The Experts are the One Who Take Notes? WTF?

OMG! OMG! We saw this on LinkedIn. Linked Fucking In. Can you imagine?

If You Aren’t Taking Notes, You Aren’t Learning
by Ben Casnocha

notes 2345425Recently, Mark Zuckerberg addressed a large auditorium of young entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. He shared lessons from his journey and his perspective on the state of the internet industry. Every seat was taken, and the 20-somethings who aspired to entrepreneurial greatness were listening with rapt attention.

According to my friend who relayed this story, there were two older folks in the front row who stood out: John Doerr and Ron Conway. They are both legendary investors in Silicon Valley. read article

Will Google Put the Final Bullet into the Head of “Old TV?”

We’re thinking that if any person/place/thing can speed up the changeover from traditional stand-alone-in-the-middle-of-your-wall-TV to totally-personalized-interweb-viewing it’s Google. And now it looks like they’re thinking that too:

Report: Google Interested In Providing Cable TV On Internet Channels, But It Won’t Be Easy
by Mary Beth Quirk

The still waters of the cable TV industry might run deep, but if companies like Google keep splashing around in them, we might see an alternative to the traditional bundling model — but it ain’t gonna be easy. A new report says Google is entertaining the idea of possibly offering cable channels over broadband Internet connections, something that would likely meet with a major pushback from cable and satellite providers.

Like its fellow tech giant Intel, Google is reportedly interested in licensing TV channels for an Internet cable service, say insiders cited by the New York Times. read article

Peggy Bechko: Kickstarting That Writer’s Vocabulary

Peggys Books shelvedby Peggy Bechko

You write. A lot. You plant the seed and spin a story, but perhaps you have a hard time choosing just the right word. A writer needs words like one lost in the desert needs water. And we hear so much about vocabulary, how broad it must be, what words to choose, how to turn a great phrase. So, in hopes of helping you cultivate that ever expanding vocabulary, here are a few tips and some helpful resources.

First the obvious. One of the best ways to expand your vocabulary is by reading. Read everything. Novels, non-fiction, newspapers, magazine articles, labels! All will help you to improve your own vocabulary. Hopefully in addition to simply reading for entertainment you, as a writer, are permitted to do only occasionally) you’re making note of words you don’t know as you read, and sooner or later looking them up in the dictionary. Good idea! (Sooner’s better than later by the way.)

Want to build your vocabulary a fun and helpful way? Then check out FreeRice.com. You answer multiple-choice questions regarding word meanings and at the same time you donate rice to help relieve hunger. A great site. Fun and broadening. Broaden your vocabulary and help feed people; a great combination. read article

Digital tools don’t make students better writers

What? Rilly? Amaaazing–

In other words, we’re filing this in the “Why Are We Not Surprised? Department, because we know damn well that having more digital writing tools just makes us lazier writers instead of better ones.

Oh crap. We just gave away this whole article: read article

LB: ComicCon is King of the World

ComicConSearchsmSee that pic to the left? I just googled ComicCon and got 873,000,000+ results in a quarter of a second!

My first visit to ComicCon was back in the late ’90s when I was doing THE SILVER SURFER on FoxKids.

I sat at a table beside Stan Lee and felt like a total imposter as we both signed autographs and later the same day we did a short panel about the upcoming show. read article