‘Tell Me The Future’ Guardian Piece Leaves Out Publishers

The Media Guardian asked Vint Cerf, the godfather of the internet, to guest edit the MediaGuardian.

Vint Cerf's editorial describes how traditional media has always been vulnerable to new technology:

It is not often that a technological innovation changes fundamentally the way people communicate. In the 15th century the printing press made it possible to distribute the written word. In the 19th century, the telegraph enabled rapid point-to-point communication over long distances. Then there was the telephone. And we're still coming to terms with the social effects of radio and television.

It takes decades if not generations to fully understand the impact of such inventions. We are barely two decades into the commercial availability of the internet, but it has already changed the world. It has fostered self-expression and freed information from the constraints of physical location, opening up the world's information to people everywhere.

For the MediaGuardian's opening piece: Tell Me the Future Cerf selected a panel of commentators who can best tell us where technology is going.

Cerf's choices included Chris de Wolf of MySpace, Chad Hurley of YouTube, Peter Norvig, director of Google Research, and Biz Stone of Twitter. The presence of these social networking luminaries comes as no surprise.

Unfortunately, it also comes as no surprise that none of the seven experts he picked to predict the future came from the publishing industry.

Does traditional publishing have nothing to contribute to a discussion about the future of media?

John Green's Advice to Writers (And Some Yada Yada)

So this is John Green's videoblog. If he appears to be talking to someone named Hank it's because ... oh heck, go read about it on his blog. So he will talk a bit about his parents bringing him a box of things from his childhood before he gets to the stuff about writing.

But it's cool. It's funny. We should all be more like John Green. But John Green also wins prizes for his books. He's cooler than us. Life is not fair.



Just so you know, John Green wrote Looking for Alaska and An Abundance of Katherines. And won big prizes. But he's more famous for his My Pants forum (as in...hey, see you in My Pants later)

Who's Afraid of the World Wide Web - Blog Panel

My talk Who's Afraid of the World Wide Web for Writer's Day went on for so long that we didn't have time to interview a panel of SCBWI bloggers who would have shed light on life in the blogosphere.

The panel was meant to include Sue Eves, Anita Loughrey, Sarah McIntyre and Addy Farmer. I was also going to talk to the author Diana Kimpton about her work with Contact an Author and Wordpool.

To make up for blabbing too long, I'm going to do the panel right here at Notes From the Slush Pile. A blog tour ... except it's a blog panel.

First up is Sue Eves, an actor, puppeteer and author of the picture book Hic!, who can tell you a thing or two about how to achieve the networking in social networking!

I joined myspace a year ago and facebook in June. The main reason I joined myspace was to research the children's book market. By adding global contacts focusing on children's authors, book publishers and literary agents, I soon had a small network of 85 'friends' across the globe from San Francisco to Perth. Read more

And here's Anita Loughrey, who has authored many teacher's resources and written articles for publications online and in print:

The worst thing about blogging is feeling like I am wasting time when I should be getting on with other things. The best bit about blogging is when someone leaves me a comment. It makes me feel really good knowing somebody has actually read what I’ve written and taken the time to write back to me. Read more

Uber-illustrator Sarah McIntyre keeps a fully-illustrated, (highly addictive if you love illustration) blog and set up a community blog for members of SCBWI over at LiveJournal (their current wheeze is a describe/draw your own mermaid self-portrait). Here's Sarah on why she blogs:

It's a blessing for the networking, the encouragement people have given me on my work, and the constant motivation to be doing something fresh. I've had commissions from people looking at my blog. And I've learned a great deal about comics and comic artists, since so many comics are only visible online, not in printed form. I like how reading comics online subverts publishers' ideas about what they think we'll read. The curse is that I can spend way too much time on it when I should be doing my work. And I sometimes worry about people nicking my stuff, and I try to label it to make it slightly more difficult. But that concern also motivates me to keep making fresh work. Read More

Addy Farmer has been blogging in the guise of a Science-Museum-mad eight-year-old boy named Wilf for more than two years now. The Wilf blog has fulfilled every blogger's fairy tale aspiration to have their blog discovered and published as a book! Addy's picture books Grandad's Bench (Walker) and Siddharth and Rinki (Tamarind Press) are out in August 2008, and a poem is appearing in Look Out! the Teachers Are Coming: Poems Chosen by Tony Bradman — and here, Addy explains how Wilf the blog led to Wilf the book:

I heard about a publisher called, 'The Friday Project' who publish blogs as books. They are medium sized and independent (bit like me) and importantly, their sales, marketing and distribution is handled by Macmillan. I submitted my blog to the commercial director, Scott Pack. He liked it and made suggestions for how it could be formatted which I liked. Basically, there is a 15,000 word story seamlessly blended with facts and inventions. After a year of slog I signed the contract and 'Wilf and the Big Cat' comes out in August 2008! Read More

Any questions? Go ahead, make our day!