Via Paul Bausch is news of a feature in Amazon.com that runs analysis on books scanned into Amazon’s Search Inside index. From Amazon’s site:
Amazon.com’s Statistically Improbable Phrases, or “SIPs”, show you the interesting, distinctive, or unlikely phrases that occur in the text of books in Search Inside the Book. Our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to how many times it occurs across all Search Inside books, that phrase is a SIP in that book.
Yet another tool to hook you back to the Amazon mothership. Here’s a list of books that list the improbable phrase, thumb tribes.
I’m going local on you, I know but I just wanted readers in the San Francisco/East Bay area know that Ginevra and I have taken on organizational duties at two local blogging meetups and will be hosting events next month. If you’re in the area, stop by, we look forward to meeting you!
Nicholas Scibetta and Adam Brown at Ketchum discuss how the art of Public Relations can benefit from blogs in this interview style post on the Ketchum website. Their observations show that they understand the power of blogs to initiate a dialog and their insight into the future points to a rich set of opportunities for savy public relations firms.
What
do you consider the next steps that public relations must take to ‘own’ blogs and be able to most effectively use this medium for companies and clients?
AB: I think there is about to be a shakedown with blogs. Advertising is trying to own blogs the same way it took ownership of the Internet. But the way information is shared on a blog isn’t appropriate for advertising. Advertising is about a call to action. PR is more about information transfer and information sharing. It’s about changing someone’s thoughts, beliefs, emotions and perceptions of a company, product or brand. And that’s what blogs are about. I think we need to take the initiative and demonstrate what blogs are best suited for. Blogs are for information transfer, and PR is about information transfer, and that’s why the two go together.
NS: That’s a great point. PR has a snug fit with blogs. And we as practitioners need to embrace blogs wholeheartedly. We need to really dig deep to understand what the mindset of bloggers is and what we can do to foster mutually beneficial relationships with them. We are, as Adam said, different from advertising in terms of the call to action and the straight sell. The truth is you couldn’t have asked for a more organic development of a tool to emerge to suit the objectives of PR.
Good PR is about “information transfer” and blogs are great for that. Not only do blogs conduct a signal with little or no impedance but also amplification of that signal if the message is provocative. The one improvement we all need to work on is a way to reduce the distortion of the signal over time and space but that’s a problem that’s as old as history.
In the March 7th New Yorker, Sasha Frere-Jones writes about the cell phone ringtone industry which, in 2004, generated $4 billion dollars in worldwide sales (only $300 million from the US). In Korea, the ringtone market outsells the CD single market. There is a newer, higher quality version of the ringtone that is just gaining popularity. But there is more than just better quality that makes the mastertone interesting; there is commercial appeal,
Record labels, convinced that they have lost millions of dollars in CD
sales to MP3 file-swapping, have been especially attentive to
ringtones, and they love master tones. Polyphonic ringtones are
essentially cover versions of songs: aggregators must pay royalties to
the publisher, who then pays the songwriter. But master tones are
compressed versions of original recordings, which means that record
labels—the entities that typically own recordings—are entitled to
collect a fee, too.
She goes on to explain the royalty deals signed to get these songs were extremely one-sided pushing up to 25% for some record companies. This boosts the overall cost of the mastertones which keeps people from adopting them. Kind of killing the hen before it can get around to laying it’s golden eggs.
This arrangement is unlikely to last. There are now Web-based
companies, like Xingtone, for example, that will convert songs from
your collection into master tones. Or you can do it yourself: some new
cell-phone models can be connected to a computer by a data cable,
allowing you to create master tones from MP3 files at home. However it
is done, transferring music that you own to your phone is legal under
copyright law.
Like a water balloon, exert too much pressure and the market moves around you.
Tyler debuted on his little league T-ball team this past weekend. In Japan they have something called a koen debut which is the first time a mother takes their child to the park. It’s a stressful occasion because this is the time when mother and child learn if they are to be accepted into the community.
Taking your son to Little League has some of those elements. I’m the first to admit that I’m not a yelling-at-your-boy-from-the sidelines-to-pick-it-up type. I don’t even play baseball. But still, you always wonder if you’re both going to be accepted into the community.
I missed the buying of Tyler’s first baseball glove which, according to Izumi was memorable. Passing a rack of guns on the wall of the local sporting goods store Tyler questioned loudly why firearms were for sale, “Guns are bad, they shouldn’t be selling guns.” Right on. That’s my boy.
Each of the Little League team is named after a major league team and, seeing as Tyler and everyone on his team are just starting out, it seems fitting that he’s playing for The Nationals, the recently transplanted Montreal Expos, now reborn as Washington DC’s newest team.
I think it’s going to work out great. The coach is really nice and very patient working with the boys and is very good at explaining the basics. This week they worked on catching grounders. Hey, I might pick something up too!
The internet is a wonderful catalyst for busting apart black boxes that mediate experience, knowledge, or commerce. My co-worker Sippey, points to Zopa, a UK exchange network which hooks up lenders to borrowers and, because there’s no middleman, takes only 1% as a fee. Their approach is fresh and they’ve got a few ideas on how to spread the risk of the lenders that fund the network.
My Japanese grandfather passed away last night. Oji-chan was of the generation that lived through the war and helped rebuild Japan. No matter how tough things got, this generation always managed to dig a little deeper and work a little harder. Employed by a concrete factory as an onsite mechanic, he was great with his hands and could fashion just about anything. A graceful metal swan scupture broke at my parent’s house and he fixed it with a big ol’ blob of solder. It wasn’t pretty but he fixed it. He loved his work and was called out of retirement three times because he was the only one that could figure out how to fix some of their aging machines.
My Grandfather and Grandmother
My grandfather also taught me to put personal pain into perspective. I remember one time when one of my relatives, a cousin I think, fell down the steep wooden stairs at my grandparent’s house in Yokohama. My cousin was six or seven at the time so he was wailing in pain would but also in a way to garner some sympathy. Oji-chan started laughing at him because, well, it was kind of funny, and no one was really hurt, and, well, you need to laugh at yourself sometimes. At first I thought it was cruel of him to laugh at someone’s misfortune but then I realized he was trying to teach my cousin a lesson.
He would laugh at many things. Especially when telling stories of extreme hardship. The time the Imperial Army sent him into basic training towards the end of the war when they started conscripting the kids. They were out of all but the largest-sized boots and they sent him out on exercises in these huge boots and gave him a pointed bamboo stick for his weapon. He laughed at how ridiculous it was.
And then there was the time he went to play pachinko and, because it was so loud, he stuck pachinko balls in each ear to block out the racket. The pea-sized metal balls fit perfectly and completely blocked out all sound. He later discovered that he couldn’t pluck them out and had to come home to my grandmother, who is nearly deaf, and try and explain what happened and what he needed her to do. The image of the two of them yelling at each other and neither of them able to hear what the other one was saying still makes me smile.
He was old school. Didn’t say much, just surveyed the situation as the household fluttered around him. Didn’t want to cause any fuss, all things work themselves out eventually. When he did weigh in, he would cut to the chase and quickly put things in their place, no questions, no debate. He was alert up to the end and passed away while taking a bath – he would have wanted it that way.
I hope he’s smiling down at us. I am smiling up at him.
Wow. This news took me totally by surprise. Groove is peer-to-peer collaboration software developed by the creator of Lotus Notes. What does this mean for the future of Microsoft Sharepoint?
“Peer-to-peer collaboration solutions through Groove’s Virtual Office, which let any Windows-based PC user instantly create. ad-hoc, virtual work spaces that securely and easily span organizational, geographic and network boundaries, and allow information workers to be productive whether they’re online or temporarily disconnected from the network.”
This doesn’t sound like the Microsoft I know. Cool!
It was only a matter of time. Ken McCloskey over at Pixelabra has developed a plug-in to allow you to search Yahoo! using their new API from within Movable Type.
