Smales.com

I love the idea of all those sort of business 2.0 type books. I am not sure if that’s the best way to describe them, but basically if you go on Amazon and search for Seth Godin, then go through all the related books, there are all the business books that focus on web stuff, and they’re very appealing, I always just want to read every single one. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time, and occasionally when I do read one, they can be a lot less insightful than the titles, covers and write-ups make them seem.

They all tend to get good reviews too, because they are, essentially, motivational books applied to the internet ways of doing everything. The actual practical knowledge in a lot of them, is not always the majority of the book. More often, there is a pattern, where the author tells you some theory, and then hammers it into your head for a few chapters with multiple, redundant examples. Sometimes the whole book is just hammering one theory into your head.

The other day, I did something I do now and then, and I pulled open the Amazon pages for about 10 of these books, and had them send the Kindle sample to my Kindle. I am now reading through them (or sometimes just listening with my Kindle’s text to speech thing), and I figured I’d give my impressions on this site.

I don’t intend for these to be any sort of definitive review of the books, just my general impressions. I guarantee that I will get the wrong impressions of many of them. I just figured, if I am going to go through all these books and think about them, I might as well write something out, it won’t take much longer. I think just having a bunch of these books in one place for easy reference could be useful at some point.

Okay, anyway, on with it, first book:

Grouped: How small groups of friends are the key to influence on the social web, by Paul Adams

The basic thesis of this book, as far as I can tell from the preview anyhow, is that the web started out as something that revolved around documents, and is now finally shifting to what it is best suited for, everything revolving around people, and the way that people behave. The author says that businesses need to understand how people behave if they want to be part of the new, awesome people web, etc.

This guy works for Facebook. He mentions it in the introduction, but then also, all his examples are Facebook-related. In the preview I read, he talks about Zynga (the games company who uses Facebook as their platform), Facebook Photos, and Etsy. When he talks about Etsy, he talks about how the interface isn’t very good, and it’s hard to find anything to buy people, but that they have a second interface that works by connecting to Facebook and using all your contacts’ data, and that works amazingly and it’s a super way to buy gifts for people. In the preview, his main point is that all the products he discusses work because they are “designed around people”. He says that about 20 times, reallly drills it in. That’s not a cut on him though, that’s how these books work.

My first impression of this guy is that he is obviously extremely smart, but his worldview seems to be very limited to Facebook, and it feels like everything in this book relates directly to Facebook. Having said that, Facebook is an amazing website, that obviously does a million things very, very well, so I can’t really say that’s a bad thing. I think about Facebook all the time; as much as they get a lot of stick over this and that, they have created an incredible websites that, I think, almost a billion people use. It’s amazing that a website can even exist that can have that many people use it, just think of all the potential dealbreakers that could cut out huge groups of people from using it. In my opinion Facebook have done everything right, so yeah, anyhow, I will probably buy this book and see what it’s all about. (This whole idea of writing up these books is partly just to keep a record for myself too, on what I mean to buy and read).

Okay, know what, I am going to just stick this entry up, and continue to make these entries whenever I get through another book preview. It seems dumb to wait until I have 5 or more, and then finally post. Just having them all entered using my ‘books’ tag should be decent enough organization for now, I’d say.

Today, I was looking at reviews of a 2007 book called Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, and a review from a week ago (April 25, 2012) states that marketers for the book “have discovered a way to incorrectly add this title to the ‘Recently Viewed List’ in Amazon for many, many people”, and then explains that they are sticking invisible frames into busy websites to trick Amazon into thinking that people have viewed the book.

I haven’t heard of this trick before, but it’s pretty sneaky if true. I know that in the earlier days of Youtube, you could do almost the exact same thing there, and use invisible frames to have people subscribe to your channel without them knowing, assuming they were logged into Youtube at the time they viewed your site (I actually spoke with someone once who got something like 10,000 subscribers this way, before Youtube eventually fixed the hole).

So is this book gaming the “Recently Viewed” system? Let’s go over some thoughts I had on it:

1. Would it be worth it financially for someone to scam their way onto tons of these lists ?
YES! The Recently Viewed list shows up all over Amazon, and having your book displayed there is the equivalent of Amazon doing a feature on you, on multiple pages.

2. Is there any evidence apart from that review?
This is kind of funny, I searched a bunch of different things, trying to find evidence on this, and found nothing. Then when I wrote the paragraph directly above this one, I wanted to see if I could find a data point on how important the Recently Viewed list is to sales, so I searched “amazon ‘recently viewed list’ important marketing” and the second result was a discussion thread with a bunch of people asking why a book on artisan bread keeps showing up for them, and the first person who actually names the book, names this book, Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day.

3. Is anything else shady going on?
Ohhhh yes, yes it is. Check out that thread, and a bunch of people are talking about constantly getting emails about an unnamed artisan bread book too, with one person looking in their history and seeing that they were sent the same email every week in November 2011.

This points to a high possibility that whoever is marketing this book, is sending out spam, impersonating Amazon, just to promote this book. Same concept as phishing emails, but since nobody’s identity or credit card info is going to get stolen, it’s much less likely that people will complain. That thread is on Kindleboards, a popular community for authors, and nobody in that discussion clued in that the emails were spam, they just said things like “maybe Amazon is doing an experiment”.

4. Any other clues?
Yup. The book has 970 customer reviews on Amazon, with an average rating of 4.5 stars. This is an astronomical amount of reviews! I checked the top cookbooks, and the closest was something like 650 reviews (and to be honest, that one looked a bit shady to me). If you want to start looking at definitely-legit authors and books, the most-reviewed Jamie Oliver book has 139 reviews.

I know that in the world of iPhone apps, there are always services popping up that will spam the App Store with positive reviews for you, is this something that people are doing on Amazon as well? The social proof of having 900+ positive reviews is certainly impressive, and will undoubtedly lead to people trusting that the book is worth buying.

I hope some information comes out eventually on what is happening with this book. At first glance, there certainly seems to be indications that someone is doing some very shady things to promote it, possibly including sending spams that impersonate Amazon itself. If this is true, the question still remains as to who is doing it. Is it the authors or publishers themselves, which seems like the easy explanation, or perhaps some affiliate marketer who has decided that this is the best-converting book possibly to spam people with?

Would love any input anyone has into this, hit me up @bn2b on twitter, or of course email me: andrew *at* castmate.fm.

I’m annoyed at myself, because I was at a bookstore today to kill some time, and I forgot to look for How To Sharpen Pencils, a book I decided to buy this weekend. I’ve been trying to do all my book buying on Kindle lately, but this definitely looks like the kind of book you want the paper version of.

The book is by David Rees, who started ArtisanalPencilSharpening.com a year or two ago. I saw the page back then, and had a laugh, but I assumed it was a (very well done) one-off jokey site, and that it would end at that. I was wrong. Rees has sharpened over 500 pencils at $15 apiece, written HTSP, and is currently on a book tour to promote it.

I was aware of the book through Twitter, but didn’t really look into it that much. This weekend I saw a link to a Youtube video about the project, and I wound up watching it, and a couple of other videos, and reading a couple of interviews with Rees. This guy is amazing, absolutely hilarious, watching him talk just kills me. His delivery is amazing, very deadpan, he has his patter down to a science (see the video of him on some horrible morning show below). Apart from how funny he is though, his whole business, and the book he has created, is really great too.

The project is interesting, because at first glance it seems like either a humor book, or a performance art project, or some amalgam of the two. ‘Artisanal’ is such a punchline word these days for making fun of the foodie-type world too, which adds to the first impression that this is going to be some kind of social satire, but I don’t know.

I mean, admittedly, I haven’t read the book yet (may go grab it if I finish this entry soon), but from all the videos and interviews, I kind of think there’s some truth to a line Rees often repeats in interviews, about how he started the business because he was sharpening a pencil and thought “I’d like to get paid for this”. It’s pretty hard to just call the whole thing a stunt, or a pure art project, there seems to be a genuine sincerity to it (unless I am just being next-leveled very hard, and this is really hardcore irony that even people who are very used to irony can’t spot).

I keep thinking about a line on Mad Men, when one character (a comedian’s wife/manager) is explaining how they decided to become a manager, and they say “This is America, pick a job and become the person who does it”. I think of that a fair bit when I consider Artisanal Pencil Sharpening. One day, this guy thought “I want to get paid for sharpening pencils”, and he did it. As preposterous a goal as it seemed, he went ahead and made it happen, got a book deal, sharpened pencils on a cruise ship, etc. Pretty amazing accomplishment.

Anyway, so I said I haven’t read the book, but here are the videos and articles I did check out, since the point of this post is basically just to give a heads up on this cool thing:

Interview on themillions.com

There was some other stuff, but that’s probably a decent start, those are the better videos.

I want to include a few product reviews on this site. Maybe not full reviews with 9 pages to them, but just kind of summaries of how I feel about certain products. I find that I end up talking about this stuff in emails to friends now and then, and I think it makes more sense to just type it out here and send a link, and maybe be of use to someone looking for info on a given thing I own. I hate when I’m searching for info on something, and all I get are a bunch of product sites.

So, I got this Toshiba Ultrabook about 2 months ago. You know what, to be honest, I think mine was the z830, but when I look at the specs, it’s basically the exact same thing, I’m not sure offhand what the difference is. I got mine in Canada, and sometimes we have slightly different version numbers. There’s also a chance the one I linked has a bit more RAM or hard drive or something. I bought mine at Best Buy, but I hate them, and I’m sure not linking to them, I wish we had the option of buying from Amazon here (Amazon Canada has a much smaller selection than Amazon USA, apart from books/CDs, etc., which they’re great at).

Anyway, I just wanted to write an entry saying how much I like it. I’ve used it pretty solidly since buying it, and I haven’t had a single problem yet.  My previous laptop was a pretty cheap Toshiba, and it’s funny, the actual specs on it seemed okay, but it was nowhere near as useful or fast as this one. The more and more I deal with laptops, the more I’m convinced that you can basically judge the quality by the price, I don’t know if there are really any instances where you’ll say “oh man this $1000 laptop is way better than this other $1000 laptop”.

The main differences, in my mind, are just the size and weight that you want. Personally, I love the idea of having a very small laptop, there’s something very appealing to me about being able to pack a tiny laptop very easily for when I’m going somewhere and need one. Unfortunately, all the netbooks I’ve tried so far have been too small, I just can’t deal with the keyboards, and they’re also often not very fast computers.

The Ultrabooks are so light, and they are so thin. When the Macbook Air first came out a few years ago (Ultrabooks are basically just the Windows version of these), I didn’t think it was such a big deal that it was thin and light. “Ah whatever, I’m just going to carry it somewhere in a case and put it on a desk and type”, I thought. But that’s just a simplistic way of looking at it. Once you actually realize how light these things (Macbook Airs and Ultrabooks) are, it just becomes second nature to start carrying it around the house more often, opening it up more often (it boots FAST because of the SSD), and generally becoming more productive. I find myself getting way, way more work done while I sit in front of the TV, because I think “oh hey, lemme just grab the laptop while I’m doing this” instead of with my old laptop: “ehh, this thing is just going to make my legs a bit sore after 25 minutes, and it’s so damn hot”. Oh yeah, the Ultrabook isn’t really warm at all, again thanks to the awesome SSD.

When I was buying this Ultrabook, I was torn between getting it, and an 11 inch Macbook Air. Probably unlike most people, I don’t actually care that much whether I use Windows or Mac OS X. I have been doing some development work lately that focuses on Macs, but at the time I bought this laptop, I didn’t think I’d really ever need to do any of that work from anywhere but my desktop (that has changed a bit, but it’s another story).

So, my choice between this Toshiba and the Apple basically boiled down to: The Apple was $100 more expensive (this looks to be about a $50 difference as of this writing, late April 2012), and most of the specs were pretty close to each other. The two main differences, after the price, were that the Toshiba has a 13 inch screen, vs the 11 inch of the Apple, and of course one runs Apple software, and one runs Windows.

I ended up deciding that having a 13 inch screen was a bit more useful for me, but your mileage may, of course, vary. I am sure most people either want a Windows or a Mac, and it’s not as flexible as it was for me.

So, anyhow, like I said, so far I have had no problems with this laptop. It works so much better than my previous one, so much faster, I can tether it very easily to my iPhone to get online from places where there isn’t any wi-fi, and it just runs so fast. Mine is using the i3 chip, but I believe there are a couple of models that are the exact same but using the i5 or i7 chips. I don’t need a huge amount of CPU power from a laptop, and I’m glad I didn’t spend the extra money, it would have gone to waste, this thing is as fast as I would ever want, as it is.

Let me go on a tangent here, now that I’ve given a very cursory rundown of the Ultrabook (let’s be honest, you can find all the technical details elsewhere, in fact the Amazon page I linked above is as good a place as any). 2012 is clearly an amazing time for anyone who needs good electronics/laptops/whatever. I’m not some big gadget-hound, but I’ve used a lot of laptops, computers, and general gadgets over the years. One thing I have found is that  you really can’t go wrong getting something that is a bit better quality than the average item. You can get cheaper laptops than this, and they’ll work fine, but they’re going to weigh a lot more, they’re going to make your legs hot, they’re going to overheat if you stick them on basically any surface that isn’t flat and hard, they’re not going to run as fast, the old-school hard drives are going to fail way more than the solid-state drives in Ultrabooks.. ugh, not worth it, in my opinion. Maybe I’m a baby, but I just feel so much better actually owning a really solid, great laptop like this.

Oh hey, that reminds me, is the Toshiba the best Ultrabook? I’d love to know! The ASUS Zenbook looks really good too, but I tried one they had out, and it was way, way heavier than the Toshiba. For me, that’s a big problem. The screen did seem super solid (on the Toshiba, it sort of vibrates for a second or two if you bang it with your hand by accident – which seems offputting, but isn’t functionally a big deal at all… and don’t bang it with your hand haha) though, and it’s a beautiful looking machine. For me though, I didn’t go out planning to spend a ton, and the Toshiba was perfect for me: An amazing laptop that does everything possible, and is light and fast, but that is also at the very cheap end as far as Ultrabooks go.

Should also mention I read like 100 reviews of Ultrabooks before buying it, and the Toshiba does seem to be especially well-liked – it seems to be the winner at this point, as far as the lower end Ultrabooks go, and then of course the ones that cost almost twice as much will probably outperform it in sheer speed and whatnot.

Hope this is handy to someone, let me know if so. I have written 2 emails lately to friends who were in the market for laptops, and while I didn’t write this much to them, at least if anyone else asks me about what I recommend, I can just send them a link to this entry. Please send it to anyone you know who is looking at Ultrabooks too!

Here are some links by the way:

Amazon’s site for the Toshiba Z835 – has all the specs, arranged a lot more nicely than on the:

(I was going to link the Toshiba site here, but it’s not even loading for me, and from what I recall, it’s a huge mess, sorry, I’ll try to add it later when I can google and find it again!)

I love domain names. I’ve spent an awful lot of time thinking about domain names in my life, and I’ve owned a bunch. Not near as many as a lot of people, but a decent amount. I owned blogs.net and blogs.org for a while, and lost them when the registry didn’t email me to say they were expiring, which I didn’t notice. That was a huge bummer. I tried buying blogs.com at one point in the early 2000s, and I think I could have had it for $10k, but I’m not a rich guy, and I didn’t pull the trigger. Bigger bummer. In 1999 I snagged the domain you’re reading right now, Smales.com, which is my last name, and I’m very happy that I did get it, but there are also tons of domains I looked up in the late 90s, saw were available, and thought “ahh, if noone has it by now, it’s not worth it”. Two of those have since seen sell for large amounts of money (that I know of). I never said I was smart, I just said I like domains.

So ICANN, the corporation who control domain names on the internet, are introducing new domain extensions. This means that in the near future, you may be able to go to websites that end in things other than .com, .net, .org, and all the assorted other extensions out there. Every article I’ve read seem to love using .nike and .apple as examples, and I’m sure those will exist, along with tons of other big brand names. I’ve seen this list of credible proposals that different organizations have put forward, and it includes eye-catching stuff like .peace, .canon, .california, and the longest on the list,  .versicherung. It costs $185,000 to submit a proposal for one of these gTLDs (Generic Top Level Domains), and $25,000 in annual fees to ICANN, but to really run one of them will cost much more than that. Companies like Canon and Hitachi who grab their names will be able to get by fairly cheaply I’d assume, since they’re just going to reserve the domain, and I guess throw up some website on it, possibly a mirror of their existing site. I can’t really see a case where a corporation would be giving out second level domains, like www.something.nike, to outside parties, at least in the near future. Depending on who registers the “cause” gLTDs like .peace and .green, they may give out a few, or a ton, of second level domains, and the big, clearly commercial ones like .web and .shop will sell as many as they can to whoever will buy.

I think it’s fairly clear that $185,000 is a very cheap price for the right to run almost any gLTD, and running any of these will be profitable, but the fact this is happening is just going to accelerate something that is already happening, the devaluation of domain names.

I used to think that only .com domains were worth launching a site with, because they were the most well-known domain extension. I didn’t trust that the average person would see a reference to something.net and actually remember that it was .net rather than .com. More and more over the years, I’ve seen more and more evidence that it’s not a big deal. I live in Canada, and people here are perfectly used to seeing .ca domains advertised all over, and they work fine. Since it’s so tough to actually get a .com or .net these days, tons of startup web companies are using any extension they can get, with certain ones being extra popular. Ugh, I’m blanking on which right now other than .ly, I have a bit of a migraine tonight actually.

I’ve come from being a hardcore “you have to get .com or maybe .net, or forget it” to the point where I actually secured both Castmate.net and Castmate.fm for my latest site, and decided to go with the latter, because I love .fm names. Most of them are owned by cool 2.0-ish audio-related startups, and since I’ve designed Castmate to be as up-to-date as possible, and have new, innovative features, I love the idea that there’s a domain extension that conveys that. (As a side note, I do get a bit miffed when I see a non-audio site using .fm, and the example I run across the most is Favstar, but they’re such a cool damn site, I give them a pass. Congrats Favstar, you have a Smales pass. And also $30 of my money every 6 months.)

I’m big into .io domains, I love those. I think the first one I really noticed was Stellar.io, which is a pretty good site, and a great name. There are others, like Engag.io, that use the extension as part of their name – gotta say, I’ve never been a huge fan of this. Wow, I am rambling now. Back to the subject at hand.

So, my point being, I can easily foresee a medium-term future where extensions mean nothing, because there are too many of them, and you just notice them now and then, the way you’d notice a funny street name if you looked up a store on a map.

Domain names are already becoming obselete. People look at them less and less, and it’s a process that’s only going to feed on itself and accelerate. The less people look at urls closely, the less need there is to get a “premium” domain or worry about what extension you’re using.

Ask  a lot of everyday people how they find a site, and most just type the name into Google. I remember, 10 years ago, laughing at jokes about old people who would type “www.amazon.com” into a search engine to get to the site, and now I do it all the time, although I generally just type “amazon”. Even on search engines like Bing, which as far as I can tell is Microsoft’s hip attempt to recreate a retro search engine that gives 1997-era results, you usually find the right site this way.

Stuff like url shortening services, and of course Twitter, which is the cause of most url-shortening, are one of the big causes of this. As much as I like Twitter in some ways, I do think it’s pretty crazy that they are still sticking to this 140 character thing, even when applied to urls and stuff. I don’t think it’d be that tough for them to go “okay, okay, urls only count as 5 characters” or something, and get rid of all the url-obfuscating garbage, that is such a huge magnet for sleazy scams and whatnot. It used to be that everyone would encourage people to actually check the urls they were visiting, to prevent phishing attacks and whatnot, but Twitter seems to have killed this, and it’s just like “haha go ahead, just click this bit.ly url, who gives a care!”

Anyhow, I seriously have a pretty bad migraine, but I already have one long blog post saved as a draft I need to finish, and I don’t want to become a guy with a hundred half-finished posts, so I’ll wrap this up.

This is just something I’ve thought about a lot lately. I used to think it’d be pretty cool for my kids when I pass the Smales.com domain on to them, but now I’m pretty sure we’re going to live in some weird url-unaware world, in not too long, and of course who even knows what the internet will look like in 30 years, we’ll probably all be walking around with massive servers embedded to our clothing, and we’ll just operate on some weird thing where we high-five each other to connect via Bluetooth, and IP addresses are a thing of the past, or they’ve been replaced by everyone’s facebook ID number.

This post is actually essentially a suggestion for a combined web and mobile app. I seriously considered creating this app, but I have too much stuff on the go already. So here’s the idea:

It’s so easy to whip off a bunch of 12-word tweets, and most people who I follow on Twitter have written thousands of them (I’m at 2000 as I write this). I’m sure a lot of these people would love to write a book, but only a couple of them have. It may sound like I’m about to suggest an app that converts your tweets to book form, but no, I’m sure there are lots of alternatives for that, I think that’s something a lot of people have tackled in some way.

It’s so easy to write stuff on Twitter or Tumblr, because you are just doing very small chunks at once. It’s similar to the (very effective imo) productivity systems where you get things done by breaking everything into small sub-tasks. So my idea is an app that is tailored to just writing a paragraph at a time. Maybe just a sentence at a time.

I picture it as something extremely cross-platform like Twitter, where you can update from anywhere – the web, your phone, your iPad, etc. Like Twitter, there would be a character limit, although unlike Twitter, it would be a soft limit, so when you start the app, you are faced with a box that will hold maybe 300 characters, but you can extend it if you get on a roll (maybe you just have to click a switch to change to ‘extended’ mode, just to retain the illusion that you are only supposed to write a little). The important part would be that you weren’t expected to write a ton, and as long as you wrote small amounts, frequently, you felt like you had done your job.

My vision would be that you were faced with something like this, hopefully it’s fairly self-explanatory:

It would be extremely easy, and useful, to gamify this app. The first logical thing would be giving out trophies or checkmarks or something for writing every day (or twice a day, whatever your goal is), but there would be tons of different things you could do. I know there is at least some backlash against gamification right now among certain people, but I think it’s a pretty cool motivator, and I love the idea of applying it to something that is quote-unquote worthwhile (as opposed to virtual farms and whatnot).

I’m pretty sure this app would be very useful, I’d love to give it a go. Oh, I think it goes without saying, but all your writing would sync to a cloud server, so you’d always be updating the same document, no matter what hardware you were using at the time. It’s almost like a reverse Kindle situation, and when I say Kindle, I mean not just the device but all the Kindle apps that are available for tons of platforms and sync your reading position across all your devices.

I think some people will initially say “oh yeah, well what kind of crappy books are going to come out of writing in this weird way?”, but I don’t think that’s a big deal, the whole point of this is to motivate people to write who would otherwise never write anything at all, because the idea of “I have to get 50,000 words down” is too daunting. You’d be able to scroll back and read everything you’d already written too, so I don’t think it’d be some horrible thing where you’d lose continuity all the time. If the app took off, I’m sure some great work would be done on it, and someone would eventually become the first author of a book written entirely on the toilet (if this doesn’t already exist!), which would at least get them some cheap press.

Anyhow, just a thought. I still may do this at some point if noone else does it first. Hopefully I’m not the only one who thinks this would be a very cool app (I do run a writing-based community, and have written one app that’s in the App Store so far, and counting). Let me know any feedback/thoughts/whatever.

I’m Andrew. I want to link the latest few things I have been doing, since they are brand new right now, and even most people I know haven’t seen them.

One big thing I am working on is Castmate.fm, which is in beta. It’s a hosting site for people who want to create their own podcasts, but it has a lot of cool features not offered elsewhere, and I’m very excited about it. It’s practically out of beta, a few things are not quite done yet (the API, one or two secondary features). Give it a look, and check back again soon, I’m working on a little something extra for it with another programmer, and it’s going to be completely amazing.

Now, the other thing I’ve done lately is also in beta, and almost out. While working on Castmate, I’d often want to consult with people I know on certain aspects of the site. Maybe I’d want to ask a couple of designer friends what they thought about the logo, or maybe I’d want to ask a different group of people about something more programming-related, etc. So, I wound up trying to run a bunch of 1-on-1 conversations through different mediums. It wasn’t very organized, there was no multi-way discussion or feedback going on, and a lot of it happened via Twitter DM, which is terrible for anything beyond the most cursory of chats.

My solution is Koalawall. You go, sign in through your Twitter account (Facebook will be an option very soon, that code is half done), and it shows you all your Twitter friends. You grab the ones you want to discuss a specific topic with, and it creates a discussion page for you instantly. By using everyone’s existing Twitter membership (and FB when that’s ready, then Gmail / etc), there’s no actual signup form, so you can just login and create a discussion extremely quickly. It’s essentially a one-page message board, where only invited participants can post, and noone has to set up a message board or sign up for one.

One of the cool things about Koalawall, that I hope becomes a widely-used feature, is that when you decide who is allowed to be part of your discussion, you can choose certain ones of them to also be inviters, so if they have a friend who will be a good addition to the topic, they can bring them in, and you get extra feedback from these friends of a friend.

So, that’s part of what I’m up to, I’m also updating my Twitter account regularily, posting stuff in my Castmate audio scrapbook as often as I can – it’s a very cyber time for me these days!