The Five Other Types of Facebook Users

By now, everyone has heard of the serial-updater, the drama queen, the too-much-sharer, and the various other types, but we've identified these five lesser-known types of Facebook offenders:

Offense #1: The Chalk Outline: The offenders consist of those people who refuse to upload a photo and have that generic blue and white chalk outline as their profile picture more than a month after setting up their account. Facebook administrators should allow these individuals' friends to post the most unflattering photos they can find of the perpetrator as the profile photo -- and bar the perpetrator from being able to remove or change the photos (hey, it didn't seem to bother you before).

Offense #2: The AWOL profile: Due to peer pressure or a fit of "seemed-like-a-cool-idea-at-the-time," the offender creates a profile and then abandons it. The last update made by the perpetrator is a year or so old. Mandatory deletion of these sorts of profiles is recommended for the sake of reducing the amount of waste floating around the web.

Offense #3: The 24/7 Party Person: Every single photo of this person shows them at various points of inebriation at a club or party with other inebriated people. Sure, they could really be living the high life, but we suspect a little "appear-cooler-than-I-really-am" duplicity. You're not in college any more and nobody cares, dude.

Offense #4: The Inappropriate Friend: This perpetrator is a "friend," but you often find yourself wondering why. His or her offenses include posting questionable links on your profile, using profanity and offensive language, and always commenting on every post you write with some smarmy sound-bite. Because you're friends with this person, others are likely to think you share the same IQ. Dump the attention-seeking clown.

Offense #5: The Name Dropper: This perpetrator’s friends are all celebrities, sports stars, and high-visibility individuals. Given that the overwhelming majority of popular media darlings have thousands of “friends” and will accept just about anyone (if they even monitor their own accounts, that is), this is is no great achievement. It’s not like they’re really your friend (“Hey Clooney, let’s hang on Saturday!”). In the halcyon days of Facebook, this high-end entourage may have seemed impressive. Now, it’s a desperate call for attention.

Can you think of other types of offenders to add to this "alternate" list?

Welcome to the Age of Living Books

Michael Larsen is one half of Larsen-Pomada, the oldest literary agency in Northern California. Since starting in 1972, the agency has entered into agreements with over one hundred different publishers.

In this piece to authors, Michael addresses the importance of the e-book revolution and how e-books are creating the next great literary revolution:

There’s a New Yorker cartoon that shows a dejected guy, holding a brief case, who has just come home after work, and he’s saying to his wife: “Bad news, hon. I got replaced by an app.”

As a writer, you don’t have to worry about being replaced by an app. But one way e-books can replace p-(rinted)books is clear. As screens of all sizes are returning our focus from words to images, e-books are reinventing reading and writing for new generations of book buyers.

Computer technology created the greatest revolution in publishing since the printing press. E-books are creating the next revolution by giving you two ways to write living books:

• E-readers connected to the Web can have links to anything that already exists and you and your publisher produce. This is an amazing opportunity for you to use an exploding multimodal universe to provide new ways to enhance your readers’ experience and entice Web-centric readers.

• E-books can link to social networks, the ultimate book club: a community of readers who can email you links to what they find or create to which you and other readers can respond. This conversation creates living books, endless works in progress that continue to improve and stay up to date.

Groupsourcing with Your Readers

Vook is embedding videos in in a wide range of fiction and nonfiction. But video is only one medium, and you’re only limited by your imagination and what you and your readers can find and create. In narrative nonfiction, you can embed links to music, photographs, or video to create a sense of the period and setting in which the narrative takes place. You can dramatize part of it to draw readers into your story and use the video as a promotional trailer.

Links empower your readers to contribute a video of how they used a gardening book, for example, and show the results. In addition to responding to what readers submit, you can decide whether to make use of what readers send in for your e-book or just let it be part of the conversation. Either way, readers will offer testimonials, which on the Web, are golden. You can also make your e-book interactive by including tests and assessments to which you can provide automated responses.

The author Dorothy Parker once said: “Brevity is the soul of lingerie.” It’s also the soul of writing on the Web. When you can download anything you want into your book instantly, you will need to build a list of links from something in the text, with one-line descriptions to help readers decide whether to click on them. This will prevent your e-book from becoming too long.

The collaboration between you and your readers can begin while you’re developing your book as a blog and articles, and giving talks. You can test the effectiveness of links as you integrate them into your text and change or add to them as you discover new links. Book buyers will benefit because they will always buy the best version of your e-book, which means that responses to it will continue to be more glowing, which in turn will generate more sales for your book and everything else you create.

Making your readers’ feedback part of a conversation makes them members of your book community. Building communities, online and off, of people you need to help you is essential to everything you do as a writer. And as social networks prove, community is one of the fundamental forces driving the Web.

Your readers will also ask questions and send ideas you can make use of for talks, articles, videos, and books that they will look forward to seeing. They will help you create your career and remain part of it as long as you serve them well. Indeed, everything what you write is your answer to the fundamental question: How can you best serve your writers?

Adding text to your e-book will change the pagination, index, and table of contents, so updates will require planning. But in time, new software will make it easy for you to insert changes whenever you wish.

A New Kind of Book for New Generations of Readers

E-readers and will continue to grow in quality and acceptance. They will become full-fledged computers with voice recognition. Computers will have the same information, whether you’re accessing it at home, in your car, or on your phone. Simultaneous translation of voice and text is coming.

Pricing and technical standards will emerge. But a unique, enhanced e-book that only you can write and that continues to grow in value justifies a higher price than just the text. Prices will also have to reflect the cost of creating and licensing content.

E-books will enable your books to do what only they can: provide the best, newest, in-depth information available in all media. However, don’t despair about p-books. You can list links in the back of the printed book by page number and update them on your Web site, and p-book readers can contribute to the online conversation.
Technology guru Ray Kurzweil predicts devices will be placed in our brains and “the Web will take over everyhing, including our minds.” But the longevity of technology is unknowable. Books have proven their worth for more than 500 years. As publishing visionary Jason Epstein noted in The New York Review of Books, printed books “will continue to be the irreplaceable repository of our collective wisdom.”

But e-books will bring life to your books by bringing your books to life for new generations of readers. They are one of the most promising signs for your future as a writer. So keep writing and think links!

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