My Summer Reading aka "EW Kristin- that's gross!"

So for those of you who don't know me, I'm a bit of a science geek. In my spare time, I go to Science on Tap lectures, read Carl Zimmer's blog, The Loom, and occasionally answer questions like, "What's phenylalanine? " (Note: I had to look this up and my answer was- "Something that's not good for you.")

Even my "for fun" reading list has a science/tech bent- one of my favorite books is Parasite Rex and I read it at night when I can't sleep. So imagine my delight when I came across Fragment by Warren Fahy.

The premise is cheesy but interesting. An American research ship lands on a remote, unexplored island and finds crazy creatures that evolution did some twisted things to. They study the creatures. Creatures kill. People scream. People die. Good fun is had for all involved.

(Please note: My colleagues around me checked it out and said it looked "gross.")

I'm in the middle of reading it now with the Kindle app on my iPhone and so far, it's everything I want my fiction reads to be: Mindless entertainment and some science tidbits thrown in for good measure.

What's interesting about this book are the supplementals offered alongside the text itself. The Amazon page has:

• Three webisodes based on the creatures in the book
• Artist renditions of the creatures
• A map of the island

I know some authors are on Twitter (I'm looking at you, James Rollins @jamesrollins and Neil Gaiman @neilhimself) and are pretty transparent about their writing process, things they're working on, etc- which is pretty cool for fans.

I think it's great that authors are using these tools (supplementals, Twitter, etc) to promote and create excitement about their books and to give us insight into their lives and creative process (but, uh, not in a creepy way- I'm not a stalker, I swear!). I'm sure they've been doing this since the dinosaurs began but I'm just now waking up to all the different things I could be exploring with my favorite books/authors.

I'm interested in finding more though- are any authors pushing more viral campaigns with new book launches? I'm thinking like a literary version of the Cloverfield campaign. Let me know!

Also- what's on your summer reading list?

Happy reading, Kristin (@KFontanilla)

PS- Here's a list of authors on Twitter- thank you, Squidoo.

Quick- tell me about your agency!

If you had to, could you tell someone about yourself- your strengths, capabilities and past successes- in a 140 characters or less?

Well, in the not-so-far future, you might have to.

I came across this tweet from @SocialMedia411 today: HEY AGENCY PEEPS! Current TV is looking for a full service agency via their "TwitteRFP" http://bit.ly/gd5bY

I went to the site and the only requirements are to include your agency name and what you could bring as Current's partner. Based on those tweets, they will then choose 5 to receive the RFP.

This is a cool idea.... right? Will this prove to be successful? Who knows. It will definitely force agencies to be concise and to a certain extent, it will force people to be more creative, at least in the way they look at their work. But creativity knows no character limits- and capabilities and successes often can't be boiled down to 140 characters (or less). And would you really want to rely on 140 characters to make a decision about someone or something?

If you can do this- pitch yourself well within a small set of characters- then kudos to you. You'll do well when more companies start interviewing on Twitter.

Shameless plug: You can follow me on Twitter @KFontanilla. I post fun, quirky tweets about myself, the world, science and technology. (That was less than 140 characters!)

Drudge Report Named #1 News Site

When it comes to website optimization is a high bounce rate a good thing? I've always viewed it as a bad thing because you are loosing customers. They took one look around, didn't see anything they liked, and left. Maybe I've been thinking about this the wrong way.

If you look at the Drudge Report, who is now the #1 news site and has 500 million monthly page views, you start to see things differently. Their entire site is made up of links, which means their entire model is based off of sending people away from their site. The length of time their users spend on the site is the amount of time it took them to find what they were looking for. The shorter the amount of time the better and they always come back wanting more. So they've got a high bounce rate and a high percentage of returning customers.

The bottom line is to give your customers what they want. Don't try to bait them into clicking from page to page to keep them on your site. The faster they find what they are looking for the happier they'll be, even if that means sending them away to a third-party site.