People
I like reading autobiographies to understand what makes people tick and how they meet their aims. (Incidentally I have ‘Drive’ on my reading pile at home at the moment). The Guardian website has a great article on the daily routines of history’s most creative minds. It’s very interesting, and in itself it’s a summary of the book Daily Rituals, by Mason Currey.
SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is a skill that everyone in Digital Media should understand. I try to brush up on my SEO skills every couple of years, so I’m halfway through SEO: An Hour a Day. I’ve read a few SEO articles and wanted a book which I could concentrate on without distractions. It’s comprehensive and approaches SEO correctly – i.e. from a business goal point of view and not ‘I just want to appear higher in Google results’.
One of the best SEO articles I’ve read online was from Jeff Bullas. It only takes a few minutes to read, and it’s very worthwhile.
The Tao of Twitter is the best resource I’ve read about how to use Twitter. It was easy to read in a couple of days. I then went back through the book with a highlighter pen over all the simple hints and tips. Thoroughly recommended.
Publishing
And finally, I read an academic white paper called “RIPTIDE: What Really Happened to the News Business”, subtitled “An oral history of the epic collision between journalism and digital technology, 1980 to the present”. It’s over 120 pages and has taken me a couple of months to read (I have too many distractions when reading a PDF).
If you have any interest in content publishing – digital or traditional, you’ll like this paper. Some of the biggest names on the Internet and business contributed to the white paper, include Sir Martin Sorrell, Eric Schmidt, Arianna Huffington, Tim Berners-Lee, Dick Costolo, and the list goes on. The paper was produced in September 2013, so it also covers Jeff Bezos purchasing The Washington Post.
A highly recommended read, full of nostalgia and incredible business deals.
Photo courtesy of World Economic Forum on Flickr