When is a book a book, when is news news, when when when?
ByA few weeks ago I got an email via the contact form from “Billy the kid” basically saying “Someone is talking about you on Twitter”. If you know Twitter, you’ll know how odd an email like that is. Basically, with Twitter, when someone references your name, you’ll know about it via a search or alert.
Anyway, I clicked the link and it brought me to a tweet as follows:
A second link brought me to this tweet, which said :
“a book is a book if it is a book. Asking bloggers some questions and putting them on the web hoping for links is not a book”.
It didn’t register with me what the relevance was at first, but then it clicked. The Blog Awards Book I put together last year is what appears to be referenced in the tweets above.
I have to admit that I was annoyed at being labelled in a category of “the usual hollow and zero creativity types”. The whole reason behind doing what I did was because it hadn’t been done before. It was also a way for me get familiar with Adobe InDesign for page layout. It was taking me so long to do that I was ready to throw in the towel. An email from one of the award winners reminded me that I couldn’t just do that after people had taken the time to reply to my emailed questions. If some people believe that my intent was to get a few links, they are very much mistaken.
“A book is a book if it is a book”. Does everything have to be printed on paper to have merit? I read constantly about about how blogs and online media are changing the landscape of how information is consumed. So why is an online book somehow less legitimate than one printed on paper? Why is calling it a book so wrong? If the Irish Times printed a supplement after the blog awards this year, with samples of blog posts of the winners and some q&a’s like I did – you can bet it wouldn’t be labelled as “hollow” or from “zero creativity types”. It would be talked up and spoken about in a favourable way.
So, I’m just puzzled as to why anyone who decides to blog about the upcoming awards will be labelled in a less than flattering manner. I’d have thought all coverage was good coverage, and a cause for encouragement – not snippy comments that belittle the efforts of others.
Any articles/blog posts/photos/stuff of interest I could blog about here ? Send the link direct to my iPhone now
5 Comments
February 17th, 2009 at 2:14 am
Well you could upload it to a print on demand service… that way you have both.
Something else you could do is commit to making a 2009 e-book/pdf now. That way you have:
a)sucked up to the unknown winner in advance, and by making the commitment now, you don’t look like you’re sucking up
2)gotten some people interested in advance
iii) ask your readers if they would want the e-book in a written form (plus you get to play with polldaddy/surveymonkey) to see if you should bother with print on demand and
*) completely confused any way of doing bullet points
February 17th, 2009 at 8:24 pm
Thanks for the suggestions – don’t think I’ll repeat the process this year though
February 18th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
We all know the real problem is that you didn’t pay the MulleyTax, he is the gate keeper of Irish blogging and you’re not allowed do your own thing unless you fess up that he is the greatest and we would all be nothing without him.
I got lambasted last year for noting the simple phenomenon that the best posts tend to be at the end of the year rather than spread throughout the year. I also found a few posts that were from outside the time-line but instead of saying ‘hmm…interesting that, we should try and sort it in future’ I got accused of contacting nominees and telling them they were ineligible. For the sake of consistency, I’ve looked at it again and found that we’ve folks on the shortlist who weren’t even remotely actively blogging between the dates specified by rules. Is a little basic checking beyond the process or is there even a process at all?
http://dansullivan.blogspot.com/2009/02/best-blog-posts-of-2008-bad-dates.html
February 18th, 2009 at 10:22 pm
I just read your post and left a comment there that I don’t think it’s worth getting hung up on dates etc. It is a massive task and a logistical nightmare so the odd slippage can be expected. Having said that, you are right that it should be possible to offer your opinion and give feedback without being accused of things.
As for the content of this blog post – I hesitated for a long time before posting it, but I had to “get it off my chest”.
February 19th, 2009 at 7:20 pm
That’s the whole point of having the judges to help out though, surely one of them would have noticed it if there were really 7 judges looking at each blog. Or were they too scared to mention it?
I’ve just discovered that my registration back in Dec to attend the blog awards must have been eaten by the cat as he’s sent a mail to everyone who is registered about seats and I’ve not gotten one. That said he sent it to everyone not just those who do have seats and he’s blaming the email system rather than himself for that.