Welcome to BenWoods.com

As I attempt to find an agency to pitch my new book, I thought it might be a good idea to list some of the agents I have contacted. At this stage, I've run into issues where companies have listed communication methods, but they don't seem to follow through. I hope that my list will save the time of others who are attempting to find representation.

August 21 is National Spumoni Day. Did you know that? I seriously doubt it. But who cares? It's an entire day to celebrate Spumoni! If you don't know what Spumoni is, check out the Wikipedia page. Better yet, let me explain why you should care about Spumoni in the first place.

I know I've said this before, but I am getting closer to publishing my new book, "Corporate Ties." There was a bit of foundation work that I needed to construct, edit, tear apart, rebuild, pulverize, stack up, decimate and recompile. Well, the good news is that I'm getting closer to the end. How do I know this? There seems to be a light at the end of each paragraph now.

Google recently made a mildly surprising announcement (at least, to me) that the company is shutting down its online collaboration tool, Wave. Google does a lot of cool, neat and worthy stuff obviously, and I think Wave fits into this category. It's just that the actual marketing of it was rather peculiar.

The definition of "friend" has been watered down a bit with the advent of online social networking. It seems that now, your friend might be someone with whom you've never met, even someone with whom you've never communicated, with the exception of a simple button click on a website. This can be a good way to meet people, but it's a bit weird to call a person a friend when it's quite possible the individual on the other side could be an enemy, a fish or a hat.

If you haven't noticed, there's a lot of stuff on the World Wide Web. For some people, that might be a good thing, but for the rest of us, who seemingly waste numerous hours a day, looking for those things we missed (like the Lip Balm Anonymous site), it's somewhat nerve-racking to explore it all.

I thought that maybe fewer people would drive since gas seems to be more expensive than an average vehicle. But I'm still waiting in traffic all over the place, on the way to and from work. Hasn't it occurred to anyone that we are all paying close to twice as much for gasoline as we did a year ago? Wouldn't they be interested in knowing how to conserve their fuel?

As you know, I don't have too many things to sell ... just books. But it is the holiday season, so I thought I might try to unload some of "The Developers" stock I have. During the month of October, I'm offering 2-for-1, which translates to $14 for two books. This way, you can purchase one for yourself and one for a gift!

It has become difficult to sell what I have because of the exclusive contract I have with my distributor. I can no longer sell directly to bookstores or libraries. However, I am allowed to sell to individuals.

The only real surprise in the latest Census Bureau report regarding the Internet is the fact that the information is probably already out of date. Then again, that's probably not even a surprise.

Because I receive a decent number of questions about a multitude of things, ranging from writing and publishing to computers and programming, I wanted to make myself a little more available to those of you who can't get in touch with me.

Starting today, I will be available on both AOL's Instant Messenger and Google Talk around the clock. So if you have a question or comment, just send it along, and I'll get back to you. It might not be immediate, but I'll try to within a day or so.

AOL screenname: WoodsBenA

GoogleTalk screenname: bwoods43