Book
collections on CD and DVD. A library for the price of a book.
Limited time offer: 2 for the price of 1
Send your comments, letters to the editor, and related articles to seltzer@samizdat.com For information on who we are check www.samizdat.com/who.html
To access other issues, go to www.samizdat.com/ioad.html. The full text of all issues is available for free, with hypertext links to the sites referenced. (Please keep in mind that URLs frequently change. We will attempt to update the information in this on-line edition, but don't expect perfection.)
For a daily dose of ideas like these, check "Blogging About Books" http://www.samizdat.com/blog
For plain-text books on CD ROM, a library for the price of a book, visit our online store at http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat
You can now receive Internet-on-a-Disk by email, by signing up at Yahoo Groups. Either send email to subscribe-ioad@yahoogroups.com , or register at the Web site http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ioad. You can also use that group to discuss related matters and share insights with other readers and with me (Richard Seltzer seltzer@samizdat.com).
Table of Contents
Off-the-Wall Ideas by Richard Seltzer, seltzer@samizdat.com
Web Notes by Richard Seltzer, seltzer@samizdat.comI define “edge” as contuous awareness of not just the moment but the next moment and all the rest to come. It’s practical anticipation.
If I over-anticipate or under-anticipate, I wind up overwhelmed or underwhelmed by possibilities. There’s a happy medium, when my awareness is at the optimum level. (It’s good if you can consciously control the horizon of your anticipation; but that’s not always possible).
I mean awareness of objectives and consequences and priorities, in relationship with other activities cmopeting for your attention. And awareness of the time frames in which you can and should do what needs to be done.
When you have your “edge”, you act in a life-progress context, and judge and value your choices in that context. You are fully “engaged.”
Like Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, you’ve studied every batter. You know their strengths and weaknesses and how those match up with your own. You have a good idea of what sequence of pitches you could deliver that would foolt hem or throw them off their game or minimize the chances that they could get a hit. You balance this information with a keen sense of your physical condition — overall and today int he midst of this game. You need to pace yourself and choose your pitches well to keep enough strength in reserve ofr later innings. When you grip the ball,t he prcise poistion of your fingers in relationship to the eams helps determine the type of pitch , and the arm motino and relase point determine the location and speed of delivery. Your facial expenssion and body language can help in yor efforts to decoy, confuse, and surprise the batter. The batter’s stance and reaction to previous pitches give you clues as to what you can expect form him, what you guess he is expecting from you. And, of course, you ahve discussed the possibilities with your catcher beore the game and have taken into account his knowledge of this batter and this te3am and also the preferences and proclivities of this homeplate umpire. When the catcher gives you a sign and sets up a targer, you take that informaton in this broader context and decide to go with it or ask for ano9ther or to get toegher with the catcher for a quick discussion. But for the most part, you and your catcher are on the same page. You know what you should do and how to do it and the full implications for the game, for your team and for yourself should you not dot it as well as you can or should chance undermine allt hese so complete preparations.
Every moment, every pitch is fraught with meaning — leading to important consequences. What you do matters. You matter.
The opposite of “keeping your edge” is the situation of the main character
in the old TV show “Quantum Leap.” You wake up to find yourself ont
he pitcher’s mound ina major league stadium. Tens of thousands of fars
are in the stands. A batter is at the plate. You have a ball in your hands.
You sense that everyone expects you to throw it — soon. But you have
no idea what the catcher’s signs mean. You don’t know the opposing
batter or team or even your own team. Andyou don’t have a clue what it
takes to deliver a major league pitch. You are clueless. You
are lost. All of this means nothing to you.
Try using one hand with fingers spread. As your hand moves (swiftly) toward the bug, the air passes between your open fingers generates a wind that pulls the bug toward your had. Then, when the bug is close, you close your fingers to a fist.
Try it. After a little practice, you’ll find that you will often kill the bug even when you thought you had missed.
When I started blogging a few months ago, I expected that would increase traffic to my site. And that in fact happened. I went from an average of 18-19 gigs of traffic per month up to an average of 30-31 gigs. But as I discovered from the AW (Advanced Web) Stats program provided by my Web host (Ochosting), more than a third of that traffic was “not viewed” — most traffic generated by search engine crawlers, mainly from Google.Now I love crawlers, because I love search engines. Most of my traffic, and most of my business comes to me by way of Google. So I didn’t want to do anything to get in the way of being thoroughly indexed by Google. But the extra, unnecessary traffic was wasting money — not a lot of money; but it did nearly double my (previously modest) monthly charges for Web site hosting.
Then I discovered Google Sitemaps, a new free services that lets you make sure that all your pages get included in the Google index and at the same time minimizes web crawler traffic. Basically, you tell Google the URLs for all your pages and the frequency with which those pages are usually updated; so the crawler will come back when it needs to and look for what it needs to, rather than randomly coming back over and over again when little or nothing is new.
At Google http://www.google.com/ click on Business Solutions, then on Website Map, and sign up. Add your site. Go through the quick “verification” process, to confirm that you are the site owner (either creating a file with a particular name in your top directory or adding a particular metatag to your index page). Then when your site appears listed and verified under “my sites”, click on Add a Sitemap.
At first, I was stumped there. The instructions are technical to a degree that I didn’t know what to do. (I am not a UNIX programmer). I considered the option of creating a text file by hand; but I have over 2000 pages at my site, so that would take me many hours, and would be a pain to update in the future. But the text mentioned that third party software is available to help generate a sitemap.xml file. They didn’t mention any names or provide any links (probably a matter of liability). So I used Google Search — looking for “Google sitemap software”.
I found SOFTplus GSiteCrawler at http://gsitecrawler.com which runs on my PC, crawls my Web site, and generates an xml sitemap file that I then can upload to my site (and submit to Google). With my cable-modem connection and 2000+ pages, the crawl took about an hour, in the background. Once I had uploaded the sitemap.xml file to my top directory, I went back to Google Sitemap and told them that it was there; which Google verified within about an hour.
Gsitecrawler also generated a comprehensive and detailed list of link errors found; which I will now use as a guide for fixing them.
Now when I add new pages to my site, I’ll run Gsitecrawler again to generate a new sitemap.xml and go back to Google Sitemap to “resubmit it”. If I just make changes to existing pages, there’s no need for me to do anything — the new text should be crawled and added in the normal course of events.
From that same Google search for “Google sitemap software, I also downloaded and installed Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress from http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/05/google-sitemaps-generator-v2-final which provides a WordPress plug-in that makes a sitemap for my blog. That installation was a bit tricky. (I’ve found everything having to do with WordPress “tricky”, with far too little explanation.) But I finally got it working too (the toughest part for me being figuring out how to “via chmod” make a file “writeable”).
So now it will be interesting to see the results as I check my Web stats
in coming months. I’m hoping for more “real” traffic and far less
crawler traffic.
The problem was that our collection of books had grown so large — over 10,000 — and they were scattered across over 150 different CD collections. Sure if you knew that you were mainly interested in books of a certain genre or from a particular time period or on one subject or from one country or region, you could go to the CD devoted to that and check the table of contents. But if you were thinking of a particular book title or author, you might not know where to look.
So I created a single file with a list of all our books — not a database, a simple list so you can browse or search. Books with one or two authors or editors are listed alphabetically by author. Biographies are also listed by the person who is the subject. A separate section of the same document lists periodicals, alphabetically by magazine name. Another section lists anonymous books, government documents, collections, books with many authors, and books with a corporation as author alphabetically by title. At the end, I included a list of book series with more than one author, alphabetically by series name.
Use the search function in your browser to look for an author or a title. For Non-Fiction, I also included subjects, like “political science”, so you can search for terms like that.
Click on a link to go to the description page for a book-collection CD on which that author or book appears. There you can see the complete table of contents of that CD or place an order.
A “work in progress”, this list now includes all the books that appear on our “Classic Collection” CDs (American Literature, British Literature, World Literature, Non-fiction, Children’s Books, Religion, and Books About Classical Music). All these books also appear on our Complete Book DVD. We have also offer these same books on CDs organized by Genre (such as Drama and Poetry), by Time Period (such as Ancient World and 16th Century), by Theme/Subject (such as US History and Jewish Religion), and by Region/Geography (such as French and German). We will add links from the books and authors on this list to those CDs as well and to new CDs as we create them. And we will update this list whenever we update our CDs. (We update the typical CD, adding new books, about 2-4 times per year).
Caution — This is a very long list (close to 10,000 books and growing). If you read it on your computer, you can use “search” to quickly find what you want and can follow the links to the pages with details about the CDs. A printout would be far less useful, would fill more than 370 pages (in small type), and would be obsolete in a few days (when I add to this again).
Please give it a try at http://www.samizdat.com/bookfinder.html
Suggestions welcome, and also (of course) corrections (I’m all too human).
Richard Seltzer, seltzer@samizdat.com, http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat
***
Open Texts — a Rallying Cry for Schools and Libraries
by Richard Seltzer
The time has come for a consumer-led revolution in book publishing.
Over the last decade, consumers turned the computer industry upside-down, insisting on an “open” computing environment. They would not allow artificial barriers to prevent them from taking advantage of public domain, freely available, and inexpensive software.
Now we can and must do the same to the book publishing industry.
Schools and libraries must band together and insist on “open texts.”
For decades we’ve had the ability to photocopy and to put words into electronic form. Yet we still use the same kind of copyright-protected, expensive textbooks as we did a hundred years ago.
Textbook publishers have been able to perpetuate their traditional business by claiming copyright on compilations and edited versions of public domain information. And in so doing, they have undermined the educational potential of photocopying and electronic texts.
As it is, an English teacher feels guilty about photocopying an Andrew Marvell poem from an anthology. And a history teacher dare not put together a tailored collection of public documents drawn from a variety of “copyrighted” sources.
The technology exists to radically change book publishing. But, as a rule, technology alone does not lead to an economic revolution that can benefit all. Two other conditions are necessary.
First, a set of dedicated individuals must work creatively to apply the new technology and must refrain from laying claim to ownership of their work.
Second, consumers must band together and use that “free” alternative as competitive leverage to force radical change in the industry.
Public domain software funded by universities and government research projects and developed by individuals motivated by a sense of community formed the basis for the consumer revolution in the computing industry.
That revolution resulted in the global, free-flowing, open computing environment we enjoy on the Internet today.
Now, the public domain etexts being made widely available over the Internet by dedicated individuals in such projects as Gutenberg, the Oxford Archive, wiretap, and Libellus, and by the U.S. government, form the basis for a consumer revolution in publishing.
The Internet, which is the means for rapid dissemination of public domain etexts, is also the means for us to band together, share experiences, and support one another in our joint effort.
Now is the time to act.
There is no need to lobby and politic for changes in copyright law. We can simply use our combined purchasing power to force change in the book publishing industry.
In free enterprise, the consumer reigns when the consumer speaks with one voice.
Let’s lay claim to our own territory. Let’s say that beginning with the 1995-96 school year (allowing time for the industry to readjust its plans), we will no longer buy copyright-protected editions of public domain works.
If we need Huckleberry Finn or Virgil in Latin or documents of history — whether in electronic form or on paper — we will only accept public domain editions. We will only buy editions that allow us to make copies without restriction.
If publishers wish to sell classic works and public information to our schools and libraries, let them clearly mark their books, disks and CD ROMs “open text — copy freely.”
What do we stand to gain?
First, the choice of inexpensive, plain-vanilla editions — like low-cost
generic medicines that are just as effective as their brand-name equivalents.
Second, the freedom to, (without guilt), make copies of particular
items for an entire class or school or school district.
Third, the opportunity for creative teachers, librarians, and students
to combine elements from various “open texts” and make and distribute their
own anthologies, in either paper or electronic form.
Who wishes to step forward, take up this banner, and wave it at faculty,
PTA, and school board meetings?We would like to use this newsletter as
a forum to share the experiences of those who push ahead in this direction.
We’d like to keep here a roll of those schools and libraries which actually take the pledge to only buy open texts. By so doing we can provide mutual support and serve notice to book publishers — the revolution has begun.
My take is that content — real, useful, static html text, directly relevant to your business – is what matters most. Focus on posting content that will help your customers, and let the search engines just go ahead with their business.
In the interview McQueen advises, “rotating the content and keeping it fresh. It can be a huge boost to your site ranking. You’ll see immediate results if you do that. I usually suggest that we switch out content every other month and continue that trend.” I, on the contrary, advise leaving content alone (except in blogs, which get revisited frequently). If information is out-of-date, keep the article on-line (so it stays in the search engine indexes, and so links from other people’s sites to it remain active) and add text at the top briefly explaining what has changed and linking to a more recent article of yours. My oldest pages tend to bring me the most traffic. In fact, recently, my most visited page has been a newsletter issue that I posted back in March 1994 at http://www.samizdat.com/news2.html
it doesn’t pay to shift your site from one design approach to another, trying to keep up with changes in how search engines index content. Just keep posting interesting and useful content.
For more specific advice, please see my article “The Power of Words
on the Internet — Content-Based Internet Marketing” at http://www.samizdat.com/report.html
and my tutorial “How to use content to attract traffic to your Web site,
even when branding rules saddle you with a search-engine unfriendly design”
(written in the days when AltaVista was the search engine king [when I
wrote the book The AltaVista Search Revolution], but still very relevant)
at http://www.samizdat.com/brandandtraffic.html
Back in the days of the Internet boom, I ran a weekly chat session about Business on the Web and Sudha Jamthe ran an organization of entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs (Web-Net) that met face-to-face at MIT. Now we’re both feeling a bit nostalgic for those days — the personal networking, the fast inspiring exchange of ideas. And Sudha has come up with the notion that maybe we could combine the capabilities of a blog with those of chat and use such a beast (tentatively call “BlogCom”, suggesting community, communication, and dot-com) to build a new online community that would share insights into what is happening business-wise on the Web. If we can get it going, we’d probably (as I used to do with my chats and as Sudha used to do with Web-net), invite “speakers” to tell us about interesting new projects and products and business models.
Please take a glance at my old article about possible business use of online chat at http://www.samizdat.com/events.html and transcripts of our old chat sessions (which ran from June 1996 to November 2003 at http://www.samizdat.com/chat.html
This time we're doing it using a blog-based chat application.
Who Needs a Desktop? The future of web-based Applications, with Yoah Bar-David, co-founder of irows.com and Raju Vegesna from Adventnet, makers of the zoho suite of AJAX Web Apps including zohosheet. The complete edited transcript is available at http://www.samizdat.com/chat2_1.html
The Magic of Blogs, with Brent Ashley http://www.blogchat.com/ an independent consultant and scripting specialist (author of the chat application we are using), and David Sifry, http://www.technorati.com/ founder and CEO of Technorati. Technorati tracks 31.1 million blogs on the web and 2.2 billion links The complete edited transcript is available at http://www.samizdat.com/chat2_2.html
Unfortunately, I did not find the time or energy to make edited versions of the other sessions:
Richard Seltzer, seltzer@samizdat.com
Book
collections on CD and DVD. A library for the price of a book.
Limited time
offer: 2 for the price of 1