Books By People I Know - the blog

I’ve downloaded the beta of Pligg, an open source version of Digg which is a very cool site that let’s end users select and rate the content for a forum of articles on technology topics. If you aren’t familiar with it, you really owe it to yourself to check it out. I am certain you’ll find more than a few links there that are worth following.

The Pligg engine has many features that I think would be great to use for my next addition to the BbPIK site. I want to have user registration, submission of blurbs that would be open for voting on and for commentary, and I love the idea of a “karma” system to give visitors a sense of the community’s collective credibility. Unfortunately I haven’t had much time to research or fiddle with Pligg, which has got me worried that it might have too much overhead for my site’s modest ambitions. Does anyone out there know of an open source tool that would fulfill most of the features mentioned above, but is a little leaner? Thanks!

I got distracted playing with the cosmetics of the site, I got distracted helping my girlfriend recover from her root canal, and yes, I got distracted bailing water out of my flooded basement, but now I’ve got my on the ball. A baseball that is. A very old baseball from Boston. Don’t know what I’m talking about? Well the first clue would be to read We Changed the World, the you would certainly be able to guess that in my roundabout way all i’m really trying to say is that I’ve finally sent off a dozen interview questions to Sidney Pike. Try to keep up, would ya?

Well I must have been on the right track with the Books By People I know idea because Amazon is now launching a program to connect authors with their readers through web technology. I have no plans to abandon my project, but I must concede that Amazon gets just a handful more visitors to their website than I do to mine (although I would argue that a finer class of people visit www.booksbypeopleiknow.com).

For those of you that have published, you may want to check out the Amazon connect program:

Amazon Connect

I believe the way the program works is that they set each participating author up with a blog which is then made available through the power of Amazon’s search capability to every Amazon customer who has previously purchased a book by that author. On the customer side they are calling it a “plog”, short for personalized web log. It sounds like a good way to stay in touch with your readers.

A few improvements.  Cleaned up the links a little on the side, but not a lot of new meat here.  I’ve been busy with my non-virtual activities.

For instance: I went to an interesting meeting tonight talking about wireless gaming technology.  It was very phone-centric, but a lot of interesting questions were asked.  Discussions touched on the problems of diverse hardware platforms, the latency of the wireless networks as an impediment to multi-player games, and the Hollywood-like issues of risk-averse producers controlling the creative process.  Good stuff, even if it doesn’t have anything to do with any of the usual BbPIK content.