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Changes Ahead

Dear Readers, I am making a new book of the Best of Cool Tools. (The last one I did was ...

Dear Readers,

I am making a new book of the Best of Cool Tools. (The last one I did was a small one in 2003.) This will be a large, real paper book and might be available in the fall. In the next few months I will be going through the 10-year archives of this site selecting the the outstanding evergreen tools, the best of the best, and then presenting them in one large book.

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To date there are more than 3,000 Cool Tool reviews posted here, so there is a lot to choose from. Despite that abundance, in surveying the reviews I’ve noticed that there are large vacancies in many subject areas. There are significant crafts that we have not covered. Not much in underwater sports. Little in metal working. None in the voice arts. Music can use more reviews, Etc.

To fill in these areas I will be actively soliciting new reviews and steering the conversation to tweak, correct, or modify the material we do have. I plan to use this blog for that conversation. For the past 10 years the Cool Tool blog has reliably posted one cool tool review every weekday. We won’t stop doing that. But starting in a few days I will begin posting additional items, queries, clips from AskCoolTools, pointers of cool tool related postings elsewhere, and other stuff in order to flush out new material.

In other words, I will be disrupting the very orderly blog that’s been running so smoothly all these years, the blog that you presumably have come to enjoy. In addition to one highly selected, well-proven tool, highly edited by Oliver Hulland each day, the blog will also sport half-baked ideas, tips, related material, questions, dialog, requests, clarifications by me and Oliver. It will resemble the variety of material you find on other blogs.

Some readers are not going to like this. That’s too bad. However it will only be temporary until I finish the book, when your regular programming will return undisturbed. Other readers are going to love it because it will be more interactive, more community minded, more dynamic. Don’t get too used to it, because after the book is done your regular programming will return undisturbed.

In the meantime, I hope to make some noise and try a few editorial alternatives. After 10 years without change it’s about time. Not everything tried will work. The intent of this experiment is to discover, with your help, the best cool tools for the book in the widest range of subject areas. Any reviewer appearing in the book will get a copy of the book.

Tell me what tools you love, and why: kk at kk dot org, or leave a comment here.

— KK

01/20/12

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