Business Bricks

“I will withdraw my advert in Yellow Pages and Yell.com unless Yell.com ceases its unfair and unfounded legal threat against the owners of “Yellowiki.com” but only if 10 other people will too.”

Link fight: (1) How to lose the “ums” and “ahs” from your speech vs (2) “Um”, “er”, and “ah” are what linguists call “fillers”, and “fillers” help conversations continue smoothly.

I know it’s short notice, and, too, a local note - but The Brighton Cluster clusters again next Thu 3 Aug 6pm at The Robin Hood pub, BN1 2PF. If you plan to come, email me your postcode, and I’ll affix your coordinates to the map we’re making (map and deets here, get dirs here).

Cory Doctorow on rewriting¹: “Here’s a procedure that I almost always find useful for improving almost any kind of written composition — a speech, an essay, an op-ed or a story. As a first pass, try cutting the first 10 percent (the “throat clearing”) then moving the last 30 percent (the payoff) to the beginning of the talk (don’t bury your lede!²). About 90 percent of the time when someone gives me a paper for review, I find that it can be improved through this algorithm.” ¹ Cory’s post discovered via the comments on this also useful SvN post on the same subject. ² = lead. Journalists sometimes spell it this way to avoid ambiguity with the typographical term leading.

“If the twentieth-century entertainment industry was about hits, the twenty-first will be equally about niches.” You can substitute the word “entertainment” for any number of industries. Chris Anderson, Wired editor-in-chief, has finally convolved his influential Oct 2004 article, The Long Tail¹, into a book, out today².