Category Archives: book riffs

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focus on process, not tools

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I’m reading Kill All Your Darlings by Luc Sante at the moment, which is very good. It includes a number of pieces on culture, many originally from Village Voice or the New York Review of Books. Sante is a fantastic writer and there are a number of great lines throughout the book, but one just […]

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Trust Agents Change the Game

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I just finished reading Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith. It’s a terrific book, and for many people it will end up being essential. While the book looks at how to use the web to build business, it is not a tech book – it is actually one of the best business books […]

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small pieces loosely joined

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More quotes that I like – this time from Small Pieces Loosely Joined by David Weinberger: Distance on the Web is measured by links, so the way to make your site ‘close’ to where your customers are is to get lots of places to point to it. How? By being interesting or worthwhile. That’s not […]

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the price of free leads to innovation

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I just finished reading Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson. As usual, Anderson takes ideas that have been out there a while and packages them in an insightful and valuable way. I’m a bit late to the party, so there has already been plenty of reaction to the book. Much of […]

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rules for positive deviance

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Atul Gawande ends his latest book Better with a set of rules for positive deviance. This is building on the idea that performance in most fields follows a bell curve, and that if you want to end up in the good tail, you need to take steps to deviate from the norm in that direction. […]

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the role of failure

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Atul Gawande from his most recent book, Better: The third requirement for success is ingenuity – thinking anew. Ingenuity is often misunderstood. It is not a matter of superior intelligence but of character. It demands more than anything a willingness to recognize failure, to not paper over the cracks, and to change. It arises from […]

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econophysics to the rescue

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I read Why Stock Markets Crash by Didier Sornette last year, and I thought it was a pretty good book. Sornette builds on the quantitative work of Benoit Mandelbrot to make models of market bubbles using non-linear dynamics. The basic idea is that bubbles are created when the expectations of people in a market become […]

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if you want some crocs, better buy them soon

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Another book that I read on my trip is Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History by David Aaronovitch. It looks at a number of conspiracy theories from around the start of the 20th Century up to the present time. Some of them have had deadly consequences (e.g. the myths […]

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the role of chance

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I had a chance to catch up with my friend Rick while I was in Seattle. Since we go back a long time, we had plenty of things to talk about. One of the things that we touched on was his time with Microsoft – he worked there on software development starting in the mid-80s. […]

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increasingly wired

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One of the books that I read on the way home last week was Create Your Own Economy by Tyler Cowen. He’s got a quick summary available on the Fast Company site, which includes this quote: In a typical day, I might write two tweets, peruse 15 blogs (Jason Kottke and Penelope Trunk are two […]

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people building networks

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I just finished reading Why the Garden Club Couldn’t Save Youngstown: The Transformation of the Rust Belt by Sean Safford. It’s a very good book. Safford compares the histories of Youngstown, Ohio and Allentown, Pennsylvania in an effort to discover why Allentown has been able to recover economically from the collapse of its primary industry […]

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impact

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There’s an interesting post on the Six Pixels of Separation blog today about metrics for social media. Here’s the problem that is set up: Maybe we have it all wrong (and I’m just as guilty as the next person). Why are we looking at how many people have joined Facebook overall? Why do we care […]

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