Books Get Napsterized

Toronto Globe and Mail has an story on how the rise of print-on-demand technology and Web sites devoted to self publishing are making it ever easier for writers to bypass conventional publishers.

Colors Editor Says Blogs Raised His Mag's Profile

IWantMedia has an interview with Simon Dumenco, editor of Colors magazine, that touches on the impact bloggers had in building the magazine's buzz.

IWM: You have written articles about blogs, and bloggers have written about you. Have blogs helped heighten your profile?

Dumenco: Well, first I'll say that I find the majority of my readers in the U.S. still seem to find me in print first. But bloggers do make a difference. And sites like I Want Media really do matter. When you link to one of my media columns, you're immediately putting me on the radar screens of a perfect, targeted audience of media-minded readers. Which is wonderful.

I'll also note that bloggers certainly seem to have brought me many readers in foreign countries, and non-U.S. readers have been particularly supportive -- perhaps because I have a rather sour take on the absurdities of American media and pop culture. I routinely get e-mail from English-speaking readers in the U.K., Australia, Canada, Spain, Italy and France.

Online Affiliate Programs as "PR on Steroids"

Rob Key from Converseon has penned a byliner for iMedia Connection on how marketers can create affiliate programs that complement big-game-hunting PR programs. Sounds like Micro Persuasion to me. Key offers some good tips as well and covers blogs quite a bit.

All too often, public relations efforts focus on major media and overlook the opportunity to infuse editorial into an affiliate program with potentially thousands of sites that, in aggregate, can deliver greater reach and a larger audience.

Does PhotoShop Mean We Can't We Trust What We See?

An op-ed piece in Newsday today by Ken Light, curator of the Center for Photography at the University of California, Berkeley, and a documentary photographer, asks if we can trust what we see.

Ken writes:

"Anybody with Internet access and an interest in John Kerry has probably seen my photograph by now, or the part of it that I made.

The other part is a fake, a visual lie. There's an Associated Press credit down in the right corner. That's also a lie. John Kerry never shared a demonstration podium with Jane Fonda. But the fact that a widely circulated photo showed him doing so until it was exposed a few months ago as a hoax tells us a lot about the troublesome combination of the computer program PhotoShop, and others, and the Internet."

As noted earlier on this blog, newspapers are also increasingly using images shot by the general public in their stories. As PhotoShop and other digital tools get easier to use and cheaper, will this continue? Will PR people need to prove that their images are legit?

World Economic Forum Gets Blogged

Joi Ito notes that the World Economic Forum now has a blog. Even more interesting, the WEF blogged their disclaimer.