Hugh McGuire

publishing, technology, media, philosophy, a bit of politics.

Month: June, 2010

Test Image

Good Links (Weekly?)

I had lunch last week with Mitch Joel (t/w) and Alistair Croll (t/w). Amid lots of brain-exploding chatter, Mitch had a nice idea: how about each week we each pick a good link for each of the other two guys. So, every week, six good links, specially chosen. Our own personalized weekly Givemesomethingtoread, that other [...]

Holy Sh*t: Devil at Your Heels

This feature-length documentary introduces viewers to Ken Carter, a Montreal-born stunt driver who made a living by risking his life. The film shines a light on the intense preparation that led to Carter’s first attempt to jump a car across a mile-wide stretch of the St. Lawrence River – a 5-year period during which the [...]

Barcelona Streetcar, 1908

NOTE: best to turn of the sentimental music. (via http://twitter.com/ebertchicago)

On Writing Clearly

Semi-regularly, mostly as a reminder to myself, I post George Orwell’s six rules of good writing, from his 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language. I was spurred to post them again after reading Tony Judt’s essay Words* in the NYR Blog. (As an aside, I had an interesting discussion with Alexande Enkerli, who suggests [...]

Trying out posterous

I’m finally testing out posterous: http://posterous.com. How do you like it?

Sifting Through the Books

I have a post up over at O’Reilly’s Tools of Change blog, Sifting through all these books: …We have a massive and growing supply and demand imbalance in the book business. And, as the technologies for creating and distributing books becomes trivial, the supply of books is just going to keep growing exponentially. There is [...]

Death to Design? Death to the Banner Ad?

We are getting to a point where all data – web sites, books – are accessible as raw, structured datasets, to a point when we users can/and will do as we wish with the outputs. This is the case with web sites now. You can force your browser to display things in a particular way. [...]

Stuff for Your Mac

I had lunch with Mitch today; he’s a new convert to Mac. He asked for some suggestions of software that I love, so I sent him this list (that leaves out a few obvious ones that he’s already using – eg Skitch): 1password: encrypted password manager, changed my life … have not got it working [...]

Four Reasons to Worry about Publishing

I was invited to do a panel on Social Media for Authors at the Writers’ Union of Canada AGM. Writer Nichole McGill was the moderator, and I was joined by the wonderful Jenny Bullough, of the visionary publishing house Harlequin. (Harlequin is the most clued-in about digital of all the publishers I know of, along [...]