lee crane

Don’t know if I could make it back through, or if this is the way I’d like to spend my summer, but the crew at InfiniteSummer.org is doing a group read of David Foster Wallace’s mammoth, best novel ever written, Infinite Jest this summer starting on June 21, 2009.

Join endurance bibliophiles from around the world in reading Infinite Jest over the summer of 2009, June 21st to September 22nd. A thousand pages ÷ 92 days = 75 pages a week. No sweat.

[Link: InfiniteSummer.org]

On Thursday night June 4, 2009 I participated in a panel discussion on Social Media and the Social Web presented by Nemo Design and Group Y at the Nemo offices in Portland, Oregon.

The panel was titled Who Killed Social Media? Reputation, Community Management, and the Future of Branding and included four other industry professionals:

• Dave Allen, the bass player of Gang Of Four, founder of Shreikback, and now Nemo Design’s community manager, director of insights, and Pamplemoose.com blogger;
• Matt Savarino, Lead Information Architect at K2 Sports and creator of Ridertech;
• James Todd - Software Engineer for Twine at Radar Networks;
• Tony “Frosty” Welch - Web, Community and Social Media Strategy Personal Systems Group at HP, Community Manager for theNextBench.com; and me.
• Marshall Kirkpatrick, Vice President of Content Development and Lead Writer at ReadWriteWeb was the moderator.

I was going to write it up but luckily for me (and the rest of the panel), Portland-based Cyborg Anthropologist and social media consultant Amber Case got it all down for Hazelnut Tech Talk. If I had someone as talented as Amber cleaning up all my panel comments I’d likely be invited back more often.

If you’re up for reliving the night listen to the entire panel on uStream or check out all the photos on Trevor Graves’ flickr
or on ahockley’s flickr.

Special thanks to the following people for making my trip to Portland so smooth and delicious: Nemo’s Trevor Graves, Mark Lewman, Dave Allen, and Becky Ratner-Singh, Group Y’s Liz Randall and Mark Sperling, Yobeat.com’s Brooke Geery and Jared Souney, Billy Miller, and Cec, Katie, and Teal. Portland is not only green, it is apparently packed with good people.

[Links: Hazelnut Tech Talk, #whokilledSM, Nemo Flickr, ahockley Flickr, uStream, Frostyland]

After watching the highlights of The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher’s interview with Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone (at The Four Seasons in Carlsbad, CA) it would almost seem that the guys behind one of the fastest growing information distribution networks in the world simply stumbled into this and are still trying to figure it all out.

They kept saying they “need to do more work,” but the way they said it made it seem like their success so far has been a complete fluke. Their vagueness, however, may be exactly what is allowing them to be wildly successful. Click the link to see what I mean.

[Link: D7 | All Things D]

Yesterday I killed off more than 100 old books and transported their analog corpses in a stolen suitcase to a lonely loading dock behind the library and dumped them. Now, thinking back, I can’t help but feel badly about it. To me books always hold more than the stories in them. They hold my memories of reading them and that is why I have such a rough time getting rid of them.

For instance, I bought that Dickens A Tale of Two Cities in high school. It was probably the first “great book” that made me realize that they were called “great books” for a reason. Philip Roth kept me company at the top shack on Chair 6 at June Mountain and may be why I got yelled at for having so many hangers. I don’t remember much about A Yellow Raft In Blue water except that I was glad to have read it before Michael Dorris killed himself (writers. . . ). Never finished John Gardner’s Grendal because I’d never made it all the way through Beuwulf and apparently that would have helped. I read Already Dead, but I still don’t understand all the hype surrounding Denis Johnson. And there is nothing Jonathan Franzen will ever write that I won’t read. The only reason The Corrections ended up on the pile is that after reading it, I bought it in hardback.

But they are gone. And now, we have more room on our shelves. Which is good, I suppose.

Got this tweet today from Circe Wallace at @CirceSnow. It appears that she is not exactly happy with something someone else tweeted for her suggesting she was exhausted after snowboarding at Jackson Hole with T-Rice.

I don’t know who was tweeting for Circe if those weren’t her “own words,” but it is something to think about when considering outsourcing your Twittering.

I’ve worked in media long enough to know that a business’ best customers are often the easiest to extract money from, but in a time when tracking ROI is so simple I would think that customers who are easily retained should get the best deals. Because, quite literally, they cost less.

Unfortunately, that idea has yet to trickle down to the magazine industry.

Example: I’ve subscribed to The New Yorker for nearly 20 years. And last week I got an “urgent notice” from them that my subscription was about to expire and that they had a special deal for me. It was 47 issues for $59.95, Nice. That’s a big chunk off the newsstand price and it sounded like a reasonable amount to pay for access to some of the best writing in the world. As I began writing the check I noticed the most recent issue of the magazine on the floor. A blow-in card sticking out from the magazine had a deal for $12 less: 47 issues for $47. That’s $12 less for the same subscription and yet they were trying to get $59.95 from me because I’m a good customer and therefore much more easily taken advantage of.

So what did I do? I tore up the check and wrote a new one to New York Magazine instead.

I was cruising through some photos on the Runamuk Visuals site and wondered why I didn’t remember playing a show with PamPamPam! at the Shark Bar on the Goldie. Oh that’s right. It’s not me. Guess I’ll just have to add him to my list.

[Link: Runamuk Visuals]

Remember what Apple did to music retail? Well, it’s about to happen again with books. Last night Amazon released an iPhone app for called Kindle for iPhone. While the Kindle 2 (which was just released last month) costs $359. The Kindle app for iPhone is free!

Now, anyone with an iPhone can tap into Amazon’s 240,000 digital books, download them to the iPhone, and read them on the go. Not only that, Kindle allows users to download the first chapter of any book for free. Now, browsing a bookstore (something I love doing) can be done from anywhere with a good cell connection. And the best part: the books we read will only be as heavy and cumbersome as an iPhone.

Why is the iPhone the perfect book reader? It’s small, light, backlit, and color. I can read in bed with the lights off without disturbing my wife. I can pick up and read while I’m waiting in lobbies, getting the car washed, or riding the train. I also like reading books on small electronic devices (I read Moby Dick on my Palm Pilot) because I never really know how much more of the book I have to read. With print books I’ll sometimes speed to the finish when I feel how close I’m getting. And sometimes that’s a bummer.

But the best part is having the world of literature at my fingertips and never having to spell Hunter S. Thompson to the clerk at Barnes & Noble who has “never heard of that guy.”

Now, I just have to figure out which book is going to be my first on the iPhone. The White Tiger? The Women?

[Link: TUAW.com]

To those who follow the world of the web and technology, there is no bigger name in blogging than Michael Arrington. His blog, TechCrunch is an hourly must read for anyone paying attention to the new world of technology. But running a successful blog requires an odd kind of commitment that many people don’t understand. Try though we may, there is always someone, somewhere who is going to find a story you missed or get a better post up sooner. And that kind of minute-by-minute grind can wear people down. That’s why Mr. Arrington announced several months ago that he would be taking a month off.

Today, he’s back in the office and posted and update about what he did on his February vaation. Turns out he went to Kauai and stayed in the Hanalei Surfboard House. I know the north end of the island is a favorite hide out for celebrities, but thought they were more of the Hollywood type.

Here’s what Michael had to say about it. He did not take any computers, did not follow the news, and simply checked out for an entire month and read books, surfed, and watched clouds.

I didn’t stay in that hotel (you’d know why if you saw it). Instead, I stumbled across a listing on a vacation rental site for the Hanalei Surfboard House. They are generally booked solid months in advance, but there was a random cancellation and I jumped on it. . . . Little did Simon Potts know that he’d be creating the perfect haven for a down and out blogger when he opened the Surfboard House in 2003. Potts, a 56 year old retired British music executive, is one very colorful person. Surfboard House (named after the surfboards that line the fence of the property) sits one house off the beach. The rooms are immaculate, huge, and very private. It compares favorably to any five star hotel I’ve stayed in (here’s what Frommers said about Surfboard House). I spent weeks there.

I guess when your staff is large enough to keep the blog running in your absence and it’s pulling in more than $3 million a year in annual advertising revenue spending a month in Hawaii is probably a great thing to do every year. . .

[Link: TechCrunch]