Bookd is cookd

Bookd followers:

It was fun while it lasted, but bookd is cookd. Ha. I'll be winding things down over the next few days.

I'll be passing the bookd handle off to someone who's interested in doing something with it that's unrelated to book reviews.

I've learned a couple of things doing this. Most important, perhaps, are these two things: 1) there is a special place in hell for people on Twitter who use auto-reply DMs, and 2) GroupTweet is a really cool platform for communicating with groups of people who all trust each other. Using it to coordinate groups of folks who are strangers is a bit more difficult.

Thanks for following. Support publishing. Buy books.

Just So You Know

I stop following anyone who's got auto-DM set up.

Dealing with Spam

Howdy:

I'm trying to keep a few steps ahead of the spam that's appearing in the bookd feed.

Right now, the benefits of allowing users to directly contribute to bookd outweigh the spam issue; let's see if I can still say that in a week's time.

Some Administrative Notes

Hi All:

Thanks for following bookd. It's been a good first couple of days.

Just a few notes:

1. The biggest thorn so far is the automatic insertion of "via @yourhandle." Sorry, but I can't change that. If you submit a recommendation and it gets badly truncated, send me email. I'll delete it (sorry, I can't edit it) and you can re-submit a shorter version.

2. If you want to submit a recommendation to bookd, three basic things must happen: you need to follow bookd, bookd needs to follow you, and then you need to submit your recommendation via direct message, not via an @ message. I'll get an @ message, and that's an ok way to send me a brief public note if you need to, but submitting a recommendation via an @ message won't put it "onto" bookd.

3. *Anything* you send to bookd via a direct message will appear on bookd. Don't take it personally, but I have and will continue to delete "thanks for following me back" kinds of tweets that find their way onto bookd. I want to keep bookd as clean as possible. I've not yet decided if I'm going to delete "yeah, me too!" tweets.

4. The best way to get in touch with questions, suggestions, etc is via email: bookdblog@yahoo.com. Hey, Twitter can't do everything :-)



Again, thanks. Now make someone want to buy a book!

welcome to bookd

Welcome to bookd, a social media experiment.

bookd uses Group Tweet, and here's how it works:

You follow bookd on Twitter, and bookd will follow you back.

If all you want to do is read book recommendations, you're done. Any review that appears on bookd will appear in your twitter stream, because you're following bookd. The cool(?) thing is that what you'll be reading are recommendations from a whole bunch of people, not just me.

Want to recommend something? It's easy. Write a recommendation for a book using 140 characters or fewer, and send it as a direct message to bookd. Include a link if you want, but doing so will cut into the number of characters you can use to write your recommendation.

Your review will appear at twitter.com/bookd in this form:

via @yourtwitterhandle: your review

So, for example:

via @beezy: Serena is brutal, apocalytic and gripping. Flannery O'Connor plus James Dickey equals Ron Rash

First known issue:

You don't have a full 140 characters for your recommendation. "via @bdr" (for example) is automatically inserted before your tweet. This is good -- it identifies a tweet as yours, and other readers can jump out to your twitter feed -- but it *does* take eat up some characters. So aiming for 130 characters is probably a good idea.