When we make a great suggestion in a column and it is ignored, that makes us grumble and complain.
There are other less important gripes for this year's Festivus. Does anyone remember the annual summertime competition in which local newspapers and Kodak teamed up to find the best examples of amateur photography? Where did that go? Why doesn't the LIFE website (which has a rock solid branding identity in the photo community) expand and publish readers' digital photos daily? Wouldn't they get a massive response to an offer to give Flickr some competition? If they added a small cash stipend for a "best of the day" image, wouldn't their site get more daily hits than the Drudge Report?
Is LIFE conceding that the BBC and Der Spiegel have gained the initiative and made it impossible for LIFE to do on the Internets what it did in the realm of magazine publishing in the late Thirties and in the pre-TV Forties? Come on, LIFE, if the BBC and Der Spiegel can post readers' pictures online, so can you! Great amateur photos were part of you winning formula in the past. It will work, again.
One of the delights of bookstore browsing is the opportunity for a serendipity find of some new book that the customer didn't know existed. As we recall, many years ago, the New York Times used to publish a list of the books being published on the same day that the issue was printed. Back in the Paleozoic period of Internets development, we suggested that Amazon should hire a reporter who could produce a daily blog about new books to provide an opportunity to increase their business with some impulse buying. We still think that's a good idea.
There may not be a huge target audience for a book on how to build chicken coops, but isn't it logical to think that a few extra units might (we are not saying "will") be sold if Amazon's hypothetical book blog plugged such an actual example of bookistry? (It is now.) Wouldn't that help build their traffic by luring "browsers" to their site?
Until earlier this week, this columnist had never seen the word "Chindogu," which is "the art of the useless idea." When we chanced across the opportunity to buy "101 un-useless Japanese Inventions" by Kenji Kawakami (translated by and additional text by Dan Papia Edited by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall) from W. W. Norton & Co., we suddenly became a Chindogu fan and bought the book.
In the book, we learned in the Ten Tenets of Chindogu that it must be a real thing and not a nonsensical concept such as a wish to become an Ethic$ Advi$$$or for a Republican Politician.
Speaking of shameless huckstering of products by the media, will the word "promobabble" (which was coined by the World's Laziest Journalist) ever gain traction and become a contender for the annual "new word" competition? In California, where everyone over the age of seven is an amateur psychologist and has distain for the word "psychobabble," indicating an effort to provide friends and relatives with insights and encouragement, knows that there should be a word to designate the endless efforts of TV talk shows to help a guest sell a new product (usually a move, record, or, in rare cases, book). Hence the word "promobabble" was invented.
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