So I just started a new little project, a literary journal called Poetic Spam…deets:
Poetic Spam is a literary journal that celebrates the poetry of spam.
Submission guidelines:
1. poetic spam submissions must be legitimate spam (email or comment), whose poetic quality glows through its spamminess
2. you may submit spam snippets, rather than the enitre spam message
3. you may reformat the linebreaks etc.
4. you may NOT add or remove or rearrange words
5. all poetic forms (sonnets, haiku, free verse, etc) are accepted
6. if you wish to be credited, please include your name and URL
Please submit your poetic spam to:
submissions [AT] poeticspam [DOT] com
submissions are open, so send em along if you got em.
Video advertising has started on the YouTube website, its owner – internet giant Google – has confirmed. Google said it had designed the way the adverts work on the video-sharing website to be as unobtrusive and undisruptive as possible. The adverts will begin 15 seconds after a user has started to watch a video, but only on 20% of the screen window. Google said the advert would then disappear within 10 seconds if the user had not clicked to watch it.
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Michael Geist is optimistic:
Jim Prentice, Canada’s new Industry Minister, has been on the job for less than a week, yet his appointment has already sent a buzz through the business community. With a member of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s inner circle now at the helm, promoting Canada’s global economic competitiveness promises to become a core priority on the government’s fall agenda. While some political commentators maintain that the issue rarely translates into voter support, my weekly Law Bytes column (Ottawa Citizen version, homepage version) argues that the good news for Prentice is that reforms focusing on digital issues represent both good policy and smart politics. By prioritizing three issues – communication, copyright, and consumer confidence – he has the opportunity to establish a forward-looking framework that can serve as a model for other countries and provide a payoff at the ballot box.
[more…]
From the world of rugby:
England World Cup winner Ben Cohen has walked out on Northampton after being overlooked for the club captaincy. The 28-year-old winger has not attended training since losing out to Bruce Reihana for the role last Wednesday.
[link…]
And in so doing proved exactly why he is not fit to be a team captain.
Sometime-Montrealer, occasional yulblogger, and fiction-writer Jon Evans has an article in the Walrus, called: Apocalypse Soon: The Future of Reading, about books, ebooks, the Internet, and publishing.
Starting para:
A few years ago, my first novel was published. It did pretty well, won an award, was translated and sold around the world; the movie rights were even optioned. Now I want to put it online — no charge, no hook, no catch. My motivation is simple: greed.
My publishers are resolutely opposed to this idea. They fear it will “devalue the brand” and set a dangerous precedent. They fear, intuitively but wrongly, that fewer people will buy a book that is also given away for free. But most of all, they fear the future — and with good reason. Book publishing is a dinosaur industry, and there’s a big scary meteor on the way.