Monday, May 01, 2006

Paperback colours

Continuing to enjoy the luxury of a bank-holiday Monday in the UK, and a bit of "through the day" posting, here is a post on Paperback Writer that is perfect for Jenny (my daughter that is, not Jenny D, though I don't know whether or not Jenny D is colour-centric). The posting is a list of ten links to sites about various aspects of colour. Paperback Writer has found most of these links via The Generator Blog , so I went over to have a look at that, and find that it is "not about those machines used to change mechanical energy into electrical energy. It's about software that creates software. Software to play around and have fun with." (Malcolm will be pleased that he's still in a job, then -- which is to find out how muscle crossbridges convert chemical into mechanical energy.) The Generator Blog looks fabulous -- full of lovely widgets, logos and gadgets that you can use to pretty up your site -- random cat-name generator, famous logo generator, flip-flop squirrel generator -- you get it. I now realise where quite a few of the cute pictures and cartoons I've seen come from! A useful post on Paperback Writer that has nothing to do with generating blog titles or suchlike is "Know thy industry", which dissects out the six "major publishers" for all those of us who might avail ourselves of their services one of these days. PBW defines "major publishers" as "who does the most business and can potentially pay me the most money for what I write." So far as I am aware from my own knowledge acquired from who knows where over the years, PBW is spot on with the first three in the list: Bertelsmann, CBS Corp. and Holtzbrinck (nowadays my own employer since its purchase of Macmillan just over 5 years ago). Next are Lagadere, Pearson, News Corp. (Rupert Murdoch). PBW provides useful links to these publishers' websites and lists a few of their better known imprints.