Why I love writing and technology…

May 2, 2012 By

…because done well, both can inspire people to act.

Whether it’s laughter or tears, love or hate, making a purchase or revolting against a government – both can provide amazing tools to inspire and encourage.

It’s how I ended up combining writing and marketing.

And it’s why I don’t dream about one day turning this business into an ‘SEO’ agency. Or a ‘social media’ agency.

I dream growing this business into something larger which is known for being able to enable change and action both internally and externally.

And it’s why I also think a lot about how that looks in terms of structure and recruitment.

And both of those issues are likely to become increasingly important this year, so if that’s the sort of thing you might be interested in, please do get in touch. Location won’t be important, but the right ideas will…

Filed Under: Marketing, TheWayoftheWeb Tagged With: , , , , ,

As one widget goes, another appears

November 24, 2011 By

The next time you visit TheWayoftheWeb, you may notice a slight change to the site. Following the decision by Google to shutter Google Friend Connect, that widget will have disappeared, along with the 82 lovely people who chose to support the site via that method.

GoogleFriendConnectonTheWayoftheWeb

Thankyou for your support Friend Connect people!

Obviously since the launch of Google+, and the focus that it now has within the company, it was fairly obvious that Friend Connect would no longer be supported (Incidentally, you have the choice of following me on Google+, or TheWayoftheWeb Google+ page). And I’ve already included the Google+ icon in the sidebar to hopefully allow the site to benefit from direct search and anything else Google decides to roll out.

The loss of Friend Connect doesn’t bug me as it did when Google killed the useful and effective social features of Google Reader – Friend Connect hasn’t really ever done very much since it launched in 2008. But it’s reinforced my perception of how Google views social connections, and how that differs from Facebook and Twitter. There doesn’t appear to be any information on how I could transfer or suggest to Friend Connect followers that they should migrate to Google+, or a confirmed date for when Friend Connect ends. And it feels as if Google still sees connections as just relationships between organised information nodes which will reform as needed.

Whereas I can’t imagine Facebook or Twitter would necessarily remove a social connection features without providing some way to switch – for instance, the move to allow subscriptions to the profile of an individual didn’t mean that they just deleted any Facebook page for an individual overnight. As much as you can deride Facebook for obscuring and messing with privacy, they do seem to understand that people take time to move, and some people will intend to do something and forget for a few days, or not get around to it. Whereas Google don’t seem fussed that I have no way to contact my former followers or friend connections should I not immediately figure out how to get them to move across. Or that I have no way of knowing whether some of them will want to follow everything I post on Google+, or would want a filtered circle of some kind?

 So what’s being added to the sidebar?

Instead of Friend Connect, or reducing the sidebar to allow my site to load slightly more quickly, I’m conforming to blogging stereotypes and immediately filling the space with something else. But it’s something a little different, as I’ve finally got around to signing up for Flattr. It’s been around for some time as a micropayment system for bloggers and other projects, which allows you to ‘flattr’ a site with a small donation if you like what people do.

I don’t imagine most of you will donate, and that’s fine, but the option is there if you feel so inclined. And I’m interested to see what happens with it, as a potential way of rewarding content creation which has existed for a while but so far hasn’t necessarily grabbed mainstream traction in the same way as something like Kickstarter has done.

I’m also installing it in support of their plan to make November 29th, ‘Pay a Blogger Day‘. It’s slightly self-promotional, but also hopefully helps to raise the question of how bloggers and other content providers support themselves in the minds of more readers and subscribers.

 Cash and blogging:

Definitely worthy of a follow-up post, but put simply, the mainstream media model of advertising-supported publishing doesn’t work for the majority of people to make a living by blogging. The amount of inventory available and the resulting low advertising rates requires hundreds of thousands or millions of readers to be your sole source of income (Although as you rise through the stages, you will probably find the available networks open up a bit and you do get a higher ad rate as a result).

Most bloggers also attempt to make money via affiliate links, but again, you need a decent amount of traffic, and you also need a decent conversion rate to make these worthwhile. And although that works in some areas, and with writers who are also natural salespeople, it isn’t going to work for everyone.

So then you come to using content as a driver for an actual business – selling information products, consultancy or whatever else you might think of. In my case, the money I make from this blog is tiny, but it’s vitally important in helping me secure consultancy and freelance work in content and digital marketing.

But again, not everyone wants to be a consultant or spend their time trying to hawk their latest eBook – it works for a certain number of bloggers, fails for a certain number, and some don’t want to go down that road.

So Flattr is the most sustained attempt at providing an alternative. A previous attempt was made by Scratchback, which closed a while ago, and which is actually deleting user accounts this month, in a strange coincidence.

So please do support the site via its new home on Google+ (Or the old ones on Twitter and Facebook), and do think about whether you might want to reward your favourite bloggers (I don’t necessarily have to be one of them!) in a more direct way via something like Flattr.

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The content war is only just beginning

November 8, 2011 By

The war is just beginning for writers, and it may seem strange given that Demand Media is starting to bounce back from an October share slump, but it isn’t going to be fought between quality writers and content farms.

Despite the frantic changes Google has been making to the search algorithm following a perceived drop in quality as churned-up content fills search results, it isn’t about the damaging effect of outsourcing assignments for the lowest possible cost or the economic effects of global competition.

This time it’s man vs machine, and the machine is getting a lot better.

 

Content War: Man vs Machine:

You may be dismissing the idea of a machine creating content based on the previous experience of spambots, as they fill comment sections the world over with ‘Blog very good. Me Like’, to build links to a website. Mostly this are easily filtered by a combination of spam filtering software and especially a final layer of human approval. What might possible sneak past a computer tends to fairly obvious to a human, particularly if it involves a variation of the ‘cheapexactnameofaproductiamselling.com’ linked in various ways.

But to adapt a quote by Cory Doctorow on copying, machine-created content will never be worse, or more expensive to produce, than it is today. It will only get better, cheaper and more accessible to both legitimate publishers attempting to make their workflow more efficient, and to spammers and content farms who can finally do away completely with the human element.

War is hell (on earth).

Want proof? Check out the work of Automated Insights, as detailed in this recent post by founder Robbie Allen. With a team of 12, they’ve produced over 100,000 sports stories in 9 months, having launched 345 websites which are all automated, and cover every division 1 NCAA basketball team.

Still dismissing the potential? Try reading the following excerpt from the latest game report on one of the sites, CarolinaUpdate.com:

The Tar Heels got to the NCAA Tournament as an at-large team after falling to Duke, 75-58, in the ACC tournament. In making the Elite Eight, North Carolina defeated 15th-seeded Long Island, 102-87 in the second round, seventh-seeded Washington, 86-83 in the third round, and then 11th-seeded Marquette, 81-63 in the Sweet Sixteen.

North Carolina was led by Tyler Zeller, who had 21 points on 75% shooting. The Tar Heels also got 18 points from Harrison Barnes, 11 from Dexter Strickland, and seven from Kendall Marshall.

Kentucky was on fire from beyond the arc, scoring 36 points in three-pointers to get an edge.

Now you see what I mean?

 

Will the future be written by machines?

When Allen ends his post by explaining how machines are a benefit to human journalists, there’s certainly some truth in it, although I suspect he’s also doing his job in placating the more nervous amongst the publishing professions. Whilst he’s keen to state that the current technology is suited to purely quantitative and data-driven work, and that journalists should be liberated to be able to focus on qualitative commentary, I suspect although he’s a very accomplished programmer, he might be limited in experiencing what happens for many publications around the globe.

As he himself says, ‘In the near term, the writers at O’Reilly and elsewhere have nothing to worry about. But I wouldn’t count out automation in the long term.’ The technology is at an early stage, and will only get better. After all, if 1000 monkeys could knock out a Shakespeare, we now have that processing power. And every year those processing primates will become cheaper and better, until instead of 1000 monkeys for one Shakespearian work, we could be seeing a sonnet per monkey.

 

What’s the future for human content?

So what happens next for humans who want to create written work beyond the status updates to which many of us might be relegated?

Well, in the short-term, we can choose to focus on quality. That’s certainly why I’m interested in projects like The Verge, and the new site and project from Milo Yiannopoulos whose views I may well have disagreed with on a regular basis, but whose aspiration to build a European quality technology site I can certainly identify closely with. Although we do have it a lot better with Techcrunch EU than the main ex-Arrington site who have recently managed to publish some unintelligible guest posts and at least a couple of stories which I knew to be factually inaccurate, but have never been corrected.

Writing!

Longer term? Whilst we can believe the noble ideal that machines will always be best with a human working alongside them, my educated guess is that spammers will be first to unleash better content algorithms into the wild on their own, particularly given the revenues they can currently get. The sheer amount of spam content means the tiniest percentage of respondents to Nigerian lotteries generates huge profits, and increasing that with better content in a no-brainer.

And anything suitable for automation – which is a lot – will be picked up by newsrooms the world over as managers and publishers will optimise over the heads of any reluctant Editors. That’s assuming enough Editors actually care about their digital product to raise a fuss when their favoured print is still in a slow death spiral.

And then that boundary will shift. And shift again, and slowly the room of writers becomes a room of servers with a couple of database admins, and one or two sub-editors just checking through a cursory selection of articles.

The solution has to be based around increasing the levels of humanity in everything we write, and everything we do online. Not only to build a bridge with anyone who reads our work, but also to ensure Google, Bing and future search engines are distinguishing what we do. Because as the level of automated content rises and becomes increasingly abused, the search engines will have to respond, and we could see search and creation algorithms cancelling each other out, leaving those authors and writers who have gone through the required steps to verify their organic-based life form will be advantaged.

What that urgently means is three things:

1. If you want to be a writer, you need to be using social media and tools like Google’s Author Markup today. Now. Because the sooner you can ensure you’re human, and the longer that exists, the better off you’ll be.

2. If you’re ever planning to launch your own website or brand, do it now. Don’t expect to learn the ropes in a staff job for a few years and then head out on your own – although that may have been a good plan, if this all comes to pass, you’ll need to be in an established position to be able to get your voice heard if you have a problem with Google’s Author markup, for example. And the way to get that help is to be reaching a million uniques per month by then, which means starting now.
If you wait a couple of years before deciding you’d like to create the ultimate blog/site on a subject, you’ll find that a few thousand readers per month could leave you at the end of one of the longest queues around if you ever need help.

3. Your personal writing style is going to be more important than ever. So a blog can be an invaluable daily tool for honing that, rather than spending your time re-writing press releases in a bland house style to churn out content as if it was 2008 all over again.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Great journalism – impartial but not neutral?

July 27, 2011 By

It’s sad in some ways that a lot of great writing and journalism has been inspired by tragedy and loss, but at the same time, it often allows some good to come out of the events by providing insight and inspiration. Three articles I’ve read recently reinforced that, along with also highlighting an interesting point from a book I’m currently reading on media ethics which states that journalism should be impartial but not neutral.

The mainstream media has been full of coverage of both the tragic events in Oslo, and the death of singer Amy Winehouse at the age of 27, with the usual mix of straight news reports, opinion, and a particularly horrific example of someone trying to cash in on search traffic on the Huffington Post. I’m not going to dignify it with a link, but using the example of Amy Winehouse to supposedly illustrate lessons for small business owners is pretty bad, compounded by the fact it’s not a great article, and the author has claimed she wasn’t aware of the term ‘linkbait’ despite running a marketing and PR company for about 9 years.

Out of all of the mainstream media coverage regarding Amy Winehouse, it’s telling that the best article has been written by comedian and actor Russell Brand, who covered both his personal relationship with the singer, but also the treament of addiction and addicts by society. Published on The Guardian website, it’s received a lot of respect for the way he tackled the subject.

At the same time, I caught up on two posts by Christian Payne – sadly within the last month, two pilots he’d flown with, interviewed and got to know have both died. One heroically saved the life of his passengers, whilst the other worked for the Kenyan Wildlife Service to help prevent animal poaching amongst other duties. Christian’s articles are even more touching due to the fact that he’s also an accomplished photographer and interviewer, and his photos, videos and audio interviews with each pilot helps us to know them posthumously.

Journalism: Impartial not Neutral

Both authors knew the subjects of their articles to some extent, and that personal insight and knowledge of the subject (and in Brands case, his own experience with addition), gives an additional impact to stories which elsewhere would be a straight news report. I’ve also been involved with reporting on the deaths of people I knew via my work, including former colleagues, and to be completely neutral about it would be impossible.

But all three articles, and hopefully my own, do provide impartiality – Christian is not writing his posts for a news organisation, but for his personal blog, and doesn’t have the editorial restrictions he might have done for a media organisation, but as an experienced and talented media creator, he’s done a great job of sharing his reaction, the background of the people involved, and also leaves us feeling sad about the loss of the two men involved, but inspired by what they had achieved.

Neutrality is defined as refusing to take sides or make a judgement. Impartiality is defined as making decisions based on objective criteria rather than bias or prejudice. We can say that the loss of those in Oslo, Amy Winehouse and the two pilots is tragic for all of us for a number of reasons, and be thankful that there are those who can provide the context and insight into the reasons why.

On one hand I do worry that resource and time-stripped media outlets chasing page views via attention-grabbing breaking news and linkbait headlines mean that these types of article will be increasingly harder to find. On the other, I’m thankful that the availability and access to self-publishing, combined with the recommendation of social networks, mean that they’ve never been more accessible to us all online. The rise of content farms and the mishandling of increased knowledge of analytics, SEO and digital marketing means that far too many writers and journalists are pursuing the wrong things, and perhaps we should all try and do something as engaged readers to encourage others to be more active in highlighting and sharing writing which is really giving us something valuable, rather than simply regurgitating links almost mindlessly to increase our own audience on social networks?

 

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The importance of beating your own drum…

April 20, 2011 By

There are certain people I follow on social networks who tend to share things outside of the normal technology, social media, marketing echo chamber, and one of them is Stuart Witts, who’s as likely distribute bizarre Lego creations as digital insight. He recently shared the following video, which sparked some thoughts…

Firstly, that video has been watched almost 10 million times since June 2010 as I write this. 32,000+ people have left comments and 64,000+ people have liked it – and it’s been featured on sites such as the blog of Swedish daily newspaper Aftonbladet.

So whether or not you think the drummer is talented, funny, or making a fool of himself, it’s proved popular. And you’ll certainly remember him far more than the rest of the band…

Right about now, I’m guessing a fair number of you are thinking about this from a marketing or advertising perspective and wondering ‘How could we do something like that and go viral?’

That’s not the point!!!

Don’t get inspired by that video.

The inspiration comes from the approach of the drummer. He probably didn’t start playing drums with the dream of wearing a gold suit jacket and playing in a cover band. It’s also pretty unlikely that anyone taught him to drum the way he does in the video. And most importantly, he’s not doing it at the expense of the song – he’s hitting all the right beats, and providing the right backing for what is meant to be the chance for the guitarist to shine.

But he’s doing it in his own way, and that’s what makes him worthy of conversation and sharing.

Now picture your industry, content, and marketing:

If those band members were representating your business competitors and their marketing strategies, one brand may have secured the traditionally starring role of the singer/guitarist.

And the rest are probably much like the bass player in the video. Doing the basics, fitting into the perceived look and feel of their industry and peers. Occasionally giving a little flourish, but generally plodding along.

Neither is particular memorable.

But certain brands are able to use their passion, belief and drive to stand out far more than anyone thought possible by doing things in their own way. And that’s what makes a brand memorable, allows people to share it without shame, and encourages people to interact and purchase from it.

But what if they don’t like us?

Now, you may think that the drummer looks like an idiot, and I’m mad to suggest your brand should be twirling drumsticks when it could be providing a nice safe steady beat. Like any £100 drum machine could do.

But that assumes that bland tolerability drives purchases and sharability more than actively loving or hating something.

Far better to have a growing army of people who love what you do, and will passionately hoover up everything you can offer.

Being actively disliked by a large number of people hasn’t stopped the Daily Mail from being the second most popular newspaper website in the world, as sad as that makes me. And it’s built a large number of people who not only like what it does, but pay money to it for that product.

Being actively disliked by some people means that they might be driven enough to explain why they don’t like you, which lets you decide whether to do something about it. And just by responding to them, you can increase your business.

If you don’t run the risk of some people disliking what you’re doing, you’ll never run the risk of being able to be loved by people who are willing to part with their scarce attention and money.

Here’s to the mad drummers.

 

Filed Under: Marketing, Social Media Marketing Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

I’m still here…

April 19, 2011 By

It may not seem like it, but I’m still here! And I’m remembering why quick informal ‘Tumblelog’ style updates can be so useful when there’s not enough time for the epic style which suits WordPress better, because at the moment there are a number of plates spinning, and not a lot of time to write my own stuff.

Just some of the multiple dinner sets currently rotating at high rpm include:

  • 1 big client contract coming to an end – already had one team member say I’ve made their job much easier, which is nice.
  • 2 really interesting proposals for new business, including one which is right up my alley.
  • 2 Jodanma website builds either reaching client sign-off or completion. Which means we might be able to put some awesome plans into practice for the actual Jodanma site at last.
  • A couple of new writing assignments for clients.
  • A decent output on OnlineRaceDriver and FPSPrestige, plus the launch of a third niche gaming site with MMO News now up and running (Anyone who fancies volunteering any articles etc, PR people looking to send out info/review copies of games, or advertisers, please do get in touch!)
  • Some business admin stuff.
  • Talking to a number of very skilled people about bolstering both the marketing and design/development resources I can offer.
  • And the joy of having major car maintenance issues, and all the other accumulated stuff that goes on when I’m not glued to a laptop…

Plus there’s numerous other existing leads and clients, videogames to test and review, WordPress continuing to deliver interesting new bugs and problems, and a final potential longterm project to flesh out in the next couple of weeks. But it does mean that I’ve got a stockpile of things to write about when I get the chance to sit down and blog again, so it’s almost like a holiday in terms of recharging my creativity here. Except with less of a suntan.

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Bloggers suing the Huffington Post – the outcome for UGC?

April 14, 2011 By

You may have seen a few reports about the class-action suit brought against the Huffington Post after it was acquired by AOL for $315 million. It was filed by Jonathan Tasini, who calculated the content created by volunteers should be valued at a third of the sale value, $105 million. There’s been a fair bit of commentary on the case, which seems to hinge on a moral obligation rather than a legal one for the Huffington Post (here, here, and  here), as it concentrates on ‘Unjust Enrichment‘ , and it will probably hinge on whether the payment in exposure etc is a fair trade for the work involved in creating articles.

Personally I have no problem with sites soliciting, accepting and publishing content supplied for free by volunteers who know the terms of the deal upfront in a clear fashion (i.e. no hiding behind 20 pages of legalese that they no longer have rights to their work – spell it out and then link to the legalese terms!)

The argument that many paid writers make is that this devalues their profession, which is a disruption being felt across various specialisms, whether it’s creative, technical or manufacturers competing in a global market. And as someone who writes for at least part of his living, I agree that the rates for writing have dropped, but it’s down to the writer to decide what will benefit them best, and how to differentiate themselves and maximise what they can earn.

But what will the legal case do?

As someone without a legal education, but with an understanding of the legal departments of large media companies, I can’t imagine the legal case will result in any significant financial reward for Tasini.

But what probably will happen is that most publishers will revisit their terms and conditions for user-generated content and tighten them up even further in any possible way to preclude similar actions. So if you want to submit something for a major site, you’ll spend the first few hours electronically signing your rights away – and it might end up limiting any existing possibilities of rewarding UGC as that could end up muddying the waters between just and unjust enrichment. I suspect the legal view will be that to offer any amount of financial reward would be riskier than none at all.

It might also lead to complications for smaller sites – if they’re accepting content without the ability to offer large amounts of proven exposure, do they then end up falling foul of ‘unjust enrichment’? Do sites need to start publishing their monthly user figures to everything who might send in a guest post?

It seems to that rather than furthering the cause of quality writing (which is more affected by the likes of Google’s Panda search update than by hitting out at the HuffPo), this could just end up limiting the outlets which are interested in accepting user content, and that lack of competition makes it even less likely that rates would rise for those willing to pay.

So have you submitted content for free anywhere? And do you feel like you were rewarded with enough exposure/other benefits?

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How soon does blogging deliver results?

January 27, 2011 By

One of the first questions that gets asked when blogging is mentioned as a topic is how quickly it will be successful. And the honest answer is impossible to give without several factors which are completely individual to every business. Do you already have a media presence? Can you devote time and resource to creating great content? And most importantly, what consititutes success? Are you looking to drive awareness, engagement, interaction, sales, ad revenue?

But at the same time, it’s handy to have something to benchmark against, and most online comparisons are flakey at best when compared to actual analytics. So I thought I’d share some recent figures for one of my personal projects, OnlineRaceDriver, as it recently celebrated a first anniversary.

Time by M$$MO on Flickr
Time by M$$MO on Flickr (CC Licence)

To give some context, OnlineRaceDriver and its new sister site, FPSPrestige, are experiments in extremely niche targetted content, driven partly by a shared passion for videogames by everyone involved, and partly by my desire to be able to build a small media business which allows me to continually experiment and evolve all the digital content and marketing skills any business or client can benefit from. Both are done in the spare time available to me and the other contributors, and the only financial investment has been in paying for hosting and a custom blog design (Both use the now-replaced Metro theme from StudioPress) – they both use WordPress as a free CMS system and PHPBB3 as a free forum solution, with Google Analytics providing measurement above what is available straight away from WordPress.

So, after 12 months of spare time work, how has ORD done?

  • 215 Posts (The biggest sign of the time constraints – ideally it should be a lot more!)
  • 204 Comments (Just under one comment per post isn’t too bad..)
  • 46,831 Page Views (Could have been more with a little more focus on high traffic posts and promotion)
  • 30,705 Unique Visitors (Again, this is an area where we probably could have done a lot more with more time)
  • 1,100+ Youtube Views (This is all from press release videos, and is a somewhat painful process a lot of the time!)
  • 59 Facebook Fans (The biggest challenge here is that Facebook Notes is increasingly broken, requiring manual updates which sometimes get forgotten!)
  • Cited as a reference source on Wikipedia (One of the nicest recent developments has been that someone working on Wikipedia has started referencing some of our breaking news on the site)

In terms of monthly figures, in the first month of ORD we had:

  • 334 Visits
  • 713 Page Views
  • 205 Unique Visitors

And 12 months later, and with 5 more days to go in January, we’ve had:

  • 4,175 Visits (Up 1,150%)
  • 5,352 Page Views (Up 650%)
  • 3,678 Unique Visitors (Up 1,694%)

1000% growth for something in a very experimental and low-key first 12 months isn’t too bad. Good enough that FPSPrestige launched and has achieved slightly better figures in its first month.

There’s no real conclusion here – in terms of success, both sites are around where I expected and hoped in the first 12 months, and all the graphs are ‘up and to the right’, so I’m happy there’s a lot more to come, even as I roll out more features (The forums for both sites have just launched, for example).

crowdpleaserbygematrium
The queue to join the new forums (Image by Gematrium on Flickr – CC Licence)

But as a simple guide – if as a small business with no budget, you could do something which puts your brand in front of 4000+ relevant people every month in exchange for some time, that could really start to change things. If you leveraged all the connections you have, that could change things a bit more. Through in some relevant promotion, and that moves it on further…

I recently scared myself when I realised that across this site and the other 3 or 4 main sites I’m playing with in my spare time, one bloke at his kitchen table now reaches over 10,000 people and growing every month.And with constant attention and improvement that number will hopefully keep growing. Of course, 10, 20, or 500,000 visitors might make a ‘successful’ website, but it doesn’t make a successful business… That’s another piece of the puzzle…

Filed Under: Social Media Marketing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Thank you and some free books for Christmas reading

December 18, 2010 By

It’s the season of goodwill, so it seems a perfect time to say thank you to everyone that’s visited my blog, followed or message me on social networks, or kindly referred me to potential new clients. Plus everyone that’s helped me set-up sites, answered my own questions, and anyone that’s come along to the #DPiP meetups or chatted at conferences etc.

And as times are financially tight for most people, and the cold weather for a lot of us is conducive to staying inside in the warm, I’ve put together a list of some books which I recommend, and are freely available for download (usually under a Creative Commons licence) – mainly because as much as I’d like to offer something I haven’t managed to come up with my own book as yet…

Obviously if you download them and enjoy them or get value from them, I’d encourage you to thank the author by buying a copy for a friend, maybe buying a copy to share in your business, or buying a copy for your local library, for example.

Note: Some of the links are to descriptions, others are directly to PDF downloads. And please check before assuming that any of the works are Creative Commons licenced.

And if you want to compare notes over Christmas, I’m just starting:

So get downloading, have a read, and maybe you’ll be inspired to help the author and your friends/colleagues/local neighbourhood. As an inspiration bonus, I’d also recommend checking out Cory Doctorow’s fictional novels – particularly ‘Makers‘, ‘Little Brother‘, ‘For The Win‘, and ‘Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom‘

And if you’ve got recommendations you can share, or want to share your thoughts on any of the books listed, comments are much appreciated!

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