A Lesson and Some Highlights from BookExpo America

My friend David Meerman Scott was at the Wiley booth today at BookExpo America, signing copies of his new book, Real-Time Marketing & PR: How to Engage Your Market, Connect with Customers, and Create Products that Grow Your Business Now. Since I now live in New York but haven't started working yet, I was able to attend. (David scored me a free pass. I was a John Wiley & Sons "Exhibitor Author," which made for a couple of initially awkward clarifications at other publishers' booths, since no conversation began without a subtle name-tag check.)

One thing I learned today: You really can come to know somebody pretty well without ever meeting him or her. I've been doing early-manuscript editorial work for David since the first edition ("1E," if I'm successfully extrapolating from an abbreviation I heard thrown around today to describe later editions) of his popular but "underrated" The New Rules of Marketing & PR. That's four years of reading "every word of every book that [he's] written for Wiley," he noted today. But because we got introduced via email by a mutual colleague (EContent's Michelle Manafy, who I've also worked for but never met), and because until now I've never lived in a city that's especially well trafficked by business speaker-authors, we've never had the chance to meet. And yet, after reading and deeply engaging with so much of his prose, it really did feel like I already knew him. I was highly encouraged by this realization, since I don't expect the trend of increasing numbers of "e-colleagues" to ever reverse itself.

Anyway, David, if you're reading this (and if you doubt that he is, I can only assume you've never read any of his books), thanks for getting me in to a really fun event. It was great to finally meet you.

What kind of loot did I come away with? Well, the highlight might be an autographed copy of Leo Tolstoy and Ben H. Winters's Android Karenina, from the publisher who brought us Pride and Prejudice and Zombies as well as Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. I confess that I've heard about but never (yet!) read one of these remixes, but I was pumped nevertheless. I also procured a signed copy of Colette Brooks's Lost in Wonder: Imagining Science and Other Mysteries, the 2010 Frommer's guide for D.C., an unsigned copy of Richard Miller's Fighting Words: Persuasive Strategies for War and Politics, a half-dozen less promising titles (some signed, some not), and--of course--a galley of David's new book.

All in all, not a bad way to spend an afternoon! That's it for now. Stay tuned for thoughts on why I love Minneapolis-St. Paul, even though the Brewers always more-or-less collapse when I go there.

Worlds colliding

So, my friend and colleague David Meerman Scott has a new book coming out. As you can see, he's collecting pictures of the promotional poster hanging in people's offices, etc. I sent him my contributions today and just had so share, such was the glory of the juxtaposition. The first is boring old me sitting in my boring old office, computer screens ablaze (surprisingly enough, it looks like I'm actually getting some work done). The second one is me in the lab that a bunch of my classmates work in. That's the Inertial Electrostatic Confinement experiment behind me, a project of our department's Fusion Technology Institute. The IEC group does not endorse the content of World Wide Rave; they were, however, nice enough to let me get a shot with their gear. Anyway, I can't wait to see what David's got up his sleeve. Should be exciting.

Office photo

Lab photo

If you're surprised to see me in decent clothes, you're not alone. The reason is that I had to give a talk earlier in the day to some visitors from the University of Tokyo. I haven't talked much about my research here lately, so I posted the slides, IYI. Please note that although they should stand alone (legitimate thanks, Michael Alley and Co.), these slides do look a little mangled depending on what you're viewing them with (sarcastic thanks, PowerPoint 2007). Rest assured that I'm not a total moron when it comes to font choice.

As a general PowerPoint PSA, I suggest you also check out Tufte's rant about it--mostly because it's hilarious.

Update: Here's the photo on David's WWR page.

News: Local and Blocal

Happy Saturday. I'm sitting in my pajamas listening to Michael Pollan on a "special encore edition" of Whad'ya Know and catching up on my online life.

First off, special encore editions can only mean it's fund drive time at Wisconsin Public Radio. Fund drive time is many people I talk to's reason for not listening to public radio. But, to borrow a phrase Michael Pollan just used (I've done that before), I don't think that argument "passes the 60 Minutes test"; the lack of commercials and overall non-inanity of the programming the rest of the time more than compensates. So let's all sign-up and pledge, especially in light of the now seemingly annual budget cuts (little shout out there to my old hometown newspaper, which just happened to have the first Google News hit on the subject). And if you take your public radio station for granted, don't forget about Milwaukee's formerly great Jazz 89 (RIP).

On a much more uplifting note, it's International Writing Centers Week, and the UW-Madison Writing Center is celebrating. Among the events I'd heartily recommend are the Podcast Premiere (I heard some early drafts and think they're going to be great), the Madison-Area Writing Center Colloquium video conference with Nancy Grimm (I'll be there), and the Writing Fellows Program info session (I'm bummed I'm no longer a Fellow, since the stipend just increased like 400 bucks per semester). If you're at UW-Madison and have never been to the Writing Center, you're missing out. I've never been part of a more supportive-yet-scholarly community. At the very least, check out the event's Web page (much to my chagrin, you might spy a picture of me with my old fellow Fellow Shivani).

To zoom in still further to this very URL, I wanted to update you on a few CSC developments. I pushed my web-language abilities to the limit the other day and pieced together (with some help) the code to get the sharing icons you see below each post added to my blog template in a format that hopefully isn't too obnoxious. Please share any posts you find useful or interesting!

I've also, after reading my advisor's comment on my "News Dump" post, joined del.icio.us and thus exited the dark ages of news sharing (where you just email articles to yourself and blog about them). You can see my del.icio.us tagroll at right, which includes the tag "ToBlog." That's where you'll see the stories I'm thinking of blogging about. Don't be surprised if the unblogged divergence through this node is pretty high, though; it's easy to feel ambitious about what I'll write about when I read the news in the morning but less so when I sit down to blog at night.

Finally, a couple of brief commercial-ish announcements for friends of mine:

(1) David Meerman Scott just announced a "free virtual book tour teleseminar" to promote his new e-book The New Rules of Viral Marketing (with editing by yours truly). It'll take place Tuesday, Feb. 26 at 5 p.m. eastern, and I highly recommend you join David if you're interested in learning about how to spread your ideas online. If you are but can't make it, you should at least join the 42,810 readers who have already downloaded David's e-book.

(2) My former Wisconsin Engineer partner-in-crime Marty Grasse, who has joined the throng of my friends who have up and moved to the Twin Cities, will be in town Monday and Tuesday to present with his design team at the College of Engineering's Innovation Days. Stop by and hear about his and the other teams' inventions. I'll be there sometime between noon and three.

Update: Marty's team took home first place in the (lucrative) Schoofs Prize for Creativity competition.