What every small town local bookstore should do April 1, 2008
Posted by Ryan in : Markteting, HowTo, Video, Film, Shopping, Trends, Books, Travel, Contributors, OrlandoScene, Teaching, open source, Branding, Storytelling, Love , 2 commentsI jsut finished reading Rent Girl
However Michelle Tea and this book are not the subject of this blog. At least, not directly.
I picked up this indy book at an indy book shop - I was on vacation, visiting Tempe, Arizona, walking to Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods, hiking the Grand Canyon, getting yummy sandwiches from the co-op and drinking local beer. And next to the Trader Joe’s in the adobe-colored shopping center (really, they all were) was this little book store, Changing Hands.
Changing Hands Bookstore, Tempe Arizona, corner of McClintock and Guadalupe. There was a café, I think, and there was a section up front with fun games - the kinds of stuff you’d see on the bookshelves of Barnes and Noble next year once they hit critical mass. Like all indy book shops, there was a table near the customer service desk with eye-catching books, new arrivals, and the ever-present signed-or-to-be-signed books. And here was Rent Girl
I only read a few pages on the plane, it was too naughty. I actually couldn’t wrap my head around this book until recently, somehow I feel that by absorbing some women’s media I can try to understand the industry a bit better - things aimed at guys are too easy to understand, low hanging fruit - women’s music, film and books are another beast.
But I digress. I want to plant a seed at Changing Hands in Tempe and Urban Think in Orlando and the Bookmine in Jacksonville, and all the other places where you feel proud buying a naughty graphic novel. This advice isn’t exactly ground-shaking, but I think it makes sense:
Every small town book shop should:
- Print their own books.
- Teach classes about how to print your own books.
- Sell said hand-made and self-published books.
- Sell books by local authors on the internet.
- Show and sell art on the walls.
- Have free and open wi-fi.
- Record video/audio podcasts with visiting authors.
- Have a space in-store and online for customers to have a conversation, either about books or what happened on last night’s LOST.
- Be a place where you want to come to read a book.
- Be a place where you would hang out with your friends.
- Be the first place you want to visit when you get off of work.
- Have space for local groups to hold meetings.
In London I saw a store that only sells Chess and Bridge supplies. They’ve got the largest selection of that stuff you’ve ever seen - no big box store could compete. And on the same block is a store that only sells Flutes. I’m told there’s a store on the other side of the river that only sells French Horns. Granted, in a big city there is a need for places that specialized, but I think even a small town book store can take some tips from these places.
I saw another place that was a grocery, bookstore, gift shop and restaurant all in one. They wouldn’t let me take pictures in there, it was so unique. They press their own olive oil.
In a certain way, Stardust Video & Coffee here in Orlando has achieved so much of what’s on my list, but the utility of the store, renting movies, was not lucrative enough for them, so they opened up to being more cafe-and-performance-space than video rental space. They’ve recently added a second stage with a strict “no dry-humping” policy, and they also sell hard liquor in addition to their amazing selection of beers, decent wine, tea, coffee, baked goods and original food.
I suppose if there was a local printer, they could achieve something similar without needing to do the actual printing themselves, but I guess that’s part of the point of the bookstore, yes?
As a “video and coffee” establishment, I don’t see where Stardust is the last word on video other than the selection, but I always felt like I wasn’t smart enough to rent there, that the right to rent a film was reserved for someone with a more cultured taste than I. However, the Thursday night Broken Speech Poetry Slam or the local rock shows they have are completely accessible, and I’ve played drums on stage at Stardust many times. Maybe that’s just partly attributed to my training as a musician, but why do I feel I’m below the film?
I guess I’m trying to encourage these book shops to become the Third Place that we are all craving here in Orlando right now. In the land of corporate coffee, the local coffee shop has evolved, mostly in order to survive. I think the local bookstore has a few more steps to take before they’re all grown up.
Which bookstores have you noticed fitting into their niche?
…continued…
This is an old meme I found via Tara Hunt and Pinko Marketing. I’ve been trying to describe local media (or at least the goals of the media I’ve been trying to produce) and what’s supposed to be for sale at Petentials and similar sites. The point isn’t to sell 24,000 of an item priced $1 but 1,000 of an item priced $24, let’s say.
Boutique (from my mac dictionary): French, literally ‘small shop,’ via Latin from Greek apothēkē ‘storehouse.’ Compare with bodega .
Some people are getting my reference to boutique mixed up with luxury brands. Personally, I wouldn’t be caught dead with Louis Vuitton bag and I’m sure most Boutiquers wouldn’t be either. The difference, as the diagram suggests (and there are many more differences than I quickly plotted in this image) is the motivations for buying. I said, “Bought for connection” because, as Sanford commented in the previous posts comment section:
“People go out of their way to purchase certain goods - like moleskine notebooks - or buy cheese from specific vendors because it broadcasts something about who they are. This statement can be personal/internal, shared with a small audience…”
The “small shop” concept is the feeling I got at Villandry in London - it was right in the heart of downtown, near the international embassy district, but instead of being generic, they were hyper-specialized. It was the kind of place you’d bring your aunts and uncles who were visiting town, to show off the awesome places that can grown up in your backyard, and they’d sit back and go “I would never buy anything in here, but I’m in awe of the place.” That’s how I feel at Stardust, that’s likely how some folks feel in the front room at Dandelion Communitea, or the co-op area at Infusion Tea in College Park. What does it all mean? How did these people come to create this art, or this custom stationery, or eco-friendly teacups, or press their own olive oil? Why are there hundreds of movies I’ve never heard of, and how in the hell can they organize them by country and director instead of genre? Who does that?
Boutiques do that. The perfect local bookstore would do that.
Take a look at people who use open source software, you’ll find the same aesthetic. Hand-made, personalized, specific, and powerful in the hands of a well-informed user, but you don’t need to be the guy who wrote it to use it or change it. You think there should be a French translation? That’s up to you. A sixth checkbox? Hack it in, contribute it to the repository. Make this the best tool for you, and therefore the best tool for folks who know where to look.
I could go on all night. Maybe I’ll go on this weekend at BarCamp. But I don’t title it “indy bookstore”. What is it?
iPhone Web Clip Favicon Fun! January 28, 2008
Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Links, HowTo, Drupal, Browsers, Trends, Design, Web Sites, interface, Branding, phone, Petentials , 1 comment so farIf you have a web page of any kind - blog, business, social network, whatever - take 3 minutes out of your day and hook this up.
Everyone has a fun little 16×16 favicon to sit in the bookmarks section, links bar, or tabs of their favorite browser (Flock, Songbird and Firefox come to mind). This has been a long-running tradition with webmasters and SEO companies to give you that last bit of branding: the favicon!
Now with mobile devices and desktop apps (rich internet applications, too?) getting into the mix, there is a need for favicons larger than squint. Enter, the apple-touch-icon and associated rel tag, which is even easier to implement than a favicon. No special file formats, no special programs needed. Instead of a screenshot of the web page, you now have a degree of control over a bookmarker’s (webclipper’s? that sounds nice) touchscreen.
All you have to do is name the thing apple-touch-icon.png and throw it in your document root. According to the primary vivid, it should be 57×57px, but that’s actually the rendered size and not likely the size Apple uses internally. If you go to http://apple.com/apple-touch-icon.png, theirs is a nice round 129×129, which is roughly 2 1/4 times larger than 57×57. I figure Apple must know something we don’t, so I’ll play along.
And now, a handy diagram to show you what’s up:
Favicon
16×16Apple Touch Icon
57×57Apple’s Official Icon
129×129
Once you get your image loaded, borrow the boss’ iPhone and add the webclip to your home page. There is also a preview screen that lets you know instantly if your icon is working (not pictured).
The iPhone even added a nice glossy, buttony finish to the experience. Ahhhhhh…! You’ll also notice the edges of your icon may get trimmed (which caused the boss to make a face). This is, as far as I know, normal. If you don’t want the boss to make a face, center the icon and leave some extra space around. Using the Apple example may be a helpful guide.
Last but not least, you may be wondering: “Why do I have to name my icon something so specific, and why do I have to use the document root?” Looks like you don’t. Again our friends at vjarmy.com tell us that there is a rel-tag we can throw in the header if we want to place the icon elsewhere:
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/path/to/my-cool-icon.png" />
If you don’t want to use a .PNG, you have smelly feet, but if you’re OK with being known as the smelly foot man, by all means, don’t use the best web picture format. I also had to dissuade my boss from experimenting with transparency in the .PNG, because I’m quite afraid of the results. Imagine a person with a naked woman on their iPhone desktop; now imagine your company’s logo displayed distastefully close to (or on top of) an unmentionable portion of said woman’s body - with a transparent background! Yikes. I would feel very sorry for Six Apart on that day…
I find the apple-touch-icon tag to be a scoche proprietary for my taste, but so are iTunes tags in podcast RSS feeds, so I guess we must needs put up with a little bullcrap every now and then.
I also heard someone recently complain about sites that have a default iPhone interface, and I mostly agree. They should put the interface on a subdomain so you can get at the regular functionality of the site, but I believe a truly useful service should be user-friendly through multiple interfaces, and traditional web apps are not always suited to touch screens.
If you have any questions (or if I forgot something) buy all means, let me know.
I am also hoping to make a small and fun Drupal module that encourages you to upload a 129×129 image to use as your site’s official webclip instead of a screenshot, so be on the lookout for that. Would you like to see other iPhone-friendly features integrated, like style sheet includes, javascripts, etc? I’d love to know.
Drupal Easy January 23, 2008
Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Site News, Career, Podcasts, HowTo, Drupal, Video, Liberatr, Web Sites, Facebook, Teaching, open source, Branding , add a commentA while ago, Charlie and I were talking about how we could share our love of Drupal with the rest of the world. Our natural desires to create original content and extend the reach Cervo Systems helped us develop the idea for a website, a podcast and a community around making Drupal accessible to people with no knowledge of programming.
Welcome Drupal Easy to our family.
Today, I answered the first question on the site, about pathauto aliases and XML Sitemaps. I hope we keep getting some mid-level questions like this, but also some much simpler questions.
I have a screencast planned for the near future that compares Drupal against industry standards for security. This will hopefully be the sort of thing PHP haters and team leads will be able to use to understand that Drupal is awesome.
One day in the future, I’d also like to come up with a coherent set of lessons we can sell in a video book format.
I also have a Facebook page which currently has 8 random fans attached, and that’s actually how I got the first question.
I think this is going to be lots of fun, and maybe help us make a little cash once we get that part of it going. Who knows?
Randi Zuckerberg’s Innovativity October 4, 2007
Posted by Ryan in : Markteting, Video, Reviews, podtech, Facebook, Branding , 1 comment so farI don’t often watch the ScobleShow, but I saw they interviewed the first sister of Facebook, Randi Zuckerberg (and it was only 5 minutes, Scoble is notoriously long-winded). It was calld Face to Facebook with Randi, cute. Here’s the deal: She called herself innovative like 5 times. Never reffered to a team or what the people who use Facebook do as innovative, but herself.
If I ever call myself innovative, I want someone to come back to this post and call me out on it. I’m having trouble putting it into words, but I don’t want to tell other people what to think of me. Randi is clearly trying to associate herself with the word “innovative” in the minds of the people watching this interview. It’s likely that in 3 years, I won’t remember what she said except for that word, and now neither will you…
How did Randi earn the right to innovate as the Digital Media Producer at Facebook? She made some videos that are only funny to silicon valley geek types, but I’ve never really found them that funny.
I’m going to look into Randi some more over the next couple of weeks and see if I can find something cool about her - I’m sure that after her appearance on Scoble she’s all over the place. If not, maybe I’ll just interview her. Stay tuned.
