Jerry spied my plea for help on Facebook and made it his personal mission to help me find it, and then David identified it immediately (I should have consulted David’s steel-trap memory first… next time I’ll know).

And the book? “The Marvelous Inventions of Alvin Fernald,” by Clifford B. Hicks, first of a series that you can learn more about at www.alvinfernald.com.

I’ll quote from David’s note:

Alvin is using the invention on the cover.  I quote from Chapter 7, “The One-Jerk Bed Maker”:

“Rummaging through the boxes on his inventing bench, he found a ball of strong cord and two small pulleys. He tied the pulleys to the head of the bed, one on each side of the pillow. He cut two long pieces of cord. One end of each cord he tied to one of the clothespins. The other ends he ran through the pulleys. He brought the cords down under the bed, leaving plenty of slack on the floor, then tied the two cords to the footboard. He squeezed open two clothespins and fastened one to the sheet and blanket on each side of the bed… He pulled slowly on the cords. The blanket and sheet slid neatly into place, as tough pulled by two invisible hands. Alvin Fernald, Great Inventor, had done it again.”

Of course, it’s possible you remember ANOTHER children’s book in which the protagonist invents an automatic bed maker. This is the one I recalled.

As I write, the local library is finding a copy and bringing it to the nearest branch.

Jerry, David– thanks!

Dear Jeff,

I’m a fan, a BIG fan, both of you and of Amazon.com. Want specifics? I got the very first Kindle and later the Kindle Dx. Love ‘em, and sometimes buy the same book in digital AND hardcover formats… both from Amazon. I’m a Prime member and think it’s the best $79.00 I spend each year. I prefer to buy mp3s via Amazon over iTunes, bought-and-downloaded the entire second season of Mad Men through your Unbox interface to watch on plane rides. I could go on, but I won’t, because I want to get to the point of this letter quickly.

Jeff, I’m begging you to create an Amazon Tip Jar that happy Amazon customers like me can use to reward the independent bookstores that Amazon is, quite simply and inarguably, killing dead dead dead. “Tip,” here means both the “ooooh, thanks for the recommendation” sort of tip and also the “here’s a few bucks for good service” tip. Your doing ths will be good for the Amazon brand, good for the world, the right thing to do, and technologically easy– combining your existing Associates program and Gift Card program.

Why should you do this? Here’s one story that, I hope, will make my point.

My guilty moment
About a year ago I was chatting with the proprietors at The Mystery Bookstore in Westwood, California (wonderful place: you ought to visit, here’s a map), where over the years I’ve happily spent a lot of money and, more importantly, received a ton of high-quality, personalized book recommendations that trump the “Frequently Bought Together” and “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” advice from your ecommerce algorithms.

On this fateful day, the nice lady at the register suggested Gregg Hurwitz’s terrific mystery “The Crime Writer” and made it sound fascinating (it is!).

I could have spend $14.00 plus tax right there in the store, but instead I covertly checked my Kindle, found it and later bought it on that platform for $9.99. Why? My Kindle was relatively new, and I wanted to see if I could fall into a mystery on that platform (yup, sure could).

But man, I felt guilty. Later, after I finished The Crime Writer, I wanted to give the folks at The Mystery Bookstore a reward, a bounty, if you will, for such a great recommendation. I wanted to hand them $5 — yes, the book is THAT good — but I didn’t, in part because I couldn’t face the perp walk of shame to the register to confess that I took their recommendation and bought it for the Kindle, and in part because I couldn’t imagine what they would DO with five bucks. There’s no “random money” entry in most cash registers, and many people would simply pocket the money rather than have to figure out what to do with it.

Jeff, help me assuage my guilt!
You can solve this problem: with an Amazon Tip Jar I could decide to reward The Mystery Bookstore later by sending them a thank you tip for the Hurwitz tip. All I’d need to do is click on the “Send a Tip!” link at Amazon.com, enter the email address or physical address of the tip-receiver, choose my dollar amount, and then go through the usual, expedient Amazon buying process.

This would be entirely voluntary for the customer — which means it might fail — but tipping at restaurants is voluntary and most of us do it.

If I browse a copy of Michael J. Mauboussin’s “Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition” (it’s on my Amazon wish list) at the local independent bookstore and later choose to save $10.18 by buying it through Amazon, I could send $1.99 — the cost of an episode of most TV shows at Amazon or iTunes — as a tip to the local shop… that means I still save $8.19, which is a lot.

Think of the positive brand exposure for Amazon! You could even make actual little glass jars that a store could have next to the register with signs that read, “Tip Jar: See something here that you’re gonna buy from Amazon? Tips appreciated!” and have the store’s email address on the jar. And it doesn’t need to be limited to bookstores (although that’s what started me down this chain of thought): if a blogger represents a book, I could say thank you. If a speaker at a conference mentions a book and I buy it, I could say thank you.

Nobody would respect a $1.99 gift certificate, but a tip? Who wouldn’t smile at that and think, “gosh, that’s nice… thanks!”

Amazon is the undisputed king of ecommerce, the cradle of the long tail, the enabler of authors to get their books in front of people in a hurry, but what Amazon doesn’t do well is have a real-time conversation… the one when how the customer’s eyes light up while she talks about one book sparks another title in the mind of the merchant. Independent bookstore owners do that very  well. You can help keep them around.

Please think about it.

Sincerely from a fan and loyal Amazon customer,

Brad Berens

I took a big screenshot that you can find here, and here’s a sneak preview:

Kemp Obit with FB banner

This content-ad juxtaposition struck me from a surreal angle. Kemp himself probably had a BlackBerry later in his career — or an assistant who had one — and probably had heard of FaceBook, but what would his response have been to seeing such a twenty-first century ad placed next to a story about such a twentieth centure figure?

Note also the AT&T U-Verse ad at the top of the page.

Note#2: Kemp was 73, which USED to seem old.

For the inveterate readers out there, the gauntlet has been thrown down! John Durham, Don E. Schultz, Sean Cheyney, Doug Weaver, Jim Meskauskas: I’m talking to YOU… and to anybody else hearing this. What explicit business strategy books have you read lately (or ever) that were worthwhile and why were they worthwhile?

Thinking over my own reading, the books that most influence me tend to not to be strategy books either. When I used to teach writing at U.C. Berkeley, for example, I never found that books about writing were useful to my students or to me as a teacher. Instead, I preferred to use things like Sun Tzu’s Art of War or Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics as writing manuals.

There’s a reason for this: off-topic books (Tzu, McCloud) open the mind to think creatively about how to apply the lessons of one subject to a related but different topic. This is also how metaphors work: if you say “my love is a red rose” that statement doesn’t contain or transmit meaning: instead, it provokes your mind to think creatively about how your love and red foliage are similar (the philosopher Donald Davidson explained this usefully in his terrific essay, “What Metaphors Mean”).

So, the books that have most influenced how I think about the interactive media business over the last three years have been books like:

• Barry Schwartz’s Paradox of Choice, which explains how and why less can be more

• Daniel Goleman’s Social Intelligence, which explains how the real metric for engagement requires people rather than server logs

• Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, which explains the forces behind things like Wikipedia

In all three cases, the books have stimulated new thought, whereas when I tried to use David Allen’s Getting Things Done it felt like a set of prescriptions that hobbled my thinking rather than expand it.

So, here’s my question: what do you think?

I’ve created this Twitter hashtag to help us all track the conversation, if it happens: #bizstratbooks

• http://scatter.wordpress.com/2008/12/03/infinity-not-quite-as-big-as-it-used-to-be/
• http://www.oopstime.com/news/health/22008/yes-i-am-afflicted-with-tivo-guilt.html
• http://dailydish.honadvblogs.com/2008/12/03/got-tivo-guilt/
• http://www.fresnobeehive.com/archives/2008/12/what_tv_shows_g.html
• http://www.gizmolovers.com/2008/12/03/tivo-guilt-dont-they-have-a-pill-for-that/
• http://blogs.mysanantonio.com/weblogs/atlarge/2008/12/new_i_refuse_to_believe_1.html
• http://www.tvsquad.com/2008/12/02/yes-i-am-afflicted-with-tivo-guilt/
• http://media.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NDU3MjBiMDNkNjM2N2FmM2RiMThiMGRlNDBmNGIzN2I=
• http://blogs.kxly.com/blog/2008/12/02/tivo-guilt/
• http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1266561/tivo_guilt_too_much_of_a_good_tivo.html?cat=15
• http://truemors.nowpublic.com/?p=34622
• http://economics.com.au/?p=1897
• http://www.tcpalm.com/blogs/thewatercooler/2008/dec/03/tivo_guilt/
• http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2008/12/question_of_the_day_how_far_back_do_your_tivo_shows_go-2.html

Some are taking it seriously and some are making fun, but golly that’s a lot of people!

The sentence most often quoted is my comparison of the moment when you fire up your TiVo to a home work assignment. You can see the original here:

And you can read David Daniel’s article version here.

I’m having great fun with this!

To recap, Ms. Blue utterly denies that Boing Boing removing links to her and her work would have any economic impact on her.

Feeling that I had perhaps been misunderstood, I posted the following comment on her blog:

Dear Ms. Blue,

Thank you for responding to my Mediavorous post about the current contratemps between you and Boing Boing.  I appreciate your engaging with my comments.  I accept completely that Boing Boing’s excision of references to you had no impact on your pocketbook.

However, I do want to clarify (and I’ll do this on Mediavorous as well) something that your excerpt from my post does not convey. Regardless of whether or not Boing Boing’s excision of references to you had any actual negative impact on you, the *desire* to have such an impact was a possible Boing Boing motivation that David Sarno at the L.A. Times had not considered in his article.  This was the point of my post, which is titled, “BoingBoing Brouhaha… L.A. Times Misses Story.”

While you and your work may be both invulnerable and indifferent to the vicissitudes of Google Juice, a good portion of the annual multi billion dollar online advertising industry — the industry that I serve professionally at ad:tech and iMedia — is powered by Google AdSense and similar programs (see this recent NY Times article for some relevant numbers: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/09/business/media/09adco.html). Many online publishers, particularly smaller ones, survive based on their Google Juice– a fact that would never be lost on the savvy editors of Boing Boing.

I was primarily speculating on a possible business motive.

I will also confess that I find most of this story mystifying as one of the more constant truisms about the internet is that everything said on it is indelible and there are infinite numbers of people paying attention to details at a level unthinkable just a few short years ago… so why would Ms. Jardin think that nobody would notice?

Best of luck to you in your work.

Sincerely,

Brad Berens
Chief Content Officer & Editor at Large
ad:tech & iMedia
…and now blogging at www.mediavorous.com

Sarno’s article is a good account of the blogosphere’s need for transparency and how Jardin has potentially violated that, but he misses a big economic point about Google Juice, and in so doing makes Jardin look like a tweaked cliche (hell hath no fury like a blogger scorned) rather than a shrewd businesswoman thinking that she doesn’t need to help the cause of a now-former ally.

When Jardin removes BoingBoing links to Blue’s work she isn’t simply saying, “nah nah, we’re not friends anymore.” BoingBoing is a site with huge traffic, and the way Google’s search functionality (its PageRank algorithm) works the more links go to a site the higher it ends up in the search results.

If Blue has any kind of revenue sharing agreement for her San Francisco Chronicle work where she gets paid more if she gets more traffic, then Jardin’s action will hit her in the pocketbook. Similarly, while it’s unclear to me if Blue’s Tiny Nibbles blog and website has advertisements beyond a Helio sponsorship, Blue’s ability to get a replacement sponsor for the soon-to-be-defunct Helio will be constrained if her traffic goes down.

Even if there is no economic impact (which I find unlikely), if Jardin removes references to Blue’s work then Blue’s Google-powered fame and influence go down.

In the blogosphere as well as everywhere else, you have to follow the money.

Note: the L.A. Times website oddly does not have the print article available in the “print edition” section of the site, although they do have a downloadable PDF of the front page. You can see a snippet of it by clicking here.

Digging into this image:

The joke hinges on a simple substitution of the word “books” for “butts,” but that substitution creates a collision of two opposite sensibilities. Sir Mix-A-Lot’s song is about a public, joyous, Rabelaisian and loudly-proclaimed love of the bodily and sensual– complete with dancing and lots of movement. Mix-A-Lot uses precise Anglo diction (how many urban black guys say “fellas” without it being satirical) and a battery of witty rhymes and puns (Honda, Fonda and Anaconda) to mark out a black aesthetic as profoundly different than that of the white mainstream media. (The music video makes this point even more clear.)

From public, bodily and sensual we move with the change of one word to private, still and cerebral. Rather than raucously celebrating the butt in a song performed out loud, the t-shirt stands on the wearer’s chest to be read and appreciated in silence… a different sort of wit.

You don’t need to know Sir Mix-A-Lot’s song closely in order to get the joke– a passing memory of the title conveys most of it. However, if your memories are at all clear then each recollected detail increases your awareness of this sensibility collision.

Sir Mix-A-Lot’s song came out in 1992, before the internet had extended much beyond college campuses and the government, before Napster took apart the music industry and while the television industry was starting to recover from the first fragmentation of media that happened with the birth of cable. As the Wikipedia editor notes, the song has been covered and parodied many times.

One of the most memorable performances, or at least the one that was seen by the most people, is when the Donkey (voiced by Eddie Murphy, who himself had a 1985 Rick James produced hit single in “Party All the Time”) briefly sings the song at the end of the first “Shrek” movie (2001).

Had Sir Mix-A-Lot released “Baby Got Back” much later than 1992, then the joke of the t-shirt would have failed, and this is where I’ll continue tomorrow.

Take a look:

The t-shirt is distributed by Café Press, which empowers individuals to design shirts, mugs and other things and profit from them, much like Threadless but without the community-voting aspect.

Digging into this image, it alludes to Sir Mix-A-Lot’s 1992 rap hit, “Baby Got Back,” which is an over-the-top enthusiastic celebration of the large buttocks of some women. The famous first line of the song is “I like big butts and I cannot lie” (see hysterical full lyrics here).

On the t-shirt, instead of butts its books, and while the Harry Potter subtext is not overt the Rowling door-stop novels intended for children and young adults were the first books that leapt to my mind.

I’ve been thinking about this shirt all weekend, and over the next few posts I’m planning to tease out why this shirt is an important signpost about how much we still depend on fat old mass culture for resonance and recognition, even though that fat old mass culture is wasting away quickly.

More to come.

While I admire what Mark Zuckerberg et. al. have accomplished, I think that “social graph” is a bit overweening and suffers from a disease that many technologists — particularly young technologists — have, which is the tendency to invent cloudy new words for clear old concepts.

In this case, the concept is serendipity.

The internet is terrific at getting you exactly what you want, when you want it and a good price: think Amazon.com, iTunes, RSS feeds and, more generally, search.

But the internet is terrible at exposing you to things that you didn’t know you wanted and might really enjoy: think the glum irrelevance of Amazon’s recommendations or the clutter of a search page when you don’t have a precise enough set of keywords in the search.

By contrast, real-world bookstores have all these wonderful aisles and shelves where people wander and happen upon things, and the clerks act like editors when they showcase staff picks on convenient shelves at eye level. I have a cognitive context for my local Borders; that context, not to mention that I’m in wander mode rather than hunt-and-acquire mode when I’m there, makes me more open to seeing new things. So, for example, I recently started reading a cute werewolf series that I happened to see displayed in the sci-fi/fantasy section at Borders. (The first one is “Kitty and The Midnight Hour” by Carrie Vaughn if you like this sort of thing.) So far, I don’t get that kind of serendipity at Amazon, and much as I like “Stumble Upon” you simply can’t go LOOKING for serendipity… it just happens.

That’s what I enjoy about Facebook: I see what my friends and acquaintances are up to, and because I like them enough to be friends with them their activities and interests come pre-equipped with relevance to my own activities and interests. So, it’s not purely random like much in search or the average banner ad: it’s framed (in the Goffman sense) and contextualized.

I’m not looking for a new book to read: I’m finding out what my friends are up to, and if one of them happens to mention a book, then I might be inclined to read it.

Generally, I tend not to like the Facebook applications that try to automate serendipity (I’m probably going to ditch Visual Bookshelf, for example) because that’s just another form of clutter.

People don’t need profundity every moment of their lives, and the idea of a social graph just sounds so dreary and like so much work. But serendipity? Now that’s a pearl of great pricel.

By the way, the greatest serendipity engine in the world is called “college,” so it’s no wonder that Facebook emerged from that even-more serendiptious, four-year environment.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day.