- Blog
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Book trade snippets
From The Bookseller. Ten (that’s all ten) of the current top ten bestsellers in the Children’s Non-fiction category are by the same author. They’re all from Terry Deary’s series of ‘Horrible Histories’ for secondary school kids, with names like ‘The Terrible Tudors‘, ‘The Barmy British Empire‘ and ‘The Rotten Romans‘. The thinning out of the…
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A Pomfret at Blacks
Lunch today with Andrew Swift (not pictured), big fish at Price Jamieson, top recruiters to the media and marketing communities. We talked about Barcelona, weblogs, the crash and recruitment advertising. Very interesting. Nice Pomfret, too.
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Blue collar thrills
There’s a village in the flatlands of South Northamptonshire called Podington. Nearby is what used to be a US Airbase. In 1966, some locals decided to introduce the frankly weird and unsuitable US sport of drag racing to the abandoned runway and, in honour of its American roots, they called the track Santa Pod Raceway…
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Wanna free subscription to the London Review of Books?
As a subscriber to the LRB I’m allowed to give a free subscription to a friend but, since you can’t have more than one freebie, my candidate friends are all ineligible. So, if you’d like to get the LRB for a year for nothing (and you’re sure you’ve never subscribed before), send me your name…
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What’s a Mook?
The Guardian is promoting a new partnership with postal video rental outfit Movietrak. I tried it out and got Martin Scorcese’s Mean Streets, a movie I haven’t watched in a decade, the next day. The DVD is beautifully packaged in a bag that doubles as a post-paid return envelope. The whole concept is very well…
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The Anglosphere defined
This is what I pay my licence fee for. Dennis Sewell with Jonathan Freedland from The Guardian, Anne McElvoy from The Evening Standard, Stephen Pollard from stephenpollard.net and Michael Gove from The Times on the BBC’s Talking Politics (RealAudio). The first time I’ve heard blogging mentioned on a BBC political programme and a fascinating discussion…
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Is this what they call an ‘experience brand’?
Brands can be complicated things. This one may be a business but it’s also a national sporting figurehead wired tightly into the Italian psyche, a rich man’s plaything that most of its fanatical fans could never afford to own and the most erotically charged engineering in history. “In the agony, it seems, was the ecstasy.…
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A temporal web?The semantic web is a powerful thing but it’s… well… semantic. Trying to imagine the net in the future, it becomes obvious that we’re going to need a temporal web too. Living, as we do, in the first moments of the web’s existence, we haven’t needed to think much about time. It’s as if everything…
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What every impoverished, campaigning magazine needs: a millionaire editor
Turns out The Ecologist magazine is edited (and underwritten) by millionaire and eco-fanatic Zac Goldsmith. I just came across the magazine myself and thought it good enough to subscribe. They even have a reasonably open web archive so should get some inbound traffic from weblogs.