The Puget News

While not generally within the theme of this blog (get used to it), today is the public launch of Blue Dot, a little startup enterprise I work at with a bunch of cool friends. We’re pretty excited to take the covers off and show it to the world, starting today with a little bit of a PR blitz.

You should try it out. Blue Dot is a great way to stay in touch with the the people that matter to you. As you browse the web, you can share anything that you find with a very simple click of a link that we put in your bookmarks toolbar. Over time, sharing all of the interesting things you’ve found builds out a really interesting representation of yourself. The site is really beautiful (if I do say so myself) and will hopefully crack the mainstream. If you try it out, I think you’ll find that it’s surprisingly social and fun to share things you discover online.

A couple of the Blue Dot folks (Kabir and Mohit) met with a local technology business writer earlier in the week. Lo and behold, we showed up prominently in today’s Seattle P-I. Booyaa!! Hello, world!

Later in the day, sometime post-5PM, Kabir will be presenting our launch announcement to the crowd of notable folks at Gnomedex 6.0, right down the street from us here in Seattle. We’re going to try and get someone to videotape that announcement. We’ll see if we can get it posted.

Technorati Tags:
Seattle, technology, community, web2.0, Blue Dot, BlueDot

How appropriate it is that the first post to this blog pertains to an author and his fascination with books and, more explicitly, bookshops. Unfortunately for Lewis Buzbee, he managed to hit this particular shop on a “post-card Seattle day.” Everyone in town apparently decided they were going to spend a little time outside. A small group of about 10 folks were the only people who decided to ignore the sunshine and instead attend a reading from Buzbee’s newest book, “The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop.”

Buzbee started off his talk by commenting on the fact that he had actually worked as an employee of the University of Washington Bookstore some 22 years prior, an interesting little piece of Northwest trivia to file away into the old memory banks. Of course, he joked, nobody working at the shop today would remember that. He recalled that time of his life as fairly turbulent, despite the fact he appreciated the job and the fact that it was his entry into the book business, where he has continued to work the greater part of his life. Most of Buzbee’s actual reading was fairly standard.

The pieces of his writing that he read were the same pieces alluded to on the jacket flap of the book - which was a bit of a let-down - but they comprised a variety of different styles and modes that kept things interesting. There were brief histories of the book trade at salient points in the past; touching on Alexandria, Shakespeare & Co., and some odd combinations of bookstores such as the tattoo parlor / bookshop in Guberville, CA. There were also discussions of the bookstores he’s found in his travels and the “bookstores that don’t exist yet but should,” a fun piece imagining all the geeky bookshops we’d like to frequent. I have some ideas in that department I may delve into in a future post as well. The book is sort of a strange amalgamation of memoir (or “meme-oir” as the author stated), history, and a little speculation to round things out.

Much of what I heard was the sound of a bibliophile in search of dialogue with his bookshop friends. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. While it’s not a book for everyone, it is indeed for those people that feel the anticipation when cracking open a new book, kill time by wandering the aisles in bookshops and libraries, or who make plans to meet friends for coffee at the local literary establishment.