juliannechat

Seeking: good questions

I'm working on finding new customers for Nexcerpt, which offers deep daily news searches with global reach.

As an example of what we do, here are the results of a deep daily search on "climate change" (with a touch of "extreme weather"). I'm curating and posting the results six days a week; feel free to use and share [1] them widely. Each customer designs and runs queries to answer their most pressing strategic or information questions.

Key to my outreach will be more strong examples. Do you have interesting questions that could suggest striking sample queries? If so, get in touch either through regular channels or via my Nexcerpt e-mail address.

[1] For example, Stop Killing Our World has added the climate news link to its sidebar. 

It's time to sign Iain (M) Banks' guestbook

If you have enjoyed ANY of the works of Iain Banks or Iain M. Banks, now would be a good time to sign his online guestbook. His bride (soon to be widow) Adele says he's reading all the messages and laughing.

This is a great role for "loved ones": handle most of the outreach so that the person facing death can focus on the things that ONLY they can do. One sub-category of potentially stress-enhancing stressors of the guestbook is people posting suggestions of cancer remedies to try, and Adele handles them as graciously as all the others.

In my message #7131, I wrote about Transition. The only critical reception Wikipedia mentions is "meh", but I loved it. It's more challenging to write a science fictional book where the real year (a concept introduced by John Clute in The New York Review of Science Fiction, January 1991, and happily beaten to death on subsequent Readercon panels) is close to the current year, and yet we need such.

I'll have more to say about Banks, but for now, go sign. He's showing how it's done. May each of us die half as well!