Tag: blogers

Book: Ilya Varlamov, Maxim Katz “100 Tips for a Mayor”

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Ilya Varlamov has been talking about urbanism in his posts for years, urging mayors of various cities to listen to him. And Maxim Katz, better known as a politician and political blogger, actually did a lot together with Ilya on improvement and city-planning issues. In 2020 they joined forces and published a joint book, 100 Tips for a Mayor. So they wouldn’t have to repeat themselves over and over again, as the saying goes. It’s easier to write everything down once in a book and then hand it out as an instruction manual.

And the book really does contain exactly one hundred tips—one hundred chapters. Yes, some are a bit superficial, and at times there are small repetitions. But what won’t you do for a nice round number in the title.

At the same time, the authors chose a structured approach. The entire book is divided into several sections:

  1. Development
  2. Transport
  3. Public spaces
  4. Semi-public spaces

And many chapters are phrased explicitly as advice. For example, “Create mixed-use neighborhoods,” or “Don’t make one-way streets.” In each chapter-tip, they first develop and justify their idea, richly illustrating everything with photographs (so the book can easily be considered a photo album — there’s more photography here than text). After explaining the idea comes a section titled “How to do it right” — recommendations on the best approaches, as well as “Successful solutions” — examples of where, when, and by whom things were done well. More rarely there’s a chapter “Where this has been done here” (meaning in Russia, of course). Yes, there aren’t many success stories in the authors’ home country, but each one shows that with the will to do it, it can be done.

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Book: Ilya Varlamov “Travel Notes”

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Ilya Varlamov is a remarkable blogger (and now also a vlogger). For many years I enjoyed reading his journal — his notes about many countries were quite informative and always accompanied by wonderful photographs. More recently, I’ve also found him likable as a person because of his civic stance.

In 2014, the publishing house “MIF” decided to release his travel notes as a separate book. This edition caught my eye, and I decided to read in one place everything I had previously skimmed through in his journal.

However, the book turned out to be a huge disappointment. I don’t know who initiated the “paper” version, but it was done in a completely senseless way and with no clear idea of who it was for.

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Affiliate Programs of Bookstores: Description and Review of Popular Ones

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There is a concept known as affiliate (referral) programs. In short: you promote a store’s products, and in return, the store gives you a percentage of each sale. It’s generally beneficial for everyone: the store gains new customers thanks to advertising on external platforms, and the authors of popular resources get a small cut from the stores if their readers decide to make a purchase. Moreover, this is highly advantageous for stores (from my non-professional point of view). In most cases, when you pay for advertising, you spend money without any guarantee of getting it back. But here, you essentially receive free advertising and only pay a small percentage of the actual revenue generated by the user. Furthermore, as a store, you typically pay for a single purchase, but the buyer might stay and become a long-term customer. For subsequent purchases, you almost never pay anyone. Additionally, there’s the well-known factor of the first purchase—it’s much harder to convince someone to make their first purchase, but if they’re satisfied, the likelihood of a second purchase increases significantly.

As a devoted bookworm, I’ve always kept an eye on the development of online book sales. I witnessed the rise and growth of ozon.ru, and I even had a small hand in the creation of the Belarusian oz.by when it launched. From then on, I simply followed the market’s evolution.

As soon as such stores started offering affiliate programs, I signed up to test them out. This was especially advantageous when I was regularly writing the ” The Notes of Glitch the Hamster” series (the namesake of this blog), which reviewed all the latest sci-fi releases on the Russian-speaking market. Back then, I included links to books directly in my reviews, using my affiliate ID. I wouldn’t say I earned a lot, but I did manage to buy a few books (considering that getting books from Russian ozon to Belarus at the time wasn’t exactly easy).

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The Russian Teacher “50 Deadly Sins in the Russian Language”

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50-grehov-russkogo

There’s a concept known as “grammar Nazi,” even covered on Wikipedia. It started as an internet meme and refers to people who are extremely meticulous about language accuracy. Naturally, it has no actual connection to Nazism or fascism, though the joke went far enough that an emblem, based on Nazi symbolism, was created for the term (and rumor has it this even led to law enforcement issues).

But the term has taken root, and people often use it in conversation—when correcting someone, they might say they’re a “grammar Nazi” and thus don’t tolerate such mistakes.

I was naturally lucky; Russian came easily to me in school, even though I didn’t study the rules all that much. I have an internal sense of the language. Over time, I’ve always been interested in the meanings of rare words and in which words people most commonly misuse. I even corrected some of my own speech mistakes as soon as I learned about them.

Then, just the other day, I stumbled upon a book called 50 Deadly Sins in the Russian Language, with a bold cover to boot. Naturally, I couldn’t resist picking it up.

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