My brother Darren and his partner Julie Szabo at Capulet Communications have put out an interesting introduction to social media marketing: Getting to First Base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook. The link includes sample chapters of the book and a weblog.

A few recent reads...

George Monbiot mentioned his book Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning (Random House) when he was interviewed the radio last fall after saying that to reduce the effects of global warming, humanity must reduce commercial air traffic
by 90 percent, which essentially means we must all stop flying. The book consists of his very compelling argument that the rich nations of the world must reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 90 percent by 2030 to prevent global warming of two degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels; if we don't, certain major ecosystems will likely collapse and release carbon dioxide in a manner we can no longer control; if this happens, climate change is out of our hands. You might want to read this book if you or someone you love plans to live for the next 30 years or so.

After visiting the Gowanus canal, an infamously polluted waterway in Brooklyn, NY, Elizabeth Royte decided to follow her garbage around and write a book about it: Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (Little, Brown and Company). She sorts her garbage into various categories (organic waste, metal, glass, plastic, paper) and then follows each to the transfer stations, organic fertilizer companies, sewage treatment plants, plastic, paper, and precious metals recycling facilities, and the landfills where it ends up. If you've ever wondered what happens to that battery or can of paint you furtively slip into the garbage, this is the book for you.  

I borrowed Carol Off's Bitter Chocolate: Investigating the Dark Side of the World's Most Seductive Sweet (Random House) from the library after reading a friend's review in the local newspaper. The book covers the history and politics of chocolate, and specifically the the essential ingredient cocoa, nearly half of which comes from the Cote d'Ivoire and the surrounding region. Read this book to learn more about who grows and harvests the main ingredient in your chocolate bar (but has likely never even heard of chocolate).  When a friend saw the book on the dining room table, she groaned and insisted that I don't tell her anything about the "dark side" of chocolate.

Anyone who has recently shelled out for a seat of Creative Suite will likely appreciate John Jantsch's article on the softwareless office where many applications are online and often free. A couple of my favorites not on this list: Harvest for time-tracking and Highrise for task-tracking.

Yes, it's time for Apple to show some leadership in environmental responsibility...

It's time for Apple to use clean ingredients in all of its products, and to provide a free take-back program to reuse and recycle its products wherever they are sold. That means:

- Remove the worst toxic chemicals from all their products and production lines.
- Offer and promote free "take-back" for all their products everywhere they are sold.

We're not asking for just "good enough." We want Apple to do that "amaze us" thing that Steve does at MacWorld: go beyond the minimum and make Apple a green leader.

What to do with the hundreds of plastic bags that seem to collect under the sink? Make a football of course.

Occassionaly a company will want to convert legacy Microsoft Word documents to a more useful format for long documents like Adobe FrameMaker. This isn't as painful as it sounds. A document on this Techknowledge site serves as a good starting point: http://techknowledgecorp.com.

The goal is to get your source document to look nearly like a plain-text document yet retain its style names, which will be matched up with target styles or tags later, and letting the target application do the things it does best.

Since the fall of 2005, I've been working as a "product support manager" which is similar to product management, but focuses specifically on the commercialization of a product from a support perspective. It's concerned with questions like:
How can you test to ensure the product is ready for release?
How will customers learn to use the product?
What will they do if they can't?
Product managers are adept at understanding the market and building tools to meet the need. Typically they are not expert in areas such as managing translations, documentation, or training. (Want to make a product manager wince: mention translations.)
Usually only larger companies treat this as a dedicated role, but the function happens regardless organization size.