How to write an ebook

Seth Godin has put a Squidoo lens together on writing ebooks. It contains some excellent advice:

  • Write something worth reading!
  • Put it into Word or a similar word processor.
  • Change your page layout to wide.
  • Even better, change your page size to eight inches wide and six inches high.
  • Use a legible font for the body copy. Times is fine, but boring. Don’t use something fancy.
  • Use a headline font with bravado!
  • Now, if you have a Mac, just choose, “print to PDF”.
  • If you don’t have a Mac, go buy one and repeat the previous step, or, if you must, figure out how to do that step with a PC or a Commodore 64 or whatever it is you’re using.
  • Your eBook is now basic, but done.
  • If you open it in Adobe Acrobat (not the Reader, but the for sale version) you can add hyperlinks. Recommended.

How to write an ebook

Seth Godin has put a Squidoo lens together on writing ebooks. It contains some excellent advice:

  • Write something worth reading!
  • Put it into Word or a similar word processor.
  • Change your page layout to wide.
  • Even better, change your page size to eight inches wide and six inches high.
  • Use a legible font for the body copy. Times is fine, but boring. Don’t use something fancy.
  • Use a headline font with bravado!
  • Now, if you have a Mac, just choose, “print to PDF”.
  • If you don’t have a Mac, go buy one and repeat the previous step, or, if you must, figure out how to do that step with a PC or a Commodore 64 or whatever it is you’re using.
  • Your eBook is now basic, but done.
  • If you open it in Adobe Acrobat (not the Reader, but the for sale version) you can add hyperlinks. Recommended.

LGKnowledge

LGKnowledge

I launched the latest project under the LGNewMedia banner yesterday, a social bookmarking site for local government called LGKnowledge. It’s based on Pligg and works just fine – the only issue will be getting enough people using it to make it worthwhile. But I’m working on that.

Announcing LGKnowledge

Lgknowledge

I’m pretty excited about this. LGKnowledge is a new site I’ve developed to try and provide a solution to the problems that search engines produce, which I discussed in this post.

In a nutshell, that problem is that search engines – even targetted ones like LGSearch – don’t have any kind of quality control built in. It’s all done by algorithms and sheer computing grunt.

LGKnowledge aims to create a resource of web documents that have been individually selected by local government workers. That is, a link is only included if someone has previously found it useful. You can also vote on links, to ensure that the really good stuff always floats to the top.

Essentially, LGKnowledge is a bit like Digg, and to a lesser extent, del.icio.us. You can submit a link using either the site or a bookmark, add comments and tags to it, and it’s then displayed on the front page. Others can vote on it, and it will be found using the search too.

Metacalfe’s Law applies to LGKnowledge in a big way. This means that the usefulness of something increase with the number of users it has. The more people visit this site and add links, the more there will be to attract others, who then add their own value to it. So please spread the word about LGKnowledge!