thoughtsignals

Something is coming on Monday … stay tuned.

New Scientist has a pretty interesting article that goes over eight ways — supported by science — to effectively persuade people. It also examines, somewhat less thoroughly, how you can resist these techniques. It does not get into when you should use them, or when you should resist them, though — that’s the tricky questions.

1. Mimicking.
2. Framing.
3. Using few reasons.
4. Being persistent.
5. Choosing your communications medium wisely.
6. Styling.
7. Generating anger.
8. Moving them along step by step.

Link.

Yesterday my copy of Justin Catanoso’s “My Cousin the Saint: A Search for Faith, Family and Miracles” arrived from Amazon. Normally, this is not the kind of book I would read. I happily left the Catholic Church a long time ago. But Justin is a former editor of mine, and I’ve read many of his previous pieces on his cousin, and more importantly heard stories first hand about the Saint and about how he wrote the book. I’ve only had time to read the very beginning, a miracle story that opens the book, but I found myself touched by the story and the writing.

I would have loved to have been at BookExpo in LA to see this panel with John Scalzi, Cory Doctorow, Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga about building online communities.

Scalzi talked about his experience establishing himself as the “benevolent dictator” of the conversational community that grew up around his blog, which has evolved into a culture that is capable of entertaining itself even when he’s not around, like when he’s up against a book deadline. Keeping the readers informed of deadlines and other parts of the writing process, he added, had an unexpected effect: “The community is kicking my ass to not blog so they can get the books.”

There’s nothing on YouTube that comes up in a quick search, but maybe somebody will post something. In the meantime, more details over at GalleyCat.

I know I’m coming to this late, but I just saw this for the first time yesterday. It raises pretty compelling questions for anyone interested in the world and economy we’re going to be living with in a few years, and that our children will grow up in.

Here’s a related wiki.

Ian Lurie has a great list of things you shouldn’t do in Internet marketing. It’s worth bookmarking.

Ian tells you not to:

• “Ignor ur spel checkr”
• “Beat your audience to death with a thesaurus”
• “Hide your contact info”

And much more.

Link.

Jeri Rowe has a piece about a Greensboro writer still going strong at 92 — that is something to aspire to.

Link.

Want to broadcast your own call-in talk radio show? No problem. Thanks to BlogTalkRadio you can. Washington Post media writer Howard Kurtz reports the site is drawing 2.4 million visitors a month, and giving lots of folks like us a new voice.

Most shows are hosted from home by bloggers who need no special equipment and pay no fee. The only requirement is that they put a link to the program on their Web site. On BlogTalkRadio’s site, visitors can search for programs by name or category.

The process is nearly idiot-proof. The host logs on to a Web page with a password, types in when he wants the show to air, and then — using a garden-variety phone — calls a special number. The computer screen lists the phone numbers of guests or listeners calling in, and the host can put as many as six on the air at once by clicking a mouse. Listeners can download a podcast version later.

Is thoughtsignals radio in the future? Maybe (after grad school) — stay tuned.

(Hat tip to my colleague Kathryn who first brought this to my attention.)

New owners of newspapers — folks like Sam Zell, who made his fortune in real estate — are now saying the outlook for the papers they bought is worse than they expected.

David Carr writes:

These are all smart businesspeople, with significant success in other endeavors, who took a hard look at the wave-tossed publishing sector and appointed themselves as life savers. And very soon after jumping in, they too began foundering in the tall waves.

A lot of these deals were done in the last two years, when the economy was still good despite the troubles in the newspaper biz. With the economy headed downhill, the systemic problems with newspapers will get amplified.

However, what continues to be missing from this whole discussion about the business of newspapers is the lack of innovation in newspaper business models (not in newsrooms, which have been trying new things like crazy the last few years).

Chris O’Brien, who has worked for newspapers as a business reporter for years, gets it right:

I see tremendous energy going in to breaking new ground in gathering news, telling stories, and creating community. What I don’t see is an equivalent amount of innovation occurring around the business models that will support journalism going forward. What I tend to see, over and over, is people experimenting wildly on the content side, and then falling back on the same old business model: Selling ads.

This model is dying.

I don’t know that I agree that selling ads, per se, is a dying business model. It’s what Google is based on after all (however, unlike newspapers, Google has produced a number of innovations in advertising). But basically, that’s right. There is lots of experimentation going on in the nation’s shrinking newsrooms, not so much in the other departments.

So JPMorgan Chase is in talks to pay more for Bear Stearns than the original $2-per-share deal it negotiated with the help of Uncle Sam. This is no surprise, as $2 per share is the equivalent of giving the company away, especially since the feds were guaranteeing $30 billion worth of risky Bear assets. The new asking price is $10 a share — meaning most Bear shareholders will still lose money, but at least they’ll lose less, and perhaps fewer of them will sue to stop the deal.

Here’s what I don’t get: Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary, last week wanted a deal that wouldn’t be portrayed as a taxpayer-funded bailout of Bear, taking the risk off its shareholders. But if this isn’t a taxpayer-funded bailout of Bear, it certainly looks a lot like a taxpayer-funded gift for JPMorgan. With $30 billion (or maybe $29 billion, according to the New York Times story), how is this anything other than a gift to JPMorgan?

It may very well be a necessary gift to ensure confidence in the financial markets, and therefore keep more money flowing through the economy, and therefore blunting whatever slowdown/recession were in, or in for. But it’s still a gift.

I suppose we won’t know until months or years down the road, after all these exotic financial instruments have been somehow unwound or their true values determined — that lack of information is what’s at the heart of the subprime mess and the larger credit crisis. But I wonder if someday it will come out that these risky Bear assets end up being worth significantly more than JPMorgan is paying for them? We won’t know for quite a while.

Link.