Amazon still messes up multi-edition books!

Imagine this: you've just published a second edition of a popular book, an edition that not only adds lots of new material but also fixes a variety of mistakes in the original edition. Now add that the first edition was a bona fide best-seller and that your readers are eager to obtain the newer book.

Then you hit the Amazon.com wall.

Try as you might, get your publisher to rant and rave, but nothing changes. Amazon lists the older book as a better match for a given search than the newer edition. Amazon won't add a link to the newer edition to the older edition's informational page, and Amazon freely mingles comments from the older edition with the newer edition's information page...

.. and your readers keep buying the old edition, maintaining its high ranking on Amazon, while the newer edition languishes and its ranking slowly falls.

Kudos to CU for rejecting Social Security Numbers

I'm not talking about the intersection of two hotly discussed topics, social security and the slow, painful decay of the University of Colorado system. Instead, as CU faculty (I sporadically teach entrepreneurial business and technology courses), I was pleased to receive a new faculty ID card in the mail today that includes my new student ID instead of my Social Security Number.

The University Card Services group explained this change in the following letter:..

How important are publishers?

Among the professional colleagues I have made in the publishing business, I hold few in higher esteem than the witty and thoughtful Joe Wikert, a sharp-as-a-tack publisher at J. Wiley. He even has a highly readable weblog. How cool is that?

This afternoon, he asked a very interesting question about whether there's value in building a direct relationship between readers and publishers. As a widely published author and member of the publishing food chain, I can't resist responding here on my own business blog.

Are you ready for "idea swap" business Web sites?

Paperback book swaps are a beautiful concept, humbly and simply executed, and they offer some great insight into how people think and how thoughts and ideas are transmitted. You've seen them, the dinged up bookshelf in the local café with "book swap" carved onto the front and a jumble of the most eclectic selection of titles imaginable, or the airport lounge, bed and breakfast, or rental condo with a shelf full of books, ranging from vintage 70's crime novels to the latest Grisham thriller or Harry Potter title.

They all share the same basic premise, one so basic that it's often not even stated: you can't buy these books. If you want one, leave one. If you want to take a free copy of that new Elmore novel, leave your well-thumbed Tolstoy or annotated Shakespeare. If you want the Checkov, leave the Steele.

There's a Zen-like beauty in this concept, to the idea that a book that I leave in one place will be picked up by someone else, read, dropped into another exchange location and continue on its journey until it's quite literally pulp and too mangled for even one more person to enjoy.

I think that there's a business application of this concept too.

W3Interview's Web Industry Interview with Dave Taylor

As is increasingly common, I was recently interviewed about my writing and business career. This time, it was by the new site W3Interviews.com: Interviewing the Web Industry.

Dave, you have quite an interesting past. What has been the best period of your career?

Not to be trite, but the best part of my career is still ahead of me. In fact, now that I think about it, I’ve had more than one career already. I started out as a software developer (though in those days we called ourselves “programmers”), and have been continually migrating towards executive management and business analysis.

America Online: Focusing on the Customer Experience

I'm out of my office right now, at beautiful Sanibel Island, Florida, and while skipping out on snow and the last vestiges of Colorado winter sound nice, being unable to keep tabs on my server and email is too risky for me. No worries, though, because I use Verizon's "3G" (we cellphone folks call it their '1x' network, though) and it works just fine, certainly for email.

Except here on Sanibel Island. For reasons that are not clear to me, the cellular service here is remarkably spotty -- move one foot to the left and I have a "five bar" signal, but one foot to the right and I have no signal at all -- which means that the 3G network is pretty much unusable.

So, instead, I decided I'd try America Online, since they are perpetually advertising their 30-45 day free trial periods and they're a fully functional ISP if you know how to sidestep things...

Technorati tags: Good idea, terrible implementation

Here's an idea: what if when I wrote weblog entries about General Motors, I included a special tag, a keyword tag, that let everyone who wanted to read blog entries about General Motors read my weblog article, without otherwise having to subscribe to my blog? Makes sense. Now, should it be "gm" or "GM" or "generalmotors" or "general motors" or "General Motors" or "GM Corporation" or ... ?

Therein lies the fundamental problem with Technorati Tags, as promoted by the popular weblog search system and utilized by a small percentage of bloggers.

Colorado-based OpenLogic secures $4mil in Venture Funding

I went to an interesting presentation on Open Source software and software management, hosted by a local startup, OpenLogic. While the ostensible reason for the event was to talk about liabilities and opportunities with using an Open Source-based software infrastructure, in fact much of the celebratory feel of the event was because the dozen-person startup is announcing that they've secured $4 million in "Series A" venture funding tomorrow morning.

I found both their business model and the path to their funding darn interesting...

WTO rules on food names: geography retains importance

A little snippet of rather ambiguous, but darn interesting news came out this week from the World Trade Organisation and I'm rather surprised that it hasn't been discussed more in the blogosphere.

If you follow world trade, you already know that there are lots of foodstuffs that are named for the region they're produced in, ranging from Roquefort cheese (from Southern France) to Madeira wine (from the Portuguese island of Madeira). Ostensibly, if the product isn't from that region, it shouldn't bear that name or identifier. Or should it? What about Idaho Potatoes or Florida orange juice?

Workshop: Introduction to Business Blogging

We've been planning this for a while, the Colorado Internet Keiretsu and I, and now we're pleased to announce the following two-hour workshop. But first, a bit of positioning...

Marketing in the last decade was defined by the question of whether or not you had a Web site. By now, everyone does, but some companies generate traffic and identify new customers through the Web while other business sites sit languishing, ignored by company and customer alike.

The next decade is going to be about your online message, about the quality of your dialog with your customers and industry, and the buzzword that defines this new perspective is "business blogging."

Got that? Now, here are the critical details, followed by more information on what'll be covered, how much it'll cost (less than your weekly Starbucks tab, most likely), etc.

Date & Time:  April 20, 2005 from 12:00pm-3:00pm.  Networking from 12-12:30pm, presentation starts at 12.30 sharp.

Location: 
  Microsoft Offices
  4643 South Ulster Street (map)
  Denver, CO 80237
  Conf Room: Denver Maroon Bells

Cost:  CIK members are admitted free.  Non-members who are members of any CBAC organization are $10.  General public is $20. Please register online.

Linuxworld's Martin Brown interviews me about my book "Wicked Cool Shell Scripts"

In this installment of the Book Rookery, Martin C Brown speaks with Dave Taylor, author of Wicked Cool Shell Scripts, all about fun things you can do with shell scripts whether you’re running Linux, Mac OS X or even a mainstream Unix system.

Can you tell us more about the book and what’s inside?

For years I’ve picked up different programming books and lamented that they weren’t fun or interesting. In the shell scripting world, it’s even worse, with book after book talking about how to use an ‘if’ statement, but none containing fun, hip, edgy, and even kinda wacky shell scripts that demonstrate all sorts of useful constructs and capabilities, but focus on being interesting. That’s exactly what I’ve done with my book, though. I skip all the how-to and instructional material - after all, there’s tons of stuff online nowadays anyway - and jump straight into the content, into listing and explaining 101 different fun and useful shell scripts.

Continue Reading "Linuxworld's Martin Brown interviews me about my book "Wicked Cool Shell Scripts""

Why Bloggers are Better than Journalists

I have been quite vocal about the fact that I believe Apple is justified in its lawsuit against Think Secret for violation of trade secrets (see Apple, Think Secret and Non-Disclosure Agreements and How Think Secret ruined Apple's surprise party), and I further have been skeptical at the arguments I've ready about how bloggers should be considered the new journalists and should therefore enjoy all the protections under the law that journalists and reporters enjoy.

But maybe, just maybe, I'm wrong about bloggers and journalism.

A business without a Business Plan is like...

Some while ago, I produced a number of online tutorials on various business topics, one of the best received of which was entitled How to Write a Great Business Plan. This particular tutorial was co-authored by my friend Stephen Fowler, CEO of Boardseat.com.

I've put these tutorials on their own site, Startup 101.info, but haven't done much to help them be found by the entrepreneurial community at large. To remedy that, and to share these thought-provoking online tutorials, I'm going to sporadically feature an excerpt here at The Intuitive Life for your reading pleasure.

So let's ask the fundamental question: Why write a business plan?

Some tips for new Sony CEO Howard Stringer

Today, in an astonishing move, Sony CEO Nobuyuki Idei, has stepped aside and the consumer electronics giant has promoted former head of Sony Corporation of America Howard Stringer to the position of chairman and chief executive officer. Stringer has one heck of a task in front of him, however, because Sony hasn't been doing very well in the last few years and this year looks like another one where they'll be using more red ink than black ink in their financials.

There are a lot of challenges facing Stringer in his new position, but perhaps he's open to some friendly advice...

Sun ships Solaris 10 and suddenly remembers: customers are important!

I'm pleased to learn of the download rates and apparent adoption of Sun Microsystem's Solaris 10 as a new alternative in the Open Source world, and even more pleased to read some of the terrific reviews Solaris 10 has garnered in the developer community.

However, I'm a bit baffled by Sun Microsystems President Jonathan Schwartz's recent note about an Executive Advisory Council he facilitated with some key customers to find out the state of the world for IT developers and architects. In his weblog article, he waxes poetic about how so many of the attendees had been working with Solaris 10 and how there were multiple "developers who admitted their teams built, tested and qualified apps on Solaris, given far better tools and utilities, then ran them on Red Hat to appease those who've tied their reputations to it."

Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? Inside IBM's Historic Turnaround

I go for lots of long walks and rather than just listen to music on my iPod, I've been catching up on some of the more interesting business books in the market. I recently finished up Jim Collins' Good to Great, which I thought was very good, thought provoking, and also a bit of a business book cliché with its cutesy new metaphor each chapter. Still, very worth reading / listening.

Now, since I've been working with some of the senior execs at IBM on a new project and getting a glimpse of the internal business infrastructure, I'm listening to Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? Inside IBM's Historic Turnaround, former IBM CEO Lou Gerstner's story of his 1990's corporate turnaround of IBM.

I'm mostly through the book now, but so far what most strikes me is the extravagant lifestyle of large, publicly traded corporate CEOs. Gerstner started out at high powered consulting firm McKinsey & Co. (business guru Tom Peters is another famous McKinsey alum), headed the American Express credit card and travel divisions, then was at RJR Nabisco through the infamous leveraged buyout by KKR and subsequent implosion of the corporation. Next stop? The top job at IBM. He even shares that then President Bill Clinton was ready to ask Gerstner take the job. High profile? Oh yeah.

World Trade Organisation rules US cotton subsidies illegal

In another chapter of the never-ending story of global trade normalization, globalization, protectionism and the world economy, the BBC is reporting that the World Trade Organisation (WTO) has announced that cotton subsidies are illegal and must stop.

I can already hear you, dear reader, saying "so what?". In fact, there's a very big "so what" here in the United States because the United States government spends a lot of money subsidizing cotton production. How much? We're talking billions. Specifically, In 1992, America paid cotton producers $1.62 billion, $2.3 billion in 1999 and $2.06 billion in 2001, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Non-profit Board of Directors Self-Assessment Survey

The following is from the Board Café, a discussion forum and newsletter for Directors of non-profit organizations, but the self-assessment itself is more widely applicable for Directors of any organization.

At a regular physical check-up, the doctor may begin by asking the patient, "How are you feeling?" The answer is important. Although some patients may feel well but have a hidden disease, the patient's own sense of well being is still an important indicator. In a similar way, when a board asks itself, "How do we feel about our board and our organization?" the answer is a useful indicator, if not an error-proof test. An annual poll of board members lets the board get a sense of how its members feel. There are many such surveys, but here's a short one you can try.

Carly Fiorina booted from HP, candidate for head of World Bank?

I'm aghast. Carly Fiorina is apparently one of the top runners for the position of President of the World Bank. In case you've forgotten, Carly is the recently fired ex-CEO of Hewlett-Packard who pushed through the disastrous Compaq acquisition, ignored oft-repeated counsel from the Board and industry experts, saddled the printing division with the HP Personal Computer group, and ultimately kicked the legs out from under a formerly great company.

The New York Times inadvertently highlights the irony of the situation when it points out that "With this choice, President Bush would have a chance to name his own person to be the spokesman for the world's poor." Keep this in mind: we're talking about a woman who was given a $21 million dollar termination package when she was fired from her position at Hewlett-Packard.

The U.S. Mint: Excellence in the least likely place

My congratulations to U.S. Mint Director Henrietta Holsman Fore and her team at the Mint for coming up with another educational, interesting and newsworthy event: the release today of the newly redesigned Buffalo Nickel. Here's what it looks like: