The RLF I am off this evening to sunny Bristol, where I'll be on a panel for the Royal Literary Fund , discussing the topic  Social Media for Writers: Brave New World or Circle of Hell? If you are in the Bristol area and of a literary bent, please do come along and join us. It's free and starts at 7.30pm - the location is Waterside 2, The Watershed , 1 Canons Road, Harbourside, Bristol BS1 5TX. If you aren't able to join us, just a few passing thoughts. A platform For quite a while now publishers have been very excited about writers (particularly book authors) having a 'platform'. This does not mean that you should rush out and buy a train set (though feel free to do so, should you wish), but rather that you should have a mechanism for making yourself visible to as many potential readers as possible. You might think that a publisher's website does this. After all, every book should be listed there, and they usually have some kind of author profil...

Okay, here's a word association test. What's the first thing that comes to mind when I say... mathematicians ? Hands up how many of you said 'Fun'? What, no one? If you are a mathematician, or a physicist making heavy use of maths, you may feel there's plenty of fun in your world, but just in case you needed a bit more, I can highly recommend UCL's new e-magazine for mathy people, Chalkdust . (Rather an odd choice of title - a bit like a computing magazine calling itself Abacus . But we are dealing with mathematicians.) What I ought to say straight away is that Chalkdust (my spellchecker insists on converting that to  Chalkiest ) is not a magazine version of an Ian Stewart type, light and fluffy popular maths book. This is a magazine that doesn't shy away from including the equations of general relativity. But having said that, you don't have to be a genuine, heavy duty mathematician to get something out of it. When I was at university, my maths ...

I gather from the BBC that Peter Higgs gets rather irritated when the Higgs boson gets referred to as the God particle. Leaving aside those who get miffed that Higgs himself gets the sole glory of the name, I think this is very short-sighted. Dr Higgs' objections are twofold: a) that he is an atheist and b) 'I know that that name was a kind of joke. And not a very good one I think.' To be honest, I think it might better if we had more God particles and less of the kind of names scientists tend to come up with left to their own devices. Let's get those objections out of the way first. So what if he is an atheist? Does that make the word 'god' disappear? Irrelevant. (And 'god' is used illustratively by plenty of atheists and near-atheists - Einstein and Steven Hawking to name but two.) As for the second, well yes, it was a sort of joke. But what's the problem with that? A touch of taking-self-too-seriously perhaps? According to Leon Lederman, the...

I've kindly been sent a review copy of Chris Brogan and Julien Smith's The Impact Equation  by those nice people at Penguin (henceforth Random Penguins). I used to write business books ( this kind of thing ), but I always find it strange coming back to them after being so immersed in popular science, because a popular science book is usually so packed with fascinating information, where the actual content of business books is often incredibly sparse, with about a page's worth of useful information packaged in a whole load of woffle. Interestingly, a while ago, a company did try to do business books on two sides of a sheet of laminated A4. They genuinely did get everything in, but even though people are supposed to want bite sized chunks these days, they wouldn't pay a book price for something so slim. We are victims of our own greed. The Impact Equation doesn't entirely escape the limitation of having a lot of padding between gems, but it definitely does have s...

The media has a very mixed attitude to Twitter. Sometimes it is given totally over the top accolades for enabling something like the Arab Spring to take place (there is no doubt it made a contribution, but equally no doubt that things would have gone ahead much the same without it). At other times it is seen as a lowest common denominator means of spreading gossip and tittle tattle. Why wouldn't you tweet it? I personally think it's a great way for getting and giving instant reactions. It can be genuinely interesting to see live response to a TV show, for instance, as tweets come flying in. And although I personally am not particularly interested in what people had for breakfast, say, it is very valuable as a way of highlighting something interesting or amusing. So, for instance, when I spot a van with an entertaining spelling error on its artwork, or when I recently came across a slow worm on my walk to the Post Office, Twitter was a natural way to make a quick comment. ...

I've mentioned before the powerful aspects of networking as identified very clearly in the interesting book  Wikinomics (see details at Amazon.co.uk or at Amazon.com ) - unfortunately it's something many companies haven't got a clue about. I was just rapidly emptying my inbox of commercial newsletters, which I have a habit of accumulating in the hope of winning a year's supply of electric bananas or some such essential, when it struck me how many of them came from that strangely named person 'donotreply' AKA 'noreply' AKA 'dontreply'. Even the rather witty weekly roundup from the IT intelligence site Silicon.com comes from a non-human sounding address silicon@newsletters.silicon.cneteu.net that it seems highly likely won't get you anywhere if you send an email to it. These companies who employ 'noreply' are, frankly, dumb. Organizations spend a vast amount of money on building a relationship with customers - yet the very mo...

The means we have for communicating in writing have blossomed over the last couple of decades. When I was at university it was letters or telegrams. We may have lost those exciting little brown envelopes that brought  news of disaster and triumph, but we've added email, text messaging and so much more. Which leads me to ponder the ways we sign off when writing. In formal letters it's easy - Yours sincerely if it's a named person you are writing to and Yours faithfully if it's not. But informal letters and particularly these quicker, easier means of written communication of today bring with them a whole host of options for how to end. Even text messages have this: do you end with a kiss or not? My (female) family expect this. In fact the number of kisses acts as a kind of emoticon. No kisses - you're in trouble. One or two - ordinary communication. Lots of kisses - either 'I want something' or 'Thank you so much!' But those kisses are so dangero...

I gather from this excellent blog post by Matt Brown (whose photo I have nicked) that the Royal Institution in London is in financial difficulties. This is really sad news. The RI is a wonderful facility, especially since its fancy makeover, and does excellent work. I have had the honour of speaking there a couple of times, and there are few things more scary for a speaker than an RI introduction, when standing at the desk where Faraday did demonstrations, your audience is told that 'n of the elements were discovered here, they have had x Nobel Prize winners... and now Brian Clegg is going to speak to you.' Gulp. Some argue, and I'm afraid that I would agree, that the current director Susan Greenfield has not done a great job. I certainly feel that the RI could be handled differently. With hindsight, spending £20 million on a refurbishment programme was probably not wise (though I guess a fair amount of this came from grants). Personally, I would suggest that those in...

Recently Google announced a new potential product called Wave that has had the e-experts all of a flutter. It's trumpted as the next generation of email. But is this just hype? Email goes back a long way - before the internet, for example. As soon as people were using computers in real time, rather than punching cards and waiting for a result, it became obvious that this would be a great way to flip little messages between each other. It has become more sophisticated, but the model is very much traditional mail. (The name's a bit of a clue.) If Wave has a model, it's more a conversation with friends than the post. Instead of a mail item being something fixed, it grows over time as responses are added. It's a living thing. You can add to and edit your original mail. As you get replies these build up, real time as a visible conversation. You can insert your reply part way through someone else's mail, to respond to particular points... and if you get confused by a comp...

I know it's only weeks since I was banging on about my 10-year-old mobile phone - but it has now been consigned to the great stock cupboard of electronic life. I've upgraded to an iPhone. It might seem a feeble cave-in, when I was proud of keeping my old mobile for so long - but the idea was never to hang on to it forever, just longer than the mayfly existence of most personal electronics. I hope I keep my iPhone for a good few years too. When they first came out I was disdainful of their locked-in proprietary nature and hated the way they forced you to go to a single phone company. But I have been gradually worn down by a series of blows - from falling in love with my daughters' iPod Touches to the sheer joy that the eloquent Dr Henry Gee has clearly gained from his iPhone. It may be a honeymoon period, but right now it's just so exciting. I mean, you can... no. I won't bore you with the obsessive details. But can a phone where checking your voicemail messa...

I have regular meetings with my agent. We chat, we can see each other... yet we're 80 miles apart, and even better it doesn't cost anything. We use Skype the internet phone/video thingy and it's absolutely brilliant. Now, what I don't understand is why so few people use it. Oh, I know Skype has millions of customers. But my agent is about the only person I know I use it regularly with. We have several friends who have it - but they don't keep it on, which misses the whole point. Skype is like phoning, but it's better and it's free. And we have lots more friends who have broadband, but don't use Skype at all. I know it's a bit more of a faff than picking up a phone, because you have to be in the room your computer's in (unless you have one of the dinky Skype phones that work when the computer's switched off), but it's so much better than an ordinary phone call if you have video - particularly if you go for the HD video, which is stunning q...

I'm not one one to be shy with electronic communication. I've got this blog and the website . I use Facebook and Twitter. I'm a member of two online websites for authors. But I just can't get the hang of FriendFeed . The estimable Maxine from Nature recommended it, and I've tried, I really have - but it just doesn't work for me. The idea is that it amalgamates all your feeds - Twitter, blogs, websites you like (I think) - all into one place. Seems reasonable. But then there are rooms for discussions on different topics, which can be sort of overlayed on your main feed. And people can comment and discuss any of these things - I just get lost. Part of the problem I have with FriendFeed is that I can't be bothered to go there. All the blogs I read (you can see the list down the bottom of the page) are automatically pulled together for me by Google Reader. I don't have to go anywhere to see these. I use iGoogle (the version of Google you can add widgets to)...