I thought I had missed a major New York news story about a mayoral candidate when I saw this sign in the subway for The Wall Street Journal's new metro section. (This marketing campaign has been out there for a while, but I didn't focus on the headlines.)
This was left on the national-foreign rim white board over the weekend. (Update: It was the handiwork of Diego Sorbara, one of the many outstanding copy editors on the desk.)
One quibble: I would have made it "finest editing in print, on the Web and for mobile."
My Twitter followers are loving it.
iPad Saturday Starts.
I couldn't resist joining the odd cultural moment, but I obviously don't have much to say about the new toy. It is syncing the apps I downloaded last night, iBooks, Marvel, Scrabble and a few others. Oddly, it claimed an iPad had previously been synced to my iMac. I think I would have known about that. Thanks to my technical assistant for helping with the unboxing and the video.
Don't Jump!
Public art, Flatiron district, Manhattan. The statues -- the work of Antony Gormley -- are popping up everywhere on building ledges, alarming some.
The coffee cups were part of a Starbucks stunt in Madison Square Park. Tthere was a tree made out of the filled cups earlier in the day, but we missed that. Beautiful day in New York.
Time for a plug. I'm pleased to announce that "After Voices," a poetry chapbook by my wife, Jane Rosenberg LaForge, was released in October
by Burning River of Cleveland. Jane has been laboring over these poems for a couple of years. Some people have asked, what is a chapbook? One definition: a short booklet containing poems, ballads or stories.
Jane's chapbook includes 12 poems and an essay arranged around the theme of her father's deafness. (He is already disputing some of the facts. Fun times!)
Jane plans to read some of the poems at a New York University faculty-student reading in the East Village in December. A hard copy of the chapbook can be ordered online for $6 a copy from Burning River. A PDF version can be downloaded for free (it includes a bonus poem not in the print edition). It will eventually be available as a digital book in epub format from Project Gutenberg.You can also buy a copy at Visible Voice Books in Cleveland, Housing Works Bookstore Cafe in SoHo, and the McNally-Jackson Bookstore,
also in SoHo. On the weekend of Oct. 17, the chapbook was released in conjunction with readings at the Morgan Conservatory of Papermaking and Visible Voice. Jane read several of the poems, including my favorites, "Lemons" and "Highway 5 Stockyard," as well as some of her unpublished poetry. Some poems in the chapbook were previously published in some form or another in La Petite Zine, Burnside Review, Bateau, Makeout Creek, Ottawa Arts Review and Noun Versus Verb. She has also had work published by the Tipton Poetry Journal and Adirondack Review.
(Originally posted at my Wordpress.com blog, palafo.com).
Right now I'm at #10 on the Listorious most-listed list for Twitter.
That's more than Ev Williams, Twitter, Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, and Ashton Kutcher. Wow, am I really that famous? Well, no.
Listorious calculates this based on lists that have been added to its site. Most lists added to the site so far are pro or near-pro lists organized by topic, not the lists an average user throws together to follow favorite people. So this is another variation on the "in crowd" or most popular users lists.
A short while ago I was around #85 (also unlikely). So I sorted through the 314+ lists that people have put me on and found some interesting ones to add to the site. And voila...
It will be interesting to compare these list counts in a day or so. Let the games being. (I'm opting out after this.)
Note to those I added: If you don't want your list on the site, it's pretty easy to take it down (or make it private). You can also claim it by logging in, adding some tags and a description.
Now this is definitely worth having. Retweets by your followers, your
retweets, and peoples' retweets of you.
Here's what the beta explanation looked like. I'm still working through how this will affect my habits (I retweet a lot) or the look of twitter streams in general. It has not rolled out to any third party clients, and I have only seen one RT in this format by someone else in the wild so far.
There's an invisible RT button that surfaces when your mouse hovers over it, in the same place where you reply to a tweet.
If you follow the person already, I'm not sure that you see the retweet. If you don't, it looks like a normal tweet, with the symbol, and a little message at the bottom. (See previous post).
Twitter rolled out the beta retweet feature to me the other day. It
only works on the Web site. I'm still trying to decide if I like it
or not, but it's not out-of-the-box bad; they must have taken some of
the reaction to heart. This is how it looks to me when I retweet
something..
Either they tweak the design, or I get a better Twitter picture.
I was at the top of Listorious in a prime location most of the day after Twitter lists came out of beta, but then @Kitson tied me around 9 p.m. and has now bumped me down a notch. Alas. Still, not bad for a list I threw together on a whim the first night of the beta. <Edited to correct dumb "Listerous" typo>