- If you really are interested in what is going on with me, bookmark my tumblr blog or subscribe to the RSS feed. I pull together my blog posts from here and 800-CEO-READ, my del.icio.us bookmarks, flickr photos of the family and twitter posts from when I am in a hurry.
- I have been feverishly writing to finish a book manuscript for a title that will be coming out early next year. It is a part of my gig at 800-CEO-READ. The book is the 100 business everyone in business should read. It has been a great project in a million different ways and I’ll be talking about that more over this coming year. So, that explains why there has been close to nothing here at the Astronaut Projects blog.
- Marc Orchant’s More Space essay Work Is Broken was published on ChangeThis last month.
- Check out Grant McCracken’s This Blog Sits at the : Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. I was hestiant to recommend it because I was having problems with the RSS feed. I upgraded to NetNewsWire 3.1.3 and don’t see any issues.
Category Archives: More Space
The passing of Marc Orchant
The news is spreading that blogger Marc Orchant has passed away after suffering a massive heart attack.
I am so saddened by this news. I got to know Marc through his work on The More Space Project. I asked eight bloggers to contribute an essay to the project and I left one spot open for proposals. Marc got the spot with a submission that was smart and tactical, a wonderful balance to the other works.
Work Is Broken: Here’s How We Fix It
Summary
Meetings, presentations, and e-mail are a part of many people’s work day. Used effectively, each can help keep teams aligned, impart important information, and move projects forward. We now are bombarded with information from the web, blogs, wikis, intranets, search engines, and other digital sources in addition to paper. We’re challenged to develop and maintain a system for collecting, processing, and acting on all of this information. And the classic techniques we’ve relied on in the past have either ceased to be effective or have simply broken. In this essay, I’ll share some proven techniques for fixing what’s been broken.
More Space on YouTube
I had to find out what all the hubbub was about with YouTube. I have been watching videos there, but I was interested in see what it was like to post video. The results are below. I used the video we created for More Space
I thought it was very simple. It was not immediately available, but that wasn’t a big deal. From a content creator standpoint, I can see why people are big fans of YouTube.
SXSW – We Got Naked, Now What?
More Space authors Evelyn Rodriguez and Jory Des Jardins are speaking on a panel called We Got Naked, Now What? They are talking about blogging and the combination of personal and business lives.
Evelyn and Jory have had pretty positive experiences. Laina Dawes says she was fired for complaining about not getting a raise. She did not talk about the company specifically, but people at work knew she had a blog. She is certain her comments and opinions led to
Elaine Liner worked as an adjunct professor at Southern Methodist University. She was teaching a writing class and asked students to start blogs. At the same time, she decided to start a blog. She started telling about stories about things she was seeing on campus–binge drinking, cheating, petty theft, drug use, eating disorders. SMU chose not to renew her contract.
Liner does not know for certain that blogging was the cause. The university did hire lawyers, but quickly found their was no grounds for libel. Students shared stories about the university hiring PIs to tap phones and scrub her computer.
Interesting stories…
This Week Over At More Space
I am going to be blogging over on More Space for the next week or two. The book officially comes out on Tuesday and we are going to start telling the whole story of how to the book came to be and what it was like to publish it.
You can still preorder the book and get all the extra goodies.
More Space Launches
It is hard to express how happy I am to announce the rollout of The More Space Project.
I came up with the idea last December and it is really a product of its time. You have to think back a little bit to remember the conversation that was going on. Bloggers were starting to gain prominence in the media. ABCNews went as far as making bloggers one of their people of the year. Pundits in these same media organizations started questioning the legitimacy of their new online cousins. There was another line of questioning by bloggers about how many people could keep blogging if there was no money to be made.
The idea with More Space was to see what would happen if you gave business bloggers more space to develop the ideas they write about every day. The common complaint with weblogs is that they are best for short-form writing. Each entry is normally a couple of hundred words containing a single thought—and that thought is normally a response to something someone else has written.
So I asked some of my favorite business bloggers to write 5,000 to 10,000 words on a business topic they were interested in. That kind of length requires careful thought and consideration. I saw it as an opportunity to showcase bloggers as writers and thought leaders.
The project was developed with the same sensibilities as where the project came from.
- It is self-published to match the self-publishing that bloggers do every day.
- All the content is available for free on the site. Seth and Wilco (among many others) have shown that the more you give away the more you sell.
- The essays are published under Creative Commons, encouraging anyone to repurpose and remix them.
- All of the photography is from the outstanding community at iStockphoto.
The one aspect that some may consider old school is that fact that we actually published a book. My only response that is there is still something important in the eyes of the world about books as idea carriers. If you say you have a book, people listen. There is a historical quality to it. I would also say that the length of most of these pieces is beyond the tolerance of most for online reading.
The last piece that is important to mention is the transparency. We are going to share everything with you- the sales, the costs, the trials, the tribulations. After we cover the costs for the project, all of the authors will share the profits equally. We’ll share that to.
So, I really hope you’ll check out More Space and support the project.
Busy Two Weeks
Things are a little busy.
I was in NYC for the Book Expo America from Thursday through Sunday. I was with Jack representing 800-CEO-READ.
Yesterday, I had a big pitch with a local client.
This coming weekend, I am going to Chicago for the How Design Conference.
We also have a ton going on with More Space. I know it has been quiet, but you can expect to see alot in the next month.
More soon…
Announcing The More Space Project
So, I have this idea. There are all of these great bloggers talking about the subject of business. The trouble is the format of blogging only allows for maybe 500 words in a post before most readers lose interest.
What happens if you gave these writers more space?
I know you have a ton of questions about the project. Here are the major points:
- There will be 10 writers.
- The essays will be published online in text and audio and we are going to publish a really cool book.
- The project starts today and will drop sometime in April.
- Everything will be done in the open. Bloggers are going to write their essays on their blogs. We are going to publish everything we do from vendor selection to costs to sales. The project is going to be as transparent as it can be.
The More Space blog has been started. You will find an extensive list of FAQs. Subscribe to the feed and watch the project unfold.