The day many a junkie has been waiting for. The release of Scott Sigler’s Infected. This could be the time all of those new media content producers has been waiting for. A big release with a big publisher for a book that has technically been in the wild for quite some time. And you could read it/listen to it for free. What the publishers have failed to realize in the past is that the free content is actually a very good thing, because it builds up a fan base of people who will definitely buy the book and will tell thousands of people about it, building buzz, before it is ever published. Publishers should be extremely happy that writers are taking an active roll in their marketing, going far beyond just a typical book tour. The new media authors also get their fans involved with the story, either by using their name as a character or playing voicemails from the fans on the books podcast. Be sure to check Scott Sigler’s website for more amazing yet creepy stories.
Here are some pictures from my little trip to pick up a copy of Infected from a local book store.
Not many copies left, but I am glad I got here in time. Busy work day so I couldn’t make it to the book store until late.
Happy happy me with my brand new copy.
My postcards and stickers that I ordered arrived on the same day. At least I can go out and promote it even more now.
Update: With the release of the book Random House has removed
the PDF. All that means is you need to go buy a copy for yourself, it’s
worth it. You can also catch the podcast free at http://www.scottsigler.com.
If you haven’t heard of him, you need to. He is an amazing author with a sick mind. Scott Sigler is the person that got me into podcast fiction and at first I didn’t understand why he called his fans junkies. Now I do. If you haven’t listened to any of his stuff you can read his soon to be released novel Infected, in full for free, by clicking here. If you enjoy it, please tell others and make sure to go to your local bookstore on April 1st and buy a copy.
If you want to learn more about the man himself, one of his fellow podcast authors had an amazing interview with him which can be found on J.C. Hutchin’s site.
I will finally be attending my first BarCamp. I am very excited that they are holding one in Orlando, FL. What is ironic though is that I am currently dissolving my web design company. I need to focus on building one company at a time and it is easier to build a company when you have multiple people working together. I hope I can help out with stuff and not have to present, because I have no idea what I would present. But I wanted to spread the word so here are some links.
I will be there for both days, but I want as many people to be at day two as possible because it is the precursor to PodCampOrlando. Depending on how it goes could very well determine whether or not there will be a PodCamp this year, at least in the Orlando area.
So thanks to Webware I just dicovered a new service called Issuu. It is similar to Scribd, but the viewer is so much better. The only thing it is missing is a bulk uploader. Well I decided to try it out by uploading the Creative Commons licensed pdfs of Mur Lafferty’s Playing for Keeps. All of the issues have been uploaded here if you want to embed them on your own site. Just click on the player below to see the full version, and you can even view it full screen once on the full viewer.
Update: It seems as though you can’t view my Issuu profile page and thereby see all of the issues that are uploaded without signing up for an account, so here are the links to each issue.
Straight from the mind of Mur Lafferty. A video blog about a Third Waver and his experiences as he learns what his powers can do. To learn more about unlikely heroes and their odd powers visit the Playing For Keeps website and subscribe to the podcast novel.
I have been deleting podcasts that I don’t really need to listen to anymore off of iTunes so I would no longer be behind by 60 podcasts on my iPod. That doesn’t work to well with current event and tech news podcasts. So I had finally trimmed it down to under 20 podcasts.
Then I got hooked on Podcast Novels… I suppose I should blame Scott Sigler because his book, Earthcore, was the first I had listened to from a lovely website called Podiobooks.com. Well as soon as I was 5 episodes into it I knew I was hooked so I went and downloaded his second book, Ancestor, just so it would be ready for me. After I finished that I saw The Rookie and thought that football didn’t really interest me all that much, but I decided to give it a try anyway. All I could keep thinking throughout the whole book was how awesome football would be if it was really like how it was in The Rookie. Needless to say it didn’t take me long to listen to that book. This brought me to Scott’s current novel, Nocturnal. Everything was going so well because I could just listen to each book and move onto the next. Then I caught up to the point that I actually had to wait more than a day for the next episode to come out. This just wouldn’t do, I needed my fix. I realized what Scott Sigler meant when he called his fans “junkies.” Thus began the downward spiral. I decided to branch out and test the waters of some other podcast novels. Nocturnal usually has a promo or two at the end of each episode so I decided to start there. Two in particular caught my interest because I am a big fan of comic books. Black Shadow and Playing for Keeps.
Black Shadow is really neat because it has locals from DC Comics. It is a story of a super hero having to deal with the supernatural. I am excited to see where the story goes. The description of Hell was pretty amazing and does not sound like a fun place at all.
Playing for Keeps is really awesome. I’ve always thought that if super heroes with powers really existed then some people would wind up with some odd or worthless powers. I’ve always thought that it was weird that there was no in between for powers. Either they have some epic really useful power, or they have no power at all. It’s also refreshing to see that the “Heroes” aren’t really as great as they are usually portrayed. I’m also a big fan of the underdog beating the crap out of the favorite. There have even been cameos from people on the SciFi channel. A description of some of the amazing things she has done for her podcast novel can be found here. The podcast is available for free here, or you can buy the finished book from Lulu.com.
I’ve gotten so into this stuff that I find my self joining the Playing for Keeps Street Team to help spread the word. I am also creating a Scott Sigler Mahalo page for people to find stuff about him easily. I would love to make a page for all these new media authors because they are so nice, but I didn’t realize how strict the standards are for Mahalo and how much work is involved in creating a page. I will gladly share links for each of the authors with Mahalo which will create a “stub” page, but I don’t think I can handle creating another full blown SERP for them.
So if you want to find some amazing new content online either in podcast or print then check out those links above. I am just getting into 7th Son by J.C. Hutchins, so I can’t say much about it yet, but the first two episodes that I have listened to have been very intriguing.
There are finally some really good utilities coming out for EVE on the Mac. One of them is a widget that runs on the dashboard and can even be run on the iPhone. Here is a picture of what it looks like in action, and the widget can be downloaded from the EVE Online forums.
There also seems to be a program in the works that will emulate all the things that EVEMon does, but it will be completely Cocoa based. The program is called Skill Monitor Cocoa. It still needs a lot of work, but the screenshots look very promising and it is somewhat functional albeit a little buggy at times.
I’ve been very impressed with the new PMetrics/Clicky for quite a while now. I just downloaded the latest WordPress plugin from them though and it rocks. Not only does it prevent me from having to input the javascript code manually onto my template pages for tracking, but now it lets me see my basic stats right on the dashboard, but it makes a new tab to see more detailed stats. Now I don’t even need to leave my site to check my stats. If you want to check it out, please follow my affiliate link to sign up at PMetrics here.
I just got into the alpha for Things today. It looks very nice, but I have already set up a bunch of stuff in OmniFocus. I also recently downloaded Anxiety. With the combined power of OmniFocus and Anxiety, Things will have to be pretty impressive to compete. I know Things isn’t feature complete, but I really hope they get the iCal syncing soon so that it can work with Anxiety. Or possibly even better if it could minimize to the tray somehow and have a small box similar to Anxiety. The GTD app space is really heating up and the quality of apps coming out is quite amazing.
