Marketing Your Bookshop (16th April)
The Internet as a Marketing Tool (17th April)
Copyright in Context: From Da Vinci to Blogging (17th April)
Globalisation, Translation, and English: a Discussion of Best Practices (17th April)
The Internet as a Marketing Tool was intended to look at how publishers and publishing houses could use the WWW space to promote books and authors, which all boiled down to a few examples of creating more or less fictional websites to bring the books out to the audience. The use of YouTube was also discussed briefly, but I picked upon the point made by one of the panellists. Some authors, he said, were writing great stuff but had little interesting to say, when meeting with their readers online or in person. Apart from the question if a writer should be a good speaker (I think so), this point is important when we think of ghost-writing.
Copyright in Context: From Da Vinci to Blogging had a misleading title, to begin with. Or perhaps, such title reflects the reality in which we now live. When I read “Da Vinci”, I first and foremost think of Leonardo. In the case with this seminar, “Da Vinci” was an abbreviation of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code. I allow for a possibility that this was an error that ended up on the website and in the booklet. But it is nonetheless a peculiar error. The talk centred first on discussing various legal suits that concerned plagiarism, which nowadays comes in two forms: borrowing an idea and borrowing facts. As far as blogging goes, the main topic here wasn’t so much the protection of copyright on the web (which would involve the discussion of Creative Commons licence), but rather about ethical issues. What to do if you’re being abused through your blog? Or what if somebody accidentally or purposely abuses you?
(This presentation only touched upon the issue of ethical blogging, but this issue has recently been highlighted in these two posts on BBC Manchester Blog. First, Kate Feld looked at Manchester bloggers’ reaction to the suggestion to develop a Blogger’s Code of Conduct. And then Robin Hamman turned a critical eye on whether or not it is appropriate to use blogs when some of them are supposed to remain private or semi-private. The question rose following the use of blogs to report on Virginia Tech tragedy, and I would expect it to generate a discussion. As far as BBC Manchester Blog goes, it is an open community, so follow through to Robin’s post to read and to share your thoughts on this.)
Links:
Robin Hamman, When Is a Blog in Public Meant to Remain Private?