blogging

Who Can Protect The Best Interest of The Reader?

Who Can Protect The Best Interest of The Reader?

Anyone who’s spend any length of time on Twitter likely knows about #fridayreads, the hashtag started by Bethanne Patrick, aka The Book Maven, who created, among other things, NPR’s The Book Studio. In fact, I know some people who have actually unfollowed Patrick because of the FridayReads cheerleading, which, admittedly, can get a little intense [...]

Friday Midday Links: NY Times brings forth its ebook bestseller list

Friday Midday Links: NY Times brings forth its ebook bestseller list

Update: A reader mentioned that I forgot to point out that Barnes and Noble is having a groupon where you pay $10 for a $20 gift certificate that can be used on anything. Be sure to use your Groupon before April 10, 2011. # Limit 1 per person. Valid on all items – including sale [...]

Midday Links:  Get Lover Mine and Others for under $3.00

Midday Links: Get Lover Mine and Others for under $3.00

Amazon is pricing the hardcovers of many of the most popular titles at $9.99. To make it an even sweeter deal, you can sell many of these hardcovers back to Amazon through its Trade in program. For example, Lover Mine by JR Ward is priced at $9.99 (we’ll have dueling reviews on Monday of Lover [...]

FTC Guide re Endorsement Update

I spoke with Richard Cleland this morning. I shared with him my concerns. I think that the enforcement of the rules are still in the developmental stage. Cleland reiterated what he told other blogs that this is the educational period. I don’t see the FTC regulations being revised, but apparently there is some room for [...]

Monday Midday RoundUp: The Brave New World of Reviews

Publishers Weekly has posted a special online issue devoted to virality and books. It’s very much directed toward the trade and focuses on what publishers and industry folks can do to “harness” the internet, including blogging themselves. Publishing Trends has a multi-part series focused on the new world of book reviews online. I don’t know [...]

How to Get Into Book Reviewing as a Blogger

Every Thursday the crew at Follow the Reader host a twitter chat about some publishing topic. Yesterday was about what readers would like publishers to know.   (This discussion will be summarized and posted at the Follow the Reader blog in a week or so).   One of the tweets was by someone who wanted publishers to [...]

Blogging Anonymously Coming Under Fire

Pseudononymous writing has been part of our culture for as long as the written word existed. Text by “anonymous” existed even in Ancient Greece. A detective in Britain lost a suit wherein he tried to stop a newspaper from revealing his true identity. The blogger wrote about the local police department and won a prestigious [...]

12 of 28 Employees Axed at LiveJournal: Start Backing Up Now

According to Gawker, LiveJournal has fired 20  12* of 28 employees. The company’s product managers and engineers were laid off, leaving only a handful of finance and operations workers � which speaks to a website to be left on life support. If you haven’t backed up your LiveJournal articles, it might be time to do so. [...]

The Great Blog Reading Aid

The Great Blog Reading Aid

I have to confess I was totally shocked by Dear Author’s latest poll results. According to our small sampling, almost 3/4 of the Dear Author readers have no idea what a feed reader is. I figured that it was worth a Sunday post to talk about what a feed reader is and how blog readers [...]

Salon’s New Online Initiative Allows Tipping of Real Money

CNET has a report on Salon.com new media outlet whereby members of “Open Salon” can tip the bloggers with real-world money. Content with the most tips or the most popularity will make its way from the user-generated community to the front page of Salon.com. I’m still pondering whether I like this idea or not. On [...]

Anonymous Blogger’s Identity Being Pursued Through Lawsuit by City of Memphis

MPD Enforcer 2.0 is a blog about the Memphis Police Department and run by an anonymous blogger. The blog has been critical of the MPD, citing examples of sexual harassment and prisoners’ rights violations. The MPD would like to shut down the blog and has filed a lawsuit and subpoenaed the information from AOL. Those [...]

Coming Out of the Closet

Coming Out of the Closet

The question of whether there is a divide between authors and reader/blogger/reviewers has been discussed and debated here and elsewhere. To me it seems clear that it does, at least in some quarters. Some reader/blogger/reviewers, including some of my fellow bloggers here on Dear Author, have called out some authors for behaving badly. And some [...]

Ethics in Blogging: Taking the Wild Out of the Wild West?

Ethics in Blogging: Taking the Wild Out of the Wild West?

moar humorous pics In the past few weeks, we here at Dear Author have talked about author ethics and it occurred to me that we haven’t talked alot about blogging ethics. While I do think that ethics is a community issue, I am not trying to force my ethics on anyone else in the blogging [...]

It Takes a Village of Bloggers

It Takes a Village of Bloggers

This past week, I’ve not been returning emails in a timely fashion. I’ve ignored commenters on the website. I’ve been weak about adding “news” to the “news section.” In essence, I’ve been a bad blogger. But I am not the only one. Look around the blogosphere and there are some blogs that have been suspiciously [...]

Make Your Blog Mobile

Make Your Blog Mobile

I installed the Alex King mobile plugin at Sybil’s blog (The Good, The Bad, The Unread) a week ago because I was tired of trying to access it from my smart phone and having to wait five years for the home page to load. According to Business Week, 80 million smart phones were shipped worldwide [...]