Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations demonstrates why he’s one of the preeminent thinkers in the field of social (and societal) impact of digital communications tools. The book is easy to read, clear, and offers sterling examples of the changes Shirky discusses.
The basic idea is that the ease digital tools like email, wikis, and social Web sites bring to creating and organizing groups, be they ephemeral or long-lasting, changes the equation of how much organizational overhead is necessary for a group to spring into existence, and for that group to accomplish its goals.
Here Comes Everybody is refreshing in that it doesn’t devolve into wild-and-wooly Wired-style techno-prognostication—Shirky is talking about what is happening right now, and what it means.
If you’re alive in 2008, you should read Here Comes Everybody. It’s that important a book.
Posted in Reviews, Society.
Tagged with groups, internet, non-fiction, social, Society.
Today I spent an hour riveted to my laptop watching a choppy, postage-stamp-sized video of a San Francisco hipster talking about blogging.
Yes, riveted. Because of course, Merlin Mann wasn’t really talking about blogging—he was talking about the creative process and how to sharpen your output.
I’ve been a bit of a Merlin fan boy for a while, but the speech he gave has catapulted me into full-on wannabe-henchman territory. That’s right: I’ll even be a henchman without a name tag. That’s how good this speech is.
Here’s an image that captures the core of the speech:
Learn it, live it, love it.
Thanks, Merlin. You’re doing good work.
Posted in Media.
Tagged with attention, blogging, creativity, internet, Media.
The Name of the Wind is the first part of a planned trilogy, and it is one impressive piece of old-school fantasy with huge and detailed world building, interesting characters and a massive story arc.
After reading it, I jumped on Amazon to order the second installment. Which is not out yet. Probably the best way to convey how much I enjoyed The Name of the Wind is that it ruined my day to find out I’m going to have to wait a long time for the second installment (not to mention the third).
If you like fantasy at all you will dig The Name of the Wind.
Posted in Reviews.
Tagged with fantasy, fiction.
The third Novel in John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War Universe, The Last Colony continues the adventures of John Perry and Jane Sagan.
It’s an enjoyable novel, and Scalzi writes with his customary economy, but it feels like he’s getting a bit tired of his creation. The Last Colony is much less intense than the preceding novels in the series, and the plot suffers from an overload of million-to-one odds that somehow go in the protagonists’ favor.
There are interesting philosophical and human ideas in the novel, but as space opera it needs a turbo charge.
Related Core Dump reviews:
Old Man’s War
The Ghost Brigades
Posted in Reviews.
Tagged with fiction, sci-fi.
William Gibson remains in the unevenly-distributed present in Spook Country, a novel packed with his beautiful prose but not all that much else.
Granted, Gibson has never been a big one for plot, instead relying on the fertility of his ideas and the enveloping grace of his writing, but Spook Country hits his nadir.
Nevertheless, if you’re a fan (and you should be), Spook Country is worth reading, even though it is frustratingly subpar for Gibson.
Related Core Dump review:
Pattern Recognition
Posted in Reviews.
Tagged with cyberpunk, fiction.
The shenanigans coming out of the Republican National Convention are enough to make anybody want to pack up and move to the Alaskan Frontier with a gun, a bottle of gin, and the strength to pluck your own eyes out. But that’s not what this post is about. I’ve done enough screaming into a pillow about that.
Incidentally, according to the convention Web site, the theme for this election’s convention is “Reform.” Which one might say is a bit of a non-sequitur for the party that’s run America the last eight years…
Here’s the thing, though: How did the party in power react to hurricane Gustav hitting Louisiana? By praising charity work and asking for aid. Not by actually proposing any kind of aid package, but suggesting that good Christian folk should, well, do something. Send some food, or something.
And then, an aid package proposal comes out of the White House! But is it for people in areas devastated by Gustav? Of course not! It’s <pinkie finger> one billion dollars </pinkie finger> for the Republic of Georgia’s fight against Russia.
That’s right, wait for the cold hands of charity, Louisiana white trash—the Russkies could be getting uppity. We have to get on top of that stat.
Disclaimer: I used to live in Louisiana, and despite the state being a bit of a Faulknerian third-world backwater, I really like it there. Obviously not enough to stay, but I do like it.
Posted in Society.
Tagged with disgust, gustav, hurricane, politics, Society.
My dad’s uncle took over the family farm in Sweden after his parents passed away. The farm was located smack dab in the middle of nowhere. He lived there alone with the livestock for his entire life, after a teenage romance went sour and he swore off women.
One of his amusements was to name his animals after family members. One of them was a bull he didn’t like. Apparently the bull was lazy. So naturally he named it after his brother-in-law.
From what I’ve been told, one day he stood and looked at the bull in its manger, shook his head, and said, “We only keep you around for the fertilizer.”
Lots of that going around these days.
Posted in Life in Sweden.
Tagged with animals, farmer, sweden.
The powers that be at work decided that all minions had to read Who Moved My Cheese?, and since I like to read anyway, and have been low-grade curious about this book for a long time, I was a good boy and plowed through it.
Which took all of 15 minutes. Really. Without skimming.
According to the blurbs on the book itself, Who Moved My Cheese has changed the lives of countless people, and has shook more people than there are stars in the galaxy to the very core of their beings. We’ll get to that in a moment.
The book is really divided into two parts, the Who Moved My Cheese parable itself about two mice and two little people looking for cheese in a maze, and a “discussion” at a high school reunion between what I can only judge to be four stroke victims.
The parable itself is not bad—it cuts to the chase† and provides some food for thought, even though it’s glib and breathlessly optimistic.
But the discussion! Oh, the discussion! It’s all on the level of “Hey, I had no idea what to do and my life was going to hell, and I had no idea what was going on until you shared this wonderful, wonderful story with me and now I totally know what I have to do!”
Seriously, if you read this book and it changes your whole outlook, good for you. Glad you got value out of it. That being said, how about you turn off the TV, stop reading mouth-breather management books, and start reading grownup books? Please.
Also, you probably shouldn’t be allowed to vote.
†It took a lot of restraint to not use the word cheese instead of chase.
Posted in Society.
Tagged with business, mouth-breathers, non-fiction, Society.
Joe McNally is a shiny golden god of photography, and in The Moment It Clicks: Photography secrets from one of the world’s top shooters he shows off his work and tells you how he got there. The result is a book that is gorgeous, informative, and sometimes touching. McNally’s voice is friendly, and the behind-the-scenes stories he tells reveals how he approaches photography and the choices he makes to get his amazing images.
The Moment It Clicks is not a very technical book—McNally doesn’t talk much about f-stops and pixels, but that is by design: the book is really about how to see like one of the greatest photographers working today.
The format is basically that McNally talks about a situation and how he approached it, then shows an image that illustrates his point. It’s very effective.
If you’re at all interested in photography, The Moment It Clicks belongs on your bookshelf or your coffee table.
Highly recommended.
Posted in Reviews.
Tagged with non-fiction, photography, pictures.
As you know if you’ve read this blog for a while, I love books. Love ‘em, love ‘em, love ‘em.
It seemed like a good idea to collect some of my favorite fiction and showcase it in one place. After some hemming and hawing, I decided to create a little Amazon aStore and populate it with hand picked crime fiction. And thus, Recoil Press was born. “Hand picked” as in, everything on there I’ve read or watched and enjoyed.
If you like crime fiction, please do check it out. As always with Amazon, if you buy something through Recoil Press, I get a teensy amount of philthy lucre, which I shall of course turn around and plow right back into Amazon. (Oh, they’re cunning…)
Enjoy.
Posted in Big Nerd.
Tagged with amazon, books, crime, fiction, recoil press.
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