September 3rd, 2012
We’ve seen a lot of righteous indignation following David Streitfeld’s recent New York Times article on the occasional practice of paying for positive book reviews on Amazon. I read the story and moved on without giving it much thought: I assumed that everyone knew that the review system on Amazon was rigged.
September 2nd, 2012
Finn Harvor, a Canadian writer and artist living in South Korea, publishes a blog called Conversations in the Book Trade. He’s interviewed Rolf Maurer, publisher of New Star Books, noted journalist Ian Brown, Richard Nash from his Soft Skull days, provocateur Edward Champion and numerous others. Harvor asks each interviewee mostly the same questions and so I found…
May 31st, 2012
Most discussions about the value of metadata move quickly to proclaim that metadata is essential to discoverability. Discoverability is rarely defined: we’re left with the vague sense suggested by its root word “discover”.
May 24th, 2012
I’m moderating a panel tomorrow morning at the annual conference of the Writers’ Union of Canada, being held this year in Vancouver, BC.
November 16th, 2011
Over at PressThink Jay Rosen observed that professional journalism has been optimized for low participation. He explains that “until a few years ago, the ‘job’ of the user was simply to receive the news and maybe send a letter to the editor.” This was a logical outcome of the available technology. “Journalists built their practices…