Bookmark now

Kevin Smokler is a writer with an interesting, if slightly depressing, c.v. He is, it seems, the power behind Central Booking; but more to the point he is a blogger and the editor of a new collection of essays entitled Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times. (Watch out for the dreaded Flash on Smokler's sites, by the way. Unless you have the latest version it may gum up your works.)

I haven't read Bookmark Now yet, but it looks as if I probably ought to. In the meantime you can read a useful review of it.

Like many a web-savvy author these days, Kevin undertook a Virtual Book Tour in the week before his book came out. This is a phenomenon which would repay study.

For my own part I took a look at some of the appearances that Kevin made on other blogs and found a particularly useful essay of his on M.J. Rose's Buzz, Balls & Hype.

This essay includes the first description of RSS which has ever made any sense to me, and also led me to PubSub, which looks as if it might be worth using. You can, apparently, use PuSub to obtain notification of any time anyone in the entire universe uses a phrase online. So if, for instance, you have a book out called "Bookmark Now" you can make sure that whenever anyone mentions the book (as in this post, for instance), you get to know about it. Neat. If it works.