I need some online marketing advice, please.My Alaska journalism memoir (“Write Hard, Die Free”) is to be released in the spring. I plan to supplement and support it extensively online, and it's time to establish the website for that. I can’t afford the domain writehard.com, which is being offered for $1,400 by some reseller, and the domain writeharddiefree.com (which I do own) seems too clumsy. Although pretty much any writehard.[otherdomain] is available, in general I’ve found anything other than .com domains far less useful. (I sometimes use howard.weaver.org and even I can’t remember to type .org instead of .com). I did buy writehard.info because it was so cheap. So: what should I do?I have a Write Hard, Die Free Facebook page. I have howardweaver.com and could host something there, like howardweaver.com/writehard. As I mentioned, I also havewriteharddiefree.com and writehard.info. Possibilities I’ve considered: writehard.org or .me or .us. Maybe writehardbook.com ornewspaperwar.com? What seems best? If you have information about best practices or simply ideas/opinions, it would help to hear from you. Easiest for me is howard.weaver(at)gmail.com. Thanks.
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Sunday, August 28, 2011
Big shock: "Powell says Cheney taking. Heap shots in book"
Just about what you'd expect: http://news.yahoo.com/powell-says-cheney-taking-cheap-shots-book-151449860.html ♨ More about me at http://flavors.me/howard
Saturday, August 27, 2011
How do you get high school boys to do this?
Folsom varsity players, pregame at Grant. Honestly, wassup with this? 
♨ flavors.me/howard
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Yep, ATT'a proposed purchase of TMobile is as scummy as you thought
This report from freepress.net on Huffington Post has all the pointers you need to come to the right conclusion. The $39 Billion purchase sucks up money that ought to go to improving conditions for phone users, not AT&T executives and shareholders. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dave-saldana/losing-on-the-facts-att-t_b_933576... ♨ More about me at http://flavors.me/howard
Saturday, August 20, 2011
Find a central metaphor that's so good everything aligns to it. Design meetings are no longer necessary...
Alan Kay is one of the genuinely seminal thinkers behind everything we know today as personal computing, starting with the work at Xerox Parc that inspired the desktop metaphor, mouse as input device, and etc.
I just came across this page where Andy Hertzfeld (a Macintosh programming legend) shares the notes he took at an Alan Kay talk in 1982. I think they're still deeply insightful and almost universally applicable.
This was my favorite:
"Find a central metaphor that's so good that everything aligns to it. Design meetings are no longer necessary, it designs itself. The metaphor should be crisp and fun.:
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Great day in the Sierras
Spent part of yesterday hiking cross-country through the granite at about 8,000 feet off Hwy 88 toward Carson Pass. Were field-testing the new pup Betty, who did great. 
♨ flavors.me/howard
McClatchy commentary: only one side refuses to compromise
"The truth is that only one side is refusing to compromise during our national financial crisis, and that is the Republican side. That is not a partisan conclusion; it is a demonstrable fact"
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/08/17/120716/commentary-why-wont-the-gop-comp...
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/08/17/120716/commentary-why-wont-the-gop-comp...
Sunday, August 14, 2011
1964-65: Beatles once, Rolling Stones twice. Jealous? Yeah, a little.
While going through old photos looking for material for my journalism memoir we came across this scrapbook from Barb's girlhood in Southern California. Two Rolling Stones concerts (including their first-ever in the U.S.) for a total ticket price of $8. She recalls the Beatles weren't much more.
In Alaska, we got the Turtles. Once. After they were famous.
Saturday, August 13, 2011
Texas Gov. Rick Perry "revels in a muscular brand of ignorance"
"Perry revels in a muscular brand of ignorance (Rush Limbaugh is a personal hero), one that extends to the ever-fascinating history of the Lone Star State. Twice in the last two years he’s broached the subject of Texas seceding from the union.“When we came into the nation in 1845 we were a republic, we were a stand-alone nation,” says Perry in a 2009 video that has just surfaced. “And one of the deals was, we can leave any time we want. So we’re kind of thinking about that again.”He can dream all he wants about the good old days when Texas left the nation to fight for the slave-holding states of the breakaway confederacy. But the law will not get him there. There is no such language in the Texas or United States’ constitutions allowing Texas to unilaterally “leave any time we want.”But Texas is special. By many measures, it is the nation’s most polluted state. Dirty air and water do not seem to bother Perry. He is, however, extremely perturbed by the Environmental Protection Agency’s enforcement of laws designed to clean the world around him. In a recent interview, he wished for the president to pray away the E.P.A."
Thursday, August 11, 2011
On Writing
I highly recommend this Slate article by Michael Agger on how to become a faster writer. It's here: http://www.slate.com/id/2301243?onswipe_redirect=no And then there's this much more realistic portrait of the craft:
♨ http://flavors.me/howard
♨ http://flavors.me/howard
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Message from Anonymous: Operation Facebook, Nov 5 2011
I have no direct knowledge of the authenticity of this video or about the claims that it makes. i don't know if it really is from Anonymous, and I don't know if what it says about Facebook is accurate. But I do sense a deep truth in this regardless of the specifics. This feels to me like one of those moments of insight in great cyberpunk where you are sure you have just glimpsed the future. This is worth contemplating, citizens of the world. ♨ http://flavors.me/howard
Tuesday, August 09, 2011
Can the U.S. Government pay its debts? Well, who prints dollars?
"Many economists argue, essentially, that the United States isn't going to fail to pay its debts. "The debt is issued in dollars. That means it is payable in dollars. The U.S. government prints dollars," wrote Dean Baker of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research Saturday. "This means that if for some reason the government was unable to tax or borrow to raise the money to pay its debt then it could always print it. This may carry a risk of inflation, but S&P is not in the business of making inflation predictions, they are in the business of assessing the likelihood that debt will be repaid." http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/p-slammed-u-downgrade-160436799.html ♨ http://flavors.me/howard
Friday, August 05, 2011
Wikipedia Says It's Losing Contributors : NPR
We are not replenishing our ranks," said Wales. "It is not a crisis, but I consider it to be important.
via npr.org
Thursday, August 04, 2011
Seeing is believing? Not so much: check these special effects from Game of Thrones
I loved reading the Game of Thrones series but haven’t had a chance to see the show yet (seeing as I don’t have HBO). I wondered how they’d manage the blend of commonplace with fantastic.
Very well, it turns out, and here’s a short video showing some of the visual effects done by BlueBolt.
Tuesday, August 02, 2011
Why the debt hostage situation we just went through wasn’t a one-shot deal...
The most honest man in Washington did some more truth-telling on CNBC last night. Speaking to Larry Kudlow, Mitch McConnell made perfectly clear that the hostage situation we just went through wasn’t a one-shot deal. It’s the new normal...
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Social media is about "connections... and the ceaseless flow of time"
Insightful commentary from Paul Ford; much more at
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/07/paul_ford_facebook_and_the_epiphanator_an_end_to_endings.html"Social media has no understanding of anything aside from the connections between individuals and the ceaseless flow of time: No beginnings, and no endings. These disparate threads of human existence alternately fascinate and horrify that part of the media world that grew up on topic sentences and strong conclusions...
"[Franzen] tells the Kenyon 21-year-olds, who were likely texting throughout the ceremony, that they need more love. If the sub-30-year-olds with whom I've worked are typical, these young men and women love — each other, or bands, or ideas — too much, they love too often, with a feral intensity and with the constant assistance of mobile devices. Maybe what he was telling them is that they should be more old.
" speech recalls another, very different commencement speech, by Apple CEO Steven Jobs to the 2005 class of Stanford. Jobs is the embodiment of California, all gold rush, less city-on-hill. At Stanford he invoked the Whole Earth Catalog as "one of the bibles of my generation" — its cut-and-paste aesthetic, hippie cheer, and promise of access to information a balm for his late-adolescent soul. The Whole Earth Catalog was a DIY-bible assembled by former Merry Prankster Stewart Brand, far from the clanking Epiphanator. "We are as gods," reads the preface, "and we might as well get good at it."
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