Let Anyone Become a Publisher with Just a Few Clicks

Seth Godin, in his review of the new Amazon Kindle, touched on something I believe in strongly at FastPencil: "Let anyone become a publisher with just a few clicks". The new Amazon Kindle is not just another piece of technology, it's part of a movement. So is FastPencil. It's the movement to revolutionize publishing.

The entire publishing industry must move forward to remove the barriers between authors and their tribes. Writing a book is hard, but publishing a book should be just a few clicks away. Anyone, anywhere should be able to write and publish a book. Anyone, anywhere should have access to books in any format.

Barack Obama Inauguration Day Video

Hulu has streaming video of the Inauguration for those of you who won't be in front of tv.



Yes we can!

Merry Christmas from the Ashley's! 2008

Seth Godin is worth your time

Many of you already read his blog and his books, but for those of you who have never heard of Seth Godin here's my pitch:

Seth Godin has been leading the development of marketing on the internet for over 12 years. He has great businesses, like Squidoo, and writes entertaining and informative books. I read his blog almost every day... because he actually posts something new and interesting almost every day.

If you have a business, or work in a business, and you care... about anything really, you will benefit from reading Seth Godin. I sure have.

It's NANOWRIMO Time!

That's National Novel Writing Month for those of you who have never heard of it before. Basically, you start writing on November 1st and stop writing on November 30th. Your goal is to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days.

I'm writing my 30-day novel in FastPencil of course. If you're a NANOWRIMO let me know and I can set you up with an account, too.

Good luck writers!

BofA bailout sucks

Here's the headline: BofA provides $8.4B mortgage break as part of Countrywide deal.

Here's the summary: BofA is going to reduce mortgages for the jerks who drove up the prices of homes during the bubble by taking out insane loans that they knew they could never pay. While they were acting irrationally, honest people sat on the sidelines saying, "we just can't afford to buy a house in this market."

This is just plain wrong. The houses should go into foreclosure and they should lose their house. That is the risk they took. Pay the price.

Foreclosures will allow the price of homes to return to a true market value. Then honest home buyers can actually get back into the market.

How are you going to feel when you find out that your neighbor just got his loan principle reduced a few hundred thousand dollars because he took out a risky loan... while you still have to pay the full price of your loan because you actually qualified for it.

That's just wrong.

My Bailout Solution: Sell the mortgages

OK, I know they are already talking about selling the mortgages. Sell them cheap to the federal government. Sell them cheap to private investors.

But why not sell them cheap back to the homeowner? Why not let the homeowner buy their own mortgage for ten-cents-on-the-dollar? I'd do it. If I could walk into my bank and buy my own mortgage at that price, I would do it.

Not everyone could pull that off, even at a discount. I understand. But if you're going to sell them anyways, why not give us first shot?

Complicated Issue: Bailout Plan

There are so many complicated issues swirling around today that I am both excited and baffled. So I thought I'd start blogging about one complicated issue at a time and see if we can simplify this together. Please comment if you can help explain.

The Bailout Plan - Help me understand this better.

From what I understand, a bank takes your money and loans it to other businesses and people. That's how they make money. But a bank can actually loan more money than they have in their vault. That's how they make lots of money. Some banks don't even have to take deposits (your money) they can have other assets, like mortgages. As long as the value of these assets is big enough, the bank can continue loaning money.

But if the value of those assets suddenly drops, the bank is screwed, they can't loan money. And if a bank can't loan money, they can't make money. That's what is happening right now. The value of the mortgages plummeted and the banks can't loan money. It's not that they don't want to loan money, they can't. Their credit rating is too low, because of the bad mortgages, and they can't get the money to loan.

So, if my assumptions here are correct, the banking industry wants the government to buy the bad loans for around 700 billion dollars so they can get them off their books. If a bank can get bad mortgages off their books, and cash in their vault, their credit rating goes up, and they can start lending money again. And since that's how they make money, everyone can keep doing business as usual.

Here's where I need your help. Is this correct? Can it be simplified even more?

Next post: Bailout Plan Commentary - what does this really mean to you and me?