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Stephen Fry in the British Library Basements

Stephen Fry in the British Library basements

After my recent blog post about the rather exclusive location deep below the reading rooms of the British Library, I was surprised to discover this week that Stephen Fry was there before me. He was there as part of a fascinating documentary in which he helps to build a copy of Gutenberg’s (and the world’s) first ever printing press. You can still catch this fascinating program via the wonderful BBC iPlayer service.

Stephen Fry and a John Bull Printing Outfit

I love the way he demonstrates the principles of typeset printing using an old John Bull Printing Outfit whilst sitting in the British Library Café. I have fond memories of that game from my early youth.

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Alex Bellinger interviews me for SmallBizPod

SmallBizPodAs I mentioned in my previous blog post on our first Facebook event at the Business & IP Centre, Alex Bellinger the founder of SmallBizPod was there with his microphone. His podcast based on interviews at this event were delayed a little by Alastair Darling and his 2008 Budget, but have now gone up on the site here.

Alex BellingerAlthough I felt I rambled on a bit, Alex seems to have kept most of the interview in the final edit. It is a mixture of chat about the Business & IP Centre and the role of Facebook and blogs to promote it to a new audience.

The show also included a cross section of interviews with some of the 50 or so members of our Facebook group who showed up on the evening. Talking of which, I see our membership has now grown to nearly 1,400 members.

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Promoting new books with video

It would seem that for some publishers the future of book promotion lies in video.

Steffi McBrideSo much for the film or TV series of the book, how about the dramatised promotional video of the book that has yet to be printed.

You can judge for youself by ‘viewing’ the forthcoming title from Blake Publishing. The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride is the memoir of a fictional young soap star who becomes a national icon to be published in September 2008.

“All Steffi’s dreams come true when she lands a starring part in the country’s biggest soap opera, has a number one Christmas single and wins a Bafta. The whole country falls in love with her, including the pop star she had a crush on all through her teenage years. But someone out there knows a secret about Steffi’s past and heartless media revelations blow apart everything she ever believed to be true about her family and about herself.”

It’s not quite my cup of tea, but I’m sure they have done their market research.

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The British Library Basements

Easter is the busiest time of the year at the British Library (so be warned if you are expecting a quiet space to do your research). In order to help cope with the volume of requests for books from our capacious basements in St Pancras, staff volunteers are requested.

As a member of staff who rarely visits the basements this is an opportunity not to be missed. After all, the basements are the very foundation of the library, from both a physical and information perspective. The four double height basements containing the bulk of the library’s 15 million books stretch down to 75ft or 23m below ground level. The construction of these required digging the deepest hole ever seen in London. I could hear the nearby sounds of trains on the Northern and Victoria Lines when I was in basement 3.

I spent a fascinating couple of hours re-shelving books in the humanities modern section. However, my trolley contained a random selection of topics giving a revealing glimpse into the subjects being researched above ground, as well as the incredible breadth of knowledge stored below ground.

automatic_crate_conveyor_systemOne fact that often surprises visitors to the basements is that the books are not stored according to any classification system. Although the British Library has adopted the Dewey system in the Reading Rooms, this would not work in the basements. The explanation is simple enough – the sheer volume of new books (6 miles or 13 kilometres) each year means that they have to be added onto the end of the previous set in acquisition order. Any other would require constant shifting of the book stock to make room.

So, for instance if they were in alphabetical order by Title, the Z’s would slot nicely in at the end of the sequence but any new A’s would require moving the whole lot. This results in some vary odd pairings of books on the shelves. I re-shelved a book on Islamic terrorism literally cheek by jowl with a volume on right-wing Jewish politics.

The photos above come from a website Subterranea Britannica which has a detailed article on a visit to the basements.

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Nice Girls and Quechup + clarification from a Director

(Since I wrote this original post I received a comment below from Glen Finch a Director of Quechup clarifying my problems).

As someone who monitors Web 2.0 developments I was aware of Quechup and their controversial email spamming techniques.

However as they had claimed to have turned over a new leaf I was somewhat surprised to receive an email from Nicegirl, who indeed did look like a ‘nice girl’ with her adorable puppy.

Nicegirl

Intrigued, I registered with Quechup and was somewhat disappointed to be greeted with this page.

Blank screen

Yet another example of empty promises of Web 2.0?

I should say that I was somewhat suspicious of Nicegirl’s user name. As I would be receiving an email from father@christmas.com.

A new comment from “Glen Finch” was received on the post “Nice Girls and Quechup” of the weblog “In through the outfield”.

Comment from Glen Finch:
As the first comment rightly states you were already a member of Quechup, registered with the username ‘infield’. You then registered (a second new user) and are suprised that you did not have a message in the inbox. Why would you? – this was a new user you had just created, if there had been an email already there from a member this surely would have been cause to raise suspicions, but not the opposite. Let me clarify a few points for you, I do so as a director of Quechup and as spokesman for the company. 1. To receive notifications from Quechup you have to be registered as a user, this is only done by people completing our registration form. We have never purchased emails, shared emails or acquired emails from anyone, period. Moreover our policy states that we will not sell or share members emails or other details and we never have. This means at some stage you or someone that knows your email address registered for you at Quechup. We track and store registration and login details so we can provide the date, time, IP address and country of location where the registration took place. 2. Regarding our address book checker. Yes we received several complaints about the way this worked in September 2007. How it worked was printed directly on the page above the feature (which was optional), the checker has worked this way for nearly 2 years without such complaints. However, given the amount of complaints we realized that address book checkers were much more common on such sites and that users were not reading how they worked before using them and that the manner in which Quechup’s worked was not what had become the perceived norm. We recoded it and changed the way the feature worked within 4 working days. As testiment to Quechup’s policy against spam we have always had the following policies in place: A member cannot send an invite to an email address more than once to stop pestering type spam. Quechup does not send ‘reminder’ emails for invites (unlike other sites such as linkedin) Members can only send messages to 1 member at a time to stop the service being used for bulk mailing. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Quechup is certified by SenderScore the industries leading email ‘SafeList’ accreditation program. Companies such as Windows Live/Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail and SpamAssasin use and rely on SenderScore for providing a SafeList of email senders. In total over 67% of consumer mail boxes in the world depend on SenderScore as to wether email is safe or spam. Maintaining this accreditation means adhering to strict anti spam policies and meeting criteria from Windows Live, Yahoo!, SpamAssasin and other sources on a daily basis.

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Web 2.0 explained in Plain ‘English’

Explaining different aspects of Web 2.0 presents quite a challenge, so it is great that Sachi and Lee LeFever have created a set of videos to do the job for us.

They aim to make topics such as Twitter and RSS accessible to their ‘moms’, which is good news for the rest of us. As they say in their About Us section of their website: “We are two passionate people and Common Craft is our company. Our product is explanation.”

Here is their ‘Wikis in Plain English‘ to give you a flavour.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dnL00TdmLY&feature=user]

P.S. The reason for the quotes in the title is of course because the Plain English is in fact Plain American via Seattle, Washington State, U.S.A.

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Mothers of Invention III

Last Monday evening saw the latest in our series of appropriately named Inspiring Entrepreneurs events. We heard five amazing stories and a discussion moderated by BBC news presenter Mishal Husain.

Mothers of Invention III kicked of with Jessica Huie, who at 17 years old discovered she was pregnant. Her father not happy, telling her that “you will only ever be a statistic”. This made a deep impression on Jessica and her subsequent successes are her way of showing him he was wrong.

She combined motherhood, college, work experience and a weekend job at a shoe shop, as well as working initially for free, at Pride magazine, local radio and publicist Max Clifford.

While searching for a card for daughter, she realised that there was nothing available with images of black or Asian people. In traditional entrepreneur style, rather than simply complaining, she started a company, and now her Colorblind Cards are spreading rapidly across the UK and soon to appear in the United States.

Sian Sutherland told her story of how she went from promoting other companies skincare products to developing her own Mama Mio range. Her main piece of advice was to ensure you have a business plan as it helps to focus on what makes your business different from your competitors.

Lorraine Heggessey, former controller of BBC1 and now CEO of Talkback Thames, surprised us when she exclaimed that in business, “everyone is bluffing.” And that historically men have been better at this then women.

Debbie Reynolds, founder of the School for Sign Language was for me the most engaging speaker with an amazingly frank honesty about her lack of business knowledge prior to starting out. However with a grant of just £1,600 she has gone on to reach a turnover of £170,000, employ 28 deaf and hearing workers and volunteers’, and won several awards in just a couple of years.

Sam Roddick, the daughter of Body Shop founder and supporter of the Business & IP Centre, Dame Anita Roddick, maintained the family tradition of being thought provoking, provocative and shocking. Describing herself as an activist, she aims to change peoples view on sexuality and eroticism.

Her erotic emporium, Coco de Mer sells sex products which are beautifully designed, luxurious and expensive. A human-hair whip is £188, bondage knickers are £200 a pair, and a Shiri Zinn Crystal Dildo, with Swarovski crystals is £1,100, including stand.

She described her route to commercial success as initially a “fuck-up”, but the important point was that she learnt from these early mistakes. In particular stocking around 1,000 items, most of which were either one-off creations or short run products from creatives.

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Ways to prevent ‘Death by PowerPoint’

I have had a great interest in presentations, the good, the bad and the ugly, for many years now.

This is partly a result of having to overcome a phobia of public speaking. I know you are going to say that no one enjoys standing in front of an audience. And that many people have trouble sleeping the night before, and some are even physically sick before going on stage. However my fear of presenting used to take the form of insomnia and panic attacks beginning up to four months before, and building up as the big day approached.

Also, fairly early in my career, my job including producing and presentations for senior managers within my company. I remember spending much time reducing overly numerous and wordy sets of slides down to something digestible and attractive, only have the managers revert to their original slides minutes before the presentation. One classic example involved our Economist who was asked to present on the tricky topic of Stock Futures and Options to our trustees. As I watched him lose his audience due to his ‘killer’ slides I wanted to to ask him if he had ever wondered why he was being asked to present on this topic for the third year in a row to the same audience.

I also remember attending a conference in which the speaker tried, and failed, to get through 120 detailed slides in 45 minutes. It was an incredibly stressful experience as an observer, and goodness knows what it was like for the presenter.

Yesterday I attended a one day training course aimed at improving the presentation skills of the Business & IP Centre team, and wanted to pass on a few key learnings from the day:

1. Engage your audience – and in order to do so you need to understand who they are, what they want and what you want to communicate to them. Don’t just churn out the same presentation each time. Tailor it to each audience.

2. Ditch the; tell ’em what you’re going to say – tell ’em – tell ’em what you said, approach. Instead jump straight in with some kind, such as a powerful story, example or anecdote in order to ‘hook’ your audience from the start.

3. Keep you audience’s attention throughout using: the power of the pause (the longer the Death by PowerPointbetter), questions (rhetorical or actual), engaging examples or stories.

4. Get rid of all of your PowerPoint slides that don’t explain or illustrate a point. How many times have you seen presenters simply reading their bullet points out?

For more details on this point have a look at this presentation on SlideShare.net

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Are you Desperately Seeking Finance?

A recurring theme when talking to early stage entrepreneurs is where are they going to get finance from.

In order to help address this problem we are devoting our next Inspiring Entrepreneurs event to this topic.

If you’re running, or about to launch, your own business, the we are offering a unique opportunity to pitch your idea to a panel of financial experts, including former “Dragon” Doug Richard.

Desperately Seeking Finance is a panel debate and discussion dedicated to the secrets of raising finance. As part of the evening, three entrepreneurs will present their business idea.

To qualify please send a 200 word summary of your business idea, including key financial projections, to bipcworkshops@bl.uk.

The deadline for submitting your plans is 25 March 2008, and those selected will be contacted the following week and asked to prepare a two minute presentation for the evening of 22 April.

Desperately Seeking Finance 2, Tuesday 22 April 2008, 18.15 – 21.00