Book Review

I've never been a big Terry Pratchett fan, probably because I sorely miss Douglas Adams and in past readings of Pratchett have been disappointed he is not Adams. This past weekend, I decided to give him another try. 'Making Money', in a Pratchett sense, had to at least be interesting and even could be entertaining. And while I still carry my towel, my soul has finally acknowledged that Douglas Adams won't be writing anything further.

While that isn't a glowing start for any author when their book is being reviewed, it's honest. And for those of us still wandering bookstores in the hope that there might be a new book by Douglas Adams out there, somewhere, it's time to slip out of the bathrobe and move on. Start with this review.

As many people who can't help but follow the 24 hour news cycle know, money is pretty important these days because there is a profound scarcity of it despite the fact that we have about the same amount of little pieces of paper clogging up our economies. 'Joe The Plumber' might think that this may be a job for him (he seems to think everything is), it isn't really so. Economic systems are not things to toy with. Ask Greenspan. In fact, here's what Greenspan did say: { Read more }

I've been going in and out of bookstores for the last few months since I've been getting prepared for some writing - to write, I read a lot. And because of that and the fact that Trinidad and Tobago's bookstores seem to be stalled with a low selection of books (improving over the years at a dismal pace), I end up looking at the haphazardly stacked discount books. The ones where you have to go through vertical stacks created so that if you're looking for something in particular, you can't find it efficiently - and if you don't know what you want, you find a steady stream of things to eliminate in the most time consuming way possible.

Bookstores in Trinidad and Tobago - take a hint. Organize your discount books somehow. Go visit a bookstore outside the region and look at the discount book areas.

Aside from the 'plural-of-synonym-for-hemorrhoids' of books, I realized something that I probably should have realized decades ago: Books with only glowing reviews on the back cover or inside covers get tossed into discount book piles because people don't know what the books are about and have no clues given to them.

I'm not in the book publishing business, but I read a lot. And I can tell you my process for looking over vast collections of books - something I've done for decades. It works like this (take notes, publishers):

(1) Is the cover appealing to me? Less points if the author's name is larger than the title of the book, even if Stephen King himself wrote it. And I'm burned out on Stephen King, as well as a few other authors...

(2) Is the title interesting and does it fit the cover? I remember the covers of Clavell's books - simple, to the point, different kinds of swords. Shogun: Samurai sword. Bought. Get it? Got it? Good.

(3) Is what is on the back cover - the description of the book - interesting? If it's just glowing words from critics/reviews, check the inner cover. No clues? Toss it. { Read more }

I had the good fortune of receiving this book just before the completion of the last U.S. Presidential Election and used the information in it to properly predict the winner. No, that's not true - but what is true is that I had a lot of fun with the statistical smorgasbord of the Elections as I refreshed myself on Statistics with Head First Statistics.

That's the trouble with statistics; there's so much. Maybe too much. Few people who quote statistics seem to understand the way that data is coaxed into giving up fresh statistical data. It's something that I hated learning in high school but something which I have found invaluable since then. Maybe it was being taught statistics by an Irish ex-priest from a book so dry that there are Holy Wars probably still going on in it. I don't know.

Head First Statistics

Weighing in at 677 pages (including the Appendices), this soft cover continues the classic 'Head First' tradition of combining images, information and humor which is infectiously sticky. There's even kung-fu references where the Ancient Masters are skewing a data set.

But what does the book offer? Quite simply, a lot. This list doesn't do it justice: { Read more }

What would you do if you only had $25 and a knapsack of belongings to start off with, no place to stay and no job to speak of? And where would you be in a year?

These are some of the questions that author Adam Shepard set out to answer and write about. And that's ground zero of Scratch Beginnings: Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream - the other side of life that so many live yet so few know about.

Taking a train ride from his hometown to a random location, the author made his own scratch beginning and somehow managed not to fall through the cracks of society. Instead, he harnessed his resources - a lesson that, given the current global economic situation, seems a lesson worth repeating. From a homeless shelter to a dwarven habitat built in an attic, from temporary work toward permanent work, the book documents one man's path through a scenic route of life of the invisible of the United States. The characters walk, saunter and even march (to the beat of their own drums, of course) off the pages even as successes and setbacks punctuate their progress - and the author's progress. The book is almost impossible to put down.

While the author may have originally set out to write a rebuttal to Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, it doesn't come across that way. There are too many differences between the authors to make it a rebuttal - instead, it helps to form a bit more of the picture of what low income America looks like. In the case of Scratch Beginnings, I find that the same spirit which sent the author on his journey is the same spirit that brought him back with a book. While the privileged go to Europe or other places to obtain 'culture', the author went into America's relatively undiscovered socioeconomic back yard - which for some is as separate a country as one whose name they cannot pronounce.

There are many ways to look at this book. Maybe it's social commentary, maybe it's gonzo journalism, maybe it's even a bit of anthropology. Ultimately, the reader decides - but what it is remains constant: a wonderful book with a positive theme. The profanity of some characters is balanced with an unquenchable thirst for success - for moving up the socioeconomic ladder toward stability. The author writes, simply, that it can be done - but that it is not easy and that it requires qualities that, perhaps, are not as apparent in society today as they were 50 years ago. This is not to say that those in unfortunate circumstance are there by choice; this is to say that there is hope. { Read more }

Thomas Friedman wrote that the World is Flat, but the Internet has proven to be less than flat on more than one occasion. Nations allow their interpretations of the Internet to their populations, the First Amendment of the United States isn't enacted the same way in most parts of the world (and in extreme cases simply does not exist), and generally speaking, the hyper-libertarianism that came with the Internet does not seem substantiated. In essence, the Emperor not only has no clothing - the Emperor is seen differently around the world, depending on the accident of one's geopolitical residence. In China, the government filters anything that it finds harmful through the very technology that allegedly was to make censorship something routed around: the very routers themselves.

The brave new world of the Internet is only an evolution of pre-Internet society, not a quantum leap as was initially expected. That there are different links for different nations and languages, that IP addresses are tracked to ascertain locale of the user and to assure appropriate content gets there - these are not things that the average internet user thinks about on a daily basis. But it was not always so.

Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World explores the history of the Internet and the effects it has had on society - as well as the impact that society has had on the Internet. From the days when Jon Postel challenging the United States Government for root control of the Internet all the way up to present day China, the way that nations filter information is explored and explained, with specific examples ranging from Napster's file sharing and the Kazaa evolution and eventual demise to Yahoo's issues with France in the context of users selling Nazi paraphernalia. China's Internet, which is vastly different from that which people from other countries have seen, demonstrates that a government can successfully filter and inject it's own agenda into what Chinese Internet users have available. Even the WTO ruling on Antigua's claims for loss of income due to US Law are explored - as well as many other issues that the Internet has tolerated. { Read more }

Prior to 1439, there were wooden block and movable type presses in Asia - but in 1439, a goldsmith put together something that changed the face of publishing around the world. Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg, better known as Johannes Gutenberg, may have even been instrumental in the spread of Christianity through the world with the Gutenberg Bible. Such was the power of new publishing technologies then, where the cost of owning and operating a press made one a part of the media. This media persisted and improved over time, and reductions in the technology cost saw the press used in all manner of areas to distribute news, pamphlets and books. Old Western movies and books do not seem complete without the 'newspaperman' who will rush off to set up the press for tomorrow's news. The ability to broadcast information to people was extremely viable, and left the need for monks and academics with cramped hands to copy books in the dust. Information could be mass produced and shared - and sold.

In the last century, radio and television became major parts of the press - Tesla's invention of radio¹ was later refined by the likes of Marconi, Roberto Landell de Moura, Jagdish Chandra Bose, Alexander Stepanovich Popov and others. It wasn't long before this became a medium for broadcast. Television was much the same.

Right before the turn of the millennium, something else became a media source - you're using it right now. It's the Internet - and where once media was about broadcasting, the Internet has increasingly influenced media into discussion. All prior media disseminated news, propaganda, advertisements and the opinions of anyone graced with the ability to use the equipment. The Internet also does the same - but the number of those who are now graced to use the equipment has increased dramatically as well. But the question is now: Where can news be found? Who are the media?

Dan Gillmor, in 2006, wrote We the Media: Grassroots Journalism By the People, For the People, a rallying call for the masses to become a part of the media - appealing to bloggers and perhaps read with disdain at the time by the traditional media outlets. In it's own way, Gillmor's book became an icon - people who hadn't even read the book started talking about 'We the Media', internalizing it in their own was and regurgitating the various perspectives in streams of 1s and 0s over the Internet.

But there are issues. For one, journalists of traditional media are afforded rights in some places that the average citizen does not - such as the ability to protect sources. The second, and perhaps the most important, is who perceives who as the media.

Enter We're All Journalists Now: The Transformation of the Press and Reshaping of the Law in the Internet Age. { Read more }

When Adaptive Path decides to share some of it's knowledge outside of the Adaptive Path blog, it's worth taking notice. Peter Merholz, Todd Wilkens, Brandon Schauer and David Verba got together and wrote Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World: Adaptive Path on Design (Adaptive Path), a book whose title and authors cannot fit within the title of this book review. Fortunately, the book is not as thick as the title would indicate.

The trouble with designing just about anything these days is uncertainty. While business is risk, business is also mitigating risk, and the book promised some insights into mitigating risk by dealing with the uncertain world we live in. How could one not consider reading the book? From the high school kid with a dream to the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, dealing with uncertainty is a necessary aspect of success.

The Book

The book is only 164 pages between bibliography and covers - relatively light but by no means diminutive in content. Throughout the book there are real world examples dating back to the days of Eastman Kodak and up to the present day success of the iPod (the latter's success still confounds this reader). { Read more }

On September 30th, 2005, Tim O'Reilly published his piece, 'What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software'. The crowd went wild - so wild, in fact, that many people didn't even bother to read the article, instead listening to other perspectives on what Tim O'Reilly wrote. In a period of great tumult across the Internet, the definition of Web 2.0 was as various as the people who wrote or spoke of it. In a way, the article suffered at the hands of Web 2.0 itself - and great confusion ran rampant on the Internet. It became a marketing buzzword. It was found in all manner of brochures.

But few, if any, truly understood what Web 2.0 was - and what Web 2.0 is. I've wrestled with the topic myself, since it is at times transparent and at others as clear as mud. Web 2.0 isn't something that is limited to a technology, as I first believed - linking it to AJAX, which was being touted as a Web 2.0 technology. To me, the whole thing from a technology perspective was not a big deal. Technologies come and go; after a quarter of a century of paying rapt attention to technology I read the words of the prophets (profits?) with a jaded detachment.

The business model was what was interesting. The business model is what is interesting. This is what Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide: Business thinking and strategies behind successful Web 2.0 implementations is about. With a note from John Battelle, Founder of Federate Media, on the front cover - also the author of The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture (which I was impressed with), the book gained a level of trust from me. Whether it lived up to that or not was something that would be determined. I plunged into it with vigor. { Read more }