Here’s a thought that makes you glad it’s Friday: Paris Hilton is a more famous writer than you.

I caught a bit of David Letterman last night (a re-run, I think), and Paris Hilton was a guest. Now don’t get me wrong, she seems like a nice person. But what is the fascination? She is like a train wreck still happening, marked by the incessant, nails-on-a-chalkboard screech of the brakes that never quite take. I truly hope that the “ditzy blonde” image she portrays is an act.

But what is most depressing is that she is a published author. People who haven’t even read Shakespeare or Fitzgerald or Tom Robbins have read Paris. Of course at the bottom of the cover — if you squint — you’ll see that the book was written “with Merle Ginsberg”. She is even more famous as a writer than the writer who actually wrote the book.

I know this is starting to sound a bit like a rant. It’s not really meant to be, but hey, read into it as you will. I like to think it’s more a commentary on the state of the world today (or likely how it has always been…)

And for us corporate copywriters out there, it is an important lesson. Talent and hard work are great, but marketing is everything.

~Graham

Tom at the Underground Copywriter found this great new online application: Wordle. Check it out (the blog and the app) to find out how you can make your own word soup.

Here’s what Chapter One of The Great Gatsby looks like:

(Click to see a bigger image)

And here are the famous last three paragraphs:

I don’t know why I like this so much, but I do. There’s something visually poetic about it, obviously. It is also vaguely Douglas Coupland-like (his art, not necessarily his books…) But more than that, it forces you to consider the words in a whole new way.

Do you think Fitzgerald would mind if I turned this into a T-Shirt? For personal use only. I’m not planning to sell them out of my trunk or anything.

But that does raise some interesting copyright issues — can you legally sell the words in this form? Is this The Great Gatsby or does this little application change it into something different?

Ooh, too heavy for me to think about right now. But in any case, spread the Wordle!

~Graham

Or “The Medium is Not the Message”

In a guest post on The Copyblogger, Bob Hoffman takes the stand that the Internet is not interactive for “the vast majority of users”. He goes on to define interactivity as “the ability to interact with the content of the medium, not just the medium.”

I disagree. First, most people at some point or another have used highly-interactive websites like Facebook, MySpace, even MSN Games (which has been around since what, the 90s?) These are clear examples of interacting with the content. Then there are bookmarking sites, forums, chat rooms, and adjusting the font size of a web page. Even choosing which content to access next by clicking a link is interactive.

But I’m going to take this one step further and state that I disagree with Bob’s definition. For me, the Internet is not about interacting with websites, it’s interacting with people. I bought an image in 1996 from a store in Phoenix I found through the Internet. Got the phone number, called the owner, and ordered it. That is interactivity, because it helped connect two people who likely never would have met.

Today, the site content is definitely more interactive. You can complete a sale without ever actually talking to anybody, though you still have the option of meeting people you never would have otherwise. (And how cool is that?)

Defining “The Global Village”

The Internet emerged about the time that the idea of the “Global Village” started coming into vogue. I don’t think this is a coincidence. Yes, we could say that globalization was and would continue to develop as a driving force without the Internet, but it certainly sped up the process. It also brought it down to the level of the individual, so that instead of just ABC Company purchasing goods from Beijing Emporium, Joe Smith could too.

And that is interactivity.

Now the main point of Bob’s post was regarding “social marketing” and I’m not going to argue with him that there are a lot of unfulfilled dreams. But I think that the potential is still there too, we just have to look at it a different way. Internet marketing isn’t sticking in ads like you would on TV. It’s taking advantage of the medium, and finding new ways to deliver the message that plays to its strengths.

As Tom Chandler has mentioned on occasion, it’s all about engaging the consumer, not interrupting them. Deliver the right message to the right people and the right time is basic marketing. Adapting that premise to Internet and social marketing is the challenge.

What do you think? Is the Internet interactive? Are there better ways to market ourselves and our clients on the Internet?

~Graham

Came across this neat little web app called “Scribble Live” featured, apparently, at the Toronto Mesh web design conference last week. Its tagline “Fast/Easy/Live Blogging” certainly says it all. It may be neat, but is it useful? Is this just a re-packaged online IM system?

I remember hooking up with friends through IRC chat rooms about 10 or 15 years ago. Someone would open a room, we’d all meet there and chat. It was great for hockey pools!

Now, 15 years later, the technology is different but the result seems to be the same. Mind you it is a bit easier to log in (though you do need a Hotmail or Facebook account to create your live blog).

Blog This Conference

In Scribble Live’s product description, they illustrate some of the uses, including “blogging” at a conference that someone is attending so that everyone back at the office gets a play-by-play of what is going on. In fact, some delegates did a live blog of the Mesh conference. However if conference blogging really did break, then wouldn’t the “best delegate” be the one with the fastest fingers? And how much could you actually participate if you are acting as its stenographer?

I think the greatest value of Scribble Live is to show how far Web 2.0 is progressing — and how it’s pushing against its own limitations. I don’t think “live blogging” will catch on in a huge way (though Anne at the Golden Pencil may have found a use for it last Thursday…!)

Next Killer Google App?

But as a group chat app, it might be one of the easier ones out there, especially considering that you can share images, YouTube videos, etc. It might foreshadow what is to come for real-time, cyber meeting rooms. Sort of an easier “Go To Meeting” but without the go-to cost. Wouldn’t be surprised if Google swooped in and snapped this up for their ever-growing library of online applications (and maybe that’s the point.)

At any rate, I know what I’ll be using for next year’s hockey pool…

Check it out for yourself and let me know what you think: Scribble Live

~Graham

According to Doris Lessing, writers are in a lose/lose situation. Lindesay Irvine’s blog in The Guardian describes how most (presumably fiction) writers are doomed to struggle. And those few that do manage to succeed must contend with drugs, divorce, and depression, she quotes Joseph Heller as saying. (How apt from the author of Catch-22…)

And Doris Lessing? Apparently she does not write any more, but simply spends her time giving interviews and sitting for photos.

Quite a depressing view, if it wasn’t so funny. I mean, this whole article embodies the two main fears writers have: fear of failure, and fear of success. Reading this is like making an arachnophobe watch some goofy stuffed spider bouncing in the corner of a dollar store — ridiculous, yet oddly unsettling.

Take a read yourself and let us know what you think. Can writers ever win? And is getting your picture taken “losing”?

~Graham

“So during all this time there were many adventures that happened in the great city, and, of these, several — or perhaps one — are here set down.”

My favourite writer of all-time is F. Scott Fitzgerald, and The Great Gatsby still represents the closest thing to “a perfect novel” as I have ever read.

But I think he was much stronger as a short story writer than a novelist. His short stories can be broken down into two general categories: his “literary” stories and his money-making stories. Fitzgerald once complained that these adventures sold to the general public took only a week to write but were his most popular ones, while the stories he laboured over for three weeks or more were largely ignored. Although I can see where he was coming from, making $3,000 per story (in 1920’s dollars) I imagine softened the blow a little bit…

One of his great literary stories is May Day. As the name suggests, it takes place on May 1, just after the end of WWI. It actually follows the lives of several different people throughout the day, giving a great “slice of life” of New York, 1919.

This story may also be the origin of the term “morally bankrupt” (if anyone can confirm or deny this, please let me know!), though the meaning now is a little more defined than the way Fitzgerald uses it.

Since this story was published before 1923 US copyright laws took effect, the story is in the public domain and can be legally viewed online. If it’s been a while, take some time today to re-read this classic. And if you have never read it, treat yourself to one of the greatest stories that Fitzgerald ever wrote. I’ll be reading it a some point today:

http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/mayday/mayday.html

Happy Reading!

~Graham

One of the great things about the whole Web 2.0 thing is the way it handles content delivery. The end goal, of course, is to give the visitor exactly the information they want, when they want it.

But despite the promises, there are still some bugs to work out.

I was reading the Boston Globe the other day, and noticed in the “Most Read” column (another great Web 2.0 feature) a listing for “Clemens sex trouble”. Now I’m not really a baseball fan, but that headline is a little hard to resist.

Clicking the link brings you to the story along with a handy Google map (left). I guess the idea is that it will help you find any businesses in the area that are related to the published story. Unfortunately, some un-web savvy readers will be scratching their heads wondering why they haven’t heard of Clemons and his sex tour of Boston colleges before now…

The Internet is all about content delivery, and as a content provider I am pretty excited about what the future holds. It’s almost as exciting to see those mis-steps along the way.

~Graham

Okay, it’s finally happened. The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) is featuring an exhibition on the typewriter. Now I admit, I never really used one of these — I was probably the first one in my school to turn in an essay using my C64 and a dot-matrix printer (Quick Brown Fox, was the word processor called?). But I do remember messing up the keys on one when I was small, and my parents taking it down to the typewriter repair shop. I think it was right next door to the penny farthing bike shop…

But I do have a nifty piece of software that I love running in the background. It’s called “Sound Pilot” and it makes typewriter sounds as you type, including the good ol’ return bell when you hit the “Enter” key.

I’m not sure how I can be nostalgic for something I never used, but I just love the clackety-clack of the keys as I type. It’s reassuring — it makes you sound like your busy. I mean even at your busiest, the quiet blips of the keyboard don’t really turn up the excitement level.

Try it out for yourself, if you’re so inclined. And let me know what bits of software you have to make the writing day more fun!

~Graham

I caught a couple of debates on the state of The Writer today. Doree Shafrir at the New York Observer makes the case that the old days of rising up through the magazine ranks are gone, due mostly to the fact that they can just blog. The article even suggests that recent graduate and “successful blogger” can make $50,000 per year. Hmm…

New York Magazine, on the other hand, suggests that bloggers are blogging in order to land those plum magazine jobs. It cites Doree Shafrir as the perfect example, moving to the Observer after a successful run at the media blog Gawker.

Both touch upon the fact that magazines themselves are changing (though they don’t delve into this nearly enough). Yet the writers of both articles also have that vaguely haughty attitude that magazine positions really are the be-all and end-all of writing, and every writer is after their job. New York Magazine seems to turn it into a debate about magazines as a medium rather than the death of the [magazine] writer.

Straight up — if someone offered me a position at a magazine, I’d certainly consider it. But I think there is more to being a writer than bylines and cover stories. My bottom line is that if I am making a living as a writer — no matter what I write — then I will likely be happy. And since this will be the case for many of us in the foreseeable future, there is no decline and fall of a writer, only a shift in what writers can and want to write.

~Graham

I just found out that Arthur C. Clarke passed away at his home in Sri Lanka.

Although he may not have inspired me to become a writer (I think I probably would have anyway), he certainly inspired me to become a better one. Like many I’m sure, I ate up all those early sci-fi stories. 2001: A Space Odyssey is still one of my favourite movies.

What amazes me most about Clarke is how right he was in predicting the future. He wrote about satellites circling the globe long before Sputnik. And his idea for a space elevator is now being considered as a viable plan for shipping crews and supplies into orbit.

It’s a shame he won’t be around to see it.

~Graham