The Tree Frog Blog

Hiatus / Moving

The TFB is on hiatus while we restructure under a new company name.  Once the new site is up, these posts will migrate, and blogging will resume. Thanks for stopping by.

Hiatus

The TFB is on hiatus. Please leave a message at the sound of the rribbitt.

The Stolen Child's Winning Campaign

Keith Donahue's The Stolen Child seems to be doing everything right. He's got a blog on Amazon... Amazon sent galleys to their top 100 reviewers... and NPR covered the unique new approach.

Bases covered. But can any author do this?

BusinessWeek Book Roundup

Here's an encouraging BusinessWeek article about the success of small niche presses. So inspiring, it's enough to make a Frog want to run out and start her own publishing company.

(The Frog's niche? Poetry, long short-stories averaging 6,000 words, and the literary ghost story.)

And here's another BusinessWeek article, about bloggers getting book deals... a trend we thought was passe.

Articles of Interest

Evidently LinkedIn is doing quite well.
Pluck is sending 700 blog feeds to major newspapers for potential syndication.

Everybody's getting it; in a matter of months our lives (and our futures) will be 100% online.  The question remains: does all this information enhance our experiences as workers and consumers?

Blogging Veronica Mars

Television's VERONICA MARS held a Blogger Press Conference Day. Now The Frog is waiting for the executive producers of LOST to invite her to Maui for a day, so she can wreak vengeance on the tree frog slaughtering Sawyer...

Powell's Gets It

Here's a great article about how Powell's Bookstore is using the internet, especially blogs and podcasts, to improve sales.

Quick-Rribbit: How Google Can Be Bad for You

Having too much of an online presence can get you in trouble. If The Frog had more time, she'd point to 9,000 versions of this same article on the internet.  At this point, we know the net gives employers the upper hand, and that too much freedom of speech (buzzword: "transparency") can keep young people from getting what they want later on.

The problem is, many in the MySpace and Facebook communities DON'T READ the news sites (i.e. BusinessWeek) that are publishing these articles. The warning needs to exist somewhere where they'll actually see it.   Maybe it's time for Transparency Training for the Next Generation of Internet Users?

More on this some other time. Enough blogging:  The Frog needs to go jogging.

The Future is Here

Remember that Ray Bradbury short story about targeted billboard messages being delivered to consumers via their shoes?  It's here. Well, just about. Our virtual footprints are being measured.

The Washington Post just ran an article about corporate marketing departments monitoring public sentiment about products.  A new software program from the Nielsen group collects and sifts through thousands of blog and message board comments, then grades them to give useful, measurable reports to marketing departments.

Scary? Maybe. But useful -- definitely. Imagine a marketplace where products are recalled, tweaked and re-released to please consumers. Sounds like a good thing to me.

The Frog's beseeches all bloggers: please, PLEASE start daydreaming about solar-powered SUVs.

Guidelines for Corporate Blogging

These aren't Tree Frog's guidelines. Rather, they come from 925m, an online advertising blog with an impressive command of PhotoShop. I covet their retro monster-movie fonts. Check out their Attack of the Blog Tips for hints on how to be a better, more effective business blogger.