danbruno.net/blog

Yeah, I know — I haven’t been writing anything. At least I changed the layout again, right?

I have, however, been (adulterously?) blogging at Vox, a new service from Six Apart of Livejournal fame.

Vox is similar to Livejournal in functionality — it’s a hosted blog service that lets you add friends, comment on their entries, and edit privacy settings. Aesthetically, though, it’s the polar opposite. Vox’s look and feel is fresher, more professional and more “Web 2.0″ (read: it has tags and big fonts). And since it’s not as garishly customizable, Vox is not as saturated with the OMG TEENAGERS population (yet). There is also a greater focus on the community as a whole, as opposed to splintered subgroups. In other words, Vox is to Livejournal as Facebook is to MySpace.

My favorite Vox feature is the Question of the Day, a suggested topic that the Six Apart folks come up with for you to write about. Being handed a topic makes writing loads easier — there’s no writer’s block, after all — and also fosters conversation, because everyone is writing about the same thing. Actually, all I’ve done there so far is answer the daily questions. There are other features that look promising too, like photo uploading (with Flickr integration) and reading lists (with data pulled from Amazon), but, well, one blog has proven to be too much for me sometimes.

If you’d like to see those Questions of the Day, check out my Vox blog at danb.vox.com. The service is in Gmail-style beta right now — in other words, it’s invite-only — so if you want to give it a try, drop me a line.

Check out this interview with Tour de France winner Floyd Landis. “You want more of that, motherfuckers?”

If only all commercials were this intense.

Mais pourquoi? Mais pourquoi?

Paul Simon and John Lennon present an award at the 1975 Grammy Awards. The winner sends Art Garfunkel to accept the award. Hilarity ensues.

Para Publishing has a list of statistics on the book industry which has been making the rounds online. It’s worth browsing through, although if you have financial or emotional investment in books you might want to sit down. Here’s a sample:

• A successful fiction book sells 5,000 copies.
• A successful nonfiction book sells 7,500 copies.
• A book must move in the stores in six weeks.
• On the average, a book store browser spends eight seconds looking at the front cover and 15 seconds looking at the back cover.
• Women buy 68% of all books.
• 58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school.
• 55% of fiction is bought by women; 45% by men.
• Only 32% of the U.S. population has ever been in a bookstore.
• 70% of the books published do not make a profit.

Terrifying, isn’t it? I’d like to see some statistics on what Oprah’s Book Club does to sales. I just saw Elie Wiesel’s Night hit the bestseller list almost 50 years after it came out because of Winfrey’s gaze.

The statistics about female/male readership tie in nicely with Menick’s meditation on the difficulties of being a young male reader. The differences between the sexes, brain-wise, are more pronounced at younger ages, and the reading assigned by schools is allegedly slanted towards females. Therefore, Menick has created the Guy’s Reading List so teenagers will have something to read until…they’re old enough to enjoy Jane Austen, I guess.

Personally, I haven’t had a problem with the supposed female bias. I enjoyed every one of Toni Morrison’s novels, as well as the Austen I’ve read. I think the bigger problem is that reading is not perceived as a male activity. You can get high school boys to read Catcher in the Rye, and they’ll like it, but to them it’ll be the exception and not the rule. And no wonder. What do you see when you walk into a library? Steamy romances, weird pink books with pictures of shoes, serial mystery novels where the authors’ names take up half of the cover. They know that all books aren’t like that, but I’m not sure the problem is that they don’t know where to look.

I’ve finally gotten into the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. I seem to have an averse reaction to recommendations. When someone tells me that I must read, see, listen to, or otherwise sense some creative work, I find that I am immediately less inclined to do so. The more enthusiastic the recommendation, the less likely I am to listen. I’m not sure why this is so; once I finally give in, i tend to enjoy whatever it is that I’ve been resisting. (Unless it’s food.)

Anyway, it seems like the Hitchhiker’s series has been recommended to me by half the people I know, so I figured there’s probably something to it. I’m through two of the five books now, and it’s quite good — it reads like a Spaceman Spiff story drawn out into a novel and written by Monty Python. More on it when I finish, perhaps.