Crikey

Now, you too can be a prize-winning author! Are you the next break out success story? Written an obscure book? Can’t find anyone to buy your book even after you’ve published it yourself? Don’t understand why no one will touch your magnum opus with a ten foot pole? Never fear, thanks to the National Best Books Awards 2009, you too can win an award for your previously unpublishable tome! For the low, low price of $69.99 (per title/per category), you too can enter your book in the National Best Book Awards (2009).

This year’s winners include:

• Fiction (unabridged): Under the Black Ensign by L. Ron Hubbard, Galaxy Press;
• Audio Book (Non-Fiction Unabridged): Fly Little Bird, Fly! & Beyond The Orphan Train: The True Story of Oliver Nordmark and America’s Orphan Trains by Donna Nordmark Aviles, Donna Nordmark Aviles, Publisher;
• Best Self-Help Book: Living Like You Mean It: Use the Wisdom and Power of Your Emotions to Get the Life You Really Want by Ronald J. Frederick, Ph.D;
• Business: Talk Radio Wants You: An Intimate Guide to 700 Shows and How to Get Invited, by Francine Silverman, McFarland & Co.;
• Animal/Pets: Moments with Baxter: Comfort and Love from the World’s Best Therapy Dog, by Melissa Joseph.

Now, you too, can be an also ran!  — Crikey Intern Michelle Loh

Issue of the day. It’s not the Crawford Report into sports funding and it’s not the ongoing tribulations of the Oceanic Viking. If you think it’s to do with a nationwide crackdown on street crime you’d be mistaken. It’s also got nothing to do with vampires. Nothing. According to today’s NT News the issue of the day is smuggling drugs in poo. Poo…

With friends like these… It has taken Venezuela by storm, but it seems that Facebook and other social networking sites also come with their perils. Police here revealed that a pair of students at a private university in Caracas had been robbing their virtual friends’ homes using information they had compiled using Facebook.  — Global Post

Coca-Cola wants you for a sunbeam. Coca-Cola is gearing up for its largest social-media project ever, one that will test its own internal flexibility and force a number of its global markets into the digital and social-media space. Expedition 206 will send three 20-somethings to 206 countries and territories where Coca-Cola is sold in 2010. The trio sets off on their 275,000-mile tour from Madrid on Jan. 1, stocked with laptops, video cameras, smartphones and plenty of other gadgetry, in order to document for the masses their search for happiness.  — Advertising Age

LinkedIn hits Australia. LinkedIn, the social networking site for business professionals, has expanded its operations into Australia and New Zealand, headed by former Yahoo managing director, Cliff Rosenberg. He will oversee the growth of the business in the two markets where the site already has more than 1.1m members.  — Mumbrella