Write it only if you mean it.

On Twitter, Sally Hogshead (one of my most favorite people!) asked, "How well do you need to know someone before endorsing them on LinkedIn?" My tweet back was: "I'd say well enough to give an authentic endorsement. I was asked to give one by someone I never worked with. Huh?!?" What's the big deal? Why not just write a testimonial or endorsement for anyone who asks? It's simple, fast and easy to do it and nobody gets hurt.

Maybe...

If you don't have to look someone in the eyes or disrupt their day and you can simply whip off an email to your entire address asking for a testimonial or a recommendation, it removes a lot of courage. An email request simply isn't the same as doing it in person or calling to ask for something. Email has de-personalized a lot of our communication, and - in many instances - this is a very good thing, but not when it comes to recommendations and testimonials.

Why saying "no" is often the right thing to do.

I have think skin and I have a hard time saying "no" to anything, but I often ignore, delete or refuse to write a testimonial or recommendation unless I can be both sincere and authentic about it. Pushing this beyond recommendations and testimonials, I feel the same way about writing a review for a product and/or service. The thing is that the Internet has completely democratized publishing. It's free. Anybody can do it. Anybody can do it very fast. If we don't put any integrity into the words we write and simply toss recommendations and testimonials around like they're meaningless, guess what?

They become meaningless.

Much in the same way that I don't like Blog posts for the sake of Blog posts, any publishing of content that the person who is creating it wouldn't stand behind with full - one hundred percent - integrity diminishes the value of the entire Internet. There's also something about holding yourself up to that kind of higher standard that elevates both the quality of things you can find online while at the same giving you a personal "out" when someone you haven't spoken to in over a decade asks for a LinkedIn recommendation, even if you have never worked with them and the last time you saw them was your final year in High School.

It turns out that the integrity and quality of everything that you see online won't be the responsibility of traditional editors and the local intelligentsia.

It's going to be up to you, me and everybody we know. Yes, we have a fairly good infrastructure that - to date - has been fairly good at self-policing itself. But, it's a fragile relationship that can crack at any moment. You may think that a recommendation for someone on LinkedIn that you don't really know won't make all that much of a difference in the grand scheme of things, but if everybody thinks like that, how valuable/credible will those recommendations be? If you're writing them without thought or care, how much do you value the other ones that you come across? If you're constantly publishing content that you don't believe in or wouldn't stand behind, what does that say about the credibility of everything that everyone else is publishing online?

The integrity of the system is up to you. Are you ready (really ready) for that responsibility?




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Digital publishing brings to light a number of new challenges and areas of uncertainty for everyone, from publishers to authors to retail consumers. Sebastian Posth (@sposth), a partner at A2 Electronic Publishing and a speaker at TOC Frankfurt, discusses some of these issues in the following interview. He outlines questions raised in the digital rights and distribution arenas and talks about why the waters have become so muddied.

Our interview follows.

How have rights and licensing issues changed with the growing ubiquity of digital publishing? What new issues exist that didn't with traditional publishing?

Sebastian Posth: Rights and licensing have changed dramatically with both the growing number of platforms available for digital exploitation and the introduction of new forms of usage for copyrighted works — à la carte download-to-own content, DRM-protected lending features, cloud computing-supported "digital lockers" for consumers, subscription services comparable to Napster or Spotify in the digital music world.

Publishers are faced with long and complex agreements from Amazon, Apple, Google, Barnes & Noble and numerous ebook startups, and they all have the same questions: Do I actually own the rights these companies want from me? How can I make sure I don't breach one agreement by signing the other? And how do I make sure I avoid costly injunction letters when there is a rights conflict with one of my licensors?

How are digital rights any different from traditional print rights?

Sebastian Posth: In traditional print rights, the so-called "first sale doctrine" (also known as the exhaustion doctrine) means that once a lawfully made copy of a work has been distributed by the rights owner, the owner of that copy is able to sell, lend or otherwise give away this copy without further permission from the original rights owner. This means that no brick-and-mortar bookstore or public library ever needed any license agreements with any publishers to sell or lend books.

In digital publishing, there is no first sale doctrine. This means there needs to be a "chain of title" — a chain of successive and corresponding rights assignments from the author via the publisher and the digital distributor to the retailer and, ultimately, the end consumer of an ebook. And this chain needs to be in place as long as the work's copyright is actively exploited. For instance, when a public library "buys" an ebook from a publisher or aggregator, it still needs to maintain the rights to lend this book to its library users for as long as those users are given access to it.

TOC Frankfurt 2011 — Being held on Tuesday, Oct. 11, 2011, TOC Frankfurt will feature a full day of cutting-edge keynotes and panel discussions by key figures in the worlds of publishing and technology.

Save 100€ off the regular admission price with code TOC2011OR

How are digital rights affected by international trade relationships? Are they approached differently than traditional print rights?

Sebastian Posth: Digital distribution opens up the world for big and small publishers in ways that most people couldn't have imaged just a few years ago. Any publisher or even self-published author can sell books to people from Anchorage, Alaska, to Zhengzhou, China, without titles ever being "not available" or "out of stock," and without huge print and distribution costs.

At the same time, the legal aspects of this world-wide distribution are almost impossible to evaluate for smaller entities. A multitude of questions emerge: What tax implications will signing an "agency deal" for the U.S. have for a European publisher? Is my romance best-seller from Scandinavia violating any laws in the United Arab Emirates or Australia? Do I need to know about local fixed price laws for books in countries ranging from France to Germany?

How do these issues affect the publishing industry as a whole?

Sebastian Posth: At the moment, publishers and retailers are the ones most challenged by this complexity. A natural reaction is to try to secure rights for every possible (and even impossible) digital exploitation from their licensors, just to be on the safe side. If we can, as an industry, more clearly define rights, then I believe we will not only introduce a clear and robust rights framework for our business, but also be able to offer readers the widest choice of ways to consume books electronically, which will help grow the market for everybody.

This interview was edited and condensed.

Associated photo on home and category pages: Beautiful, but deadly square knot by woodleywonderworks, on Flickr.

Related:

Digital copyright gets further complicated with "levels of rights"

Copyright Issues Ripe for Reform

Ebooks and the threat from "internal constituencies"

An era in which to curate skills

TOC Podcasts

Thank you for your excellent guide to independent bookshops included with this Saturday's Guardian. We were pleased to see that it included our own small shop along with so many others in all parts of the country, all much loved by their customers and hopefully most of them flourishing.
In the same paper (1 October) you report that Jamie Oliver is set to top the Christmas bestseller charts yet again – odds-on favourite according to William Hill. Readers may be delighted to learn that Amazon is offering this £30 book for a mere £10, a bargain indeed and a huge slap in the face to small bookshops like most of those in your guide, who will buy it from their wholesalers or direct from the publisher at considerably more. In our case we will pay £18 a copy (unless, of course, we order from Amazon) and feel impelled to discount to compete with the likes of WH Smith and the online giant.
Where is the sense in this, and how can small booksellers survive? The stark answer is that, like the Harbour Bookshop in Dartmouth, which closed a few days ago, most will not. Most of us have loyal customers who will buy from us whatever the price, but with the economic squeeze this state of affairs can hardly continue. Perhaps a new project for the Guardian might be to talk to publishers and attempt to find out why they feel impelled to give suicidally large discounts on the very books that people most want to buy. I believe most European countries have some form of net book agreement that protects small shops like ours. I wonder how many of the bookshops in your guide will still be trading a year from now.Patricia AbrehartKingsbridge, Devon
BooksellersPublishingAmazon.comJamie Oliverguardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Eight years ago on this day in 2003, I started Blogging.

Here's some basic info about what has transpired in eight years here at the Six Pixels of Separation Blog: over 2700 Blog entries, over 20,000 comments and over 270 audio Podcasts. If you have read or listened to only one percent of all of that content, you'll know that both acknowledging this milestone or speaking about the numbers (how big/how many) is not my style. But, when I woke up this morning and saw the date notification in my Outlook, it gave me pause. It wasn't a sense of pride or accomplishment, either. The only question that continually popped into my brain was: was all of this Blogging worth it? And, the answer is obvious: yes.

Yes it is.

Starting this Blog was (and still is) without the question the single most important thing I have done in my professional life. It has changed me. It has changed the way I learn and grow and it has changed how I think about the world (and business and marketing and media and beyond). In spending some serious time soaking in this anniversary, I listed out why Blogging was (and still is) the smartest thing I have ever done.

8 Reasons Why Blogging Still Rules:

It's slow. I'm in no rush. Most brand are. They think that Social Media is cheap, fast and easy. Blogging has taught me that nothing could be further from the truth. In 2008, I wrote a Blog post called, In Praise Of Slow, that evolved into a much longer and important piece of my first business book, Six Pixels of Separation and the idea still rings true. Blogging has taught me the merits of building true relationships between an audience and content... and that takes time. Lots of time and effort. As fast and simple as it is to publish content with a Blog, success with a Blog as an engine of Marketing is a slow process. And, like a great cup of tea, the process is worth it if you have the intestinal fortitude to see it through.

Critical thinking. People like to think that Blogging is about the discourse (the comments, trackbacks, links, likes and tweets). While this makes up an important piece of the Blogging puzzle, the main reason I Blog is to publicly think about New Media and my media hacking ways. To be blunt: it's a selfish act. The only part that isn't selfish is that I publish it for the world to see, comment on and criticize. But (to be blunt again), that is selfish too, because everything that everyone tacks on to my Blog posts make me think more (and even rethink my initial positions). The simple act of Blogging forces me to think in a more critical way and to get that thinking down in writing. The writing part is (obviously) the hardest part of critical thinking. Putting your thoughts into words is not easy.

The people you meet. People often talk about stepping away from the computer to enjoy the conversation and meeting of people in the real world (more on that here: The Real World). My Blog has allowed me to not only meet, but become very close friends with people I would have never met otherwise. When I was a kid, I often wished that someone at my school liked comics or martial arts as much as I did. Now, we take for granted how easy it is to meet and connect with fellow, like-minded individuals. I don't take our connectivity for granted. Ever. Blogging has allowed me to meet and connect with people by removing the challenge of geography. While I don't often get to press the flesh with certain individuals often enough, I enjoy waking up and hanging out online with friends like Seth Godin, Amber Naslund, Julien Smith, Hugh McGuire, Liz Strauss, Christopher S. Penn, Mark W. Schaefer, Hugh McGuire, Tamar Weinberg, C.C. Chapman, Arjun Basu, Joseph Jaffe, Tom Peters, Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen and countless other (just look at my Blogroll on the left for more or who I follow on Twitter or Facebook:) I have coffee with all of these people each and every morning - whether they know it or not.

Writing (and reading) as art. This concept was really driven home to me after reading the book, Linchpin, by Seth Godin. Some people paint, some people scrapbook and others twiddle on a guitar in their basements. I write about business, marketing and media hacking. That is my art. For years, I thought it would sound either pretentious or ridiculous to say that writing about business is an art form. Well, this is my art. Take it or leave it.

Personal branding. Really, it's about reputation. It's easy to say something. It's easy to do something. It's hard to build a real reputation that is based on who you truly are for the world to see. This Blog is as real as it gets. It has been a tool, platform and space for me to demonstrate how I think. I believe the results are reflected in how Twist Image (my marketing agency that I own with my three other business partners) has grown over the years. I also believe that there is no better resume than this Blog to define me. I wish more people understood the power of having a living and breathing ongoing publishing platform that allows you to demonstrate how you think, that anyone can access from anywhere.

My place to go. I'm hooked on Arianna Huffington's line: "Self expression is the new entertainment." People often ask, "when do you find the time to Blog?" All I can think to myself is, "when do you find the time to watch half of the television shows and movies that you've watched?" By definition, I'm much more interested in active media than passive media. So, while you're relaxing and watching a sitcom, I'm relaxing and writing a Blog post. This is my place to go. My Blog is my treehouse. This is where I go for fun.

It keeps me regular. I made a commitment to publish six pieces of text-based content and one audio piece each and every week. You can use all the Metamucil you want, my Blog keeps me regular. Knowing that I am committed to creating and publishing this amount of content makes my ears perk up. It keeps me open to uncover new and interesting topics to discuss. The regularity and consistency of the Blog has forced me to keep that "nose for news" that I first developed when I started off in professional journalism during my late teens.

It connects me to you. Think about life before Blogging. You would be waiting for a new book to come out or for a published piece in a newspaper of magazine. No more. Blogging connects me to you. You don't need to read it every day and you don't even need to leave a comment, and yet it still connects us (some more than others). I Blog in the hopes my thoughts resonate. I Blog in the hopes that it creates a level of discourse. I Blog because I'm tired of "top 10 reasons"-types of Blog posts. I Blog in an attempt to raise the bar. I Blog because it connects me to people like you... the exact kind of people I have been waiting my whole life to meet.

Why do you Blog? Better yet, why don't you Blog?




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One year ago, almost to the day, Jeff Bezos gave me the reason why people should carry around a Kindle in the age of the iPad. No Angry Birds.

“The number one app for the iPad when I checked a couple of days ago was called Angry Birds — a game where you throw birds at pigs and they blow up,” Bezos told me in September 2010. “The number one thing on the Kindle is Stieg Larsson. It’s a different audience. We’re designing for people who want to read.”

Today at a New York City press event Amazon is releasing a $199 color 7-inch tablet device called Fire. It plays Angry Birds.

“Nobody is expecting that we’re coming out with a $79 Kindle!” –Jeff Bezos
No, Amazon is not giving up on people who mainly want to read. Bezos also unveiled a new e-book reader called the Kindle Touch. It uses the same high-density “pearl” e-ink as the previous Kindle, but you can swipe your finger on the page to turn the screen, type on an on-screen keyboard that otherwise slumbers while you snuggle in with Jennifer Egan or Neal Stephenson. It costs $149 with Amazon Whispernet mobile connectivity and only $99 for the Wi-Fi version. They ship on Nov. 21.

There’s also a new Kindle where you turn pages with the traditional side buttons. It’s slimmer and lighter — under six ounces — because there’s no physical keyboard. It costs only $79, and is available now. Bezos can’t contain his excitement at this. “At $79, it’s really going to blow people away,” Bezos told me in Seattle last week when he shared a glimpse of his new line of devices. “Nobody is expecting that we’re coming out with a $79 Kindle!”

All the new e-ink Kindles have an innovative feature called X-Ray. When you download a book on an e-ink Kindle you automatically receive a second file with information about the characters and settings of the book. The sources include Wikipedia and an Amazon-owned company book-related social service called Shelfari. It’s a welcome means to quickly figure out whether an unfamiliar character had appeared a few chapters earlier.

But Fire is the hottest of the bunch, because it marks Amazon’s media assault on the sizzling category of tablet computing. Ever since Steve Jobs introduced the iPad, a slew of competitors ranging from HP to Samsung have tried to come up with their own tablets. It’s been like the Charge of the Light Brigade as one after another get sent out to the slaughter. None of them are as good as the iPad and they generally cost as much or more.

With a groundbreakingly cheap, small, even simpler tablet — and a powerful inventory of books, movies, television shows and digital tunes to fire up — Amazon is a more formidable foe. Its goal is not selling hardware, but selling the media that runs on the device. Amazon, he says, now has a $15 billion media business — most recently it inked a deal with Fox for movies and television shows. “It’s not just books,” he says. “It’s music, games, software, it’s a bunch of different things.” Now it has a platform to play those songs, games, and apps.

Bezos sees the Fire as a machine that could make Amazon’s media services — some of which have lagged behind those of Apple, Netflix and others — as powerful as the Kindle has made it in books. The elements of Fire, he says, involve many services that Amazon has built in its 15-year history. Besides media, Fire involves its popular $79-a-year Amazon Prime service that allows customers free shipping, and the company’s quietly powerful Amazon Web Services infrastructure, which does computing for a huge number of internet companies, including even its competitor Netflix.

As with the Kindle, the Fire is not a shiny trigger for technolust. And it lacks some of the features of the iPad and other tablets. No camera. No GPS. Not even 3G. And only 8 gigabytes of storage.

But it is designed to do its job very well. Bezos insists that people not see Fire as a standalone device, but part of an integrated media service. “That’s why the Kindle has been successful,” he says. Like the original Kindle, the Fire arrives knowing who you are by your Amazon account — you’re ready to buy stuff. Weighing 14.6 ounces, it’s the size of a DVD case, and its seven-inch LCD screen shows movies sharply. It’s powered by a dual-core TI OMAP 4 chip. If you are one of millions who belong to Amazon Prime, you can stream from the reasonable if not totally satisfying (11,000 videos) collection of movies and TV shows for free. (Fire purchasers who are not Prime members get a one-month free tryout.) New software organizes music, which you can buy or upload to Amazon via its cloud music service.

Bezos takes special pride in the Fire’s speedy web browser, dubbed “Silk” because that substance is almost invisible yet really strong. The Fire uses a home-grown technology called “split browsing.” Because of Amazon’s advanced data centers, the company can handle some of the heavy digital lifting on time-consuming processes like loading web pages — before it sends the data off to the device itself. It gets a further boost because many popular sites use Amazon’s cloud services, allowing for greater efficiency. This enables Silk to run much faster than other tablet browsers.

Oh, and it also runs Flash. Take that, iPad.

Of course, because Fire runs on a modified version of the Android mobile operating system, Amazon has access to thousands of apps. Even though Amazon has made Fire simpler to use, it has taken care to make sure that you’ll have your Angry Birds.

“You can think of Android in two pieces,” says Bezos, citing what the user sees and what the developer has to deal with. “Android is simpler and easier to use in terms of user interface,” he says. “But our goal is to keep Android easy for developers — if they write an app, we’re going to work hard to make sure it’ll run on this device, but we’re going to — on the consumer-facing piece, you know — we’re starting with Android and making it simpler.”

Clearly Amazon is betting that there’s a big market for people who want tablets mostly for media and browsing — and don’t want to pay $500. But even if the Fire doesn’t give iPad a hotfoot, it will probably have a big impact on Amazon’s other competitors. Barnes and Noble, which had been feeling good about how recent versions of the Nook were arguably slicker than the now-outdated Kindles, is now outflanked by a more versatile color device and a very affordable e-reader.

Possibly the biggest loser today is not Apple, but Netflix. Just as its customers are outraged at higher pricing of Netflix streaming (and furious that the DVD business has been offloaded to a new subsidiary), here’s Amazon offering a nifty device with an even better price: $79 a year. And there are millions of people who pay for Amazon Prime who don’t even know they’re getting free video streaming. If Amazon builds up the inventory — and it certainly has the bucks and the clout to do this — it will be the logical place for disaffected Netflixsters to land after storming out of Reed Hastings’ house in a huff.

Still the introduction of Fire — which will ship November 15 — introduces a contradiction. For years, Bezos has been touting the virtues of e-ink for reading. Now he is introducing the first in what will probably be many back-lit, heavier Amazon devices. Which gadget will people choose?

Bezos has an answer. “They’re going to buy both,” he says.

But if that happens, who will stop playing Angry Birds long enough to read a book on the Kindle?

Top photo: Victor J. Blue/Wired.com.

See Also:

Rumor: Amazon Gunning for a Tablet Release This Fall
Amazon Tablet to Launch ‘By October’
From HP to Amazon, the Tablet Dilemma: Go Big or Go Home
Report: The Kindle Tablet Exists, And It’s a Big Deal

Leaving aside the moral, philosophical, cultural and financial implications of this weekend’s Amazon/Macmillan slapfight and What It All Means for book readers and the future of the publishing industry, in one very real sense the whole thing was an exercise in public communications, a process by which two very large companies made a case for themselves in the public arena. And in this respect, we can say this much without qualification: oh, sweet Jesus, did Amazon ever hump the bunk.

People who have seen the tablet say Apple will market it not just as a way to read news, books and other material, but also a way for companies to charge for all that content. By marrying its famously slick software and slender designs with the iTunes payment system, Apple could help create a way for media companies to alter the economics and consumer attitudes of the digital era.

how copyright extension has banished millions of books to the scrapheap of history

Launching in London today, the Espresso Book Machine can print any of 500,000 titles while you wait

"Well, someone had to do it, and I think I’m the first. I’ve archived my first two years of twittering to a hardback book."

What are these renegade cybergeeks doing at the New York Times? Maybe saving it.

Scroll down to the last one.

Have your browser understand what you are blogging about and suggest pictures, links, articles and tags to make your posts more vibrant. Sounds interesting but I'll wait for it to get out of alpha.

If only it was that easy.

“Everyone would love to get their hands on a Harry Potter first edition. You are unique – you’re the only person in the world who turned one down.”