Have you, by any chance, started reading more books in parallel than you used to? I have, and I’m trying to figure out whether it’s an age thing, or whether the Web has an unusual effect on reading habits. I’ve noticed that my tendency to read more than one book at the same time has, if anything, increased since the Web. Just curious.

While on the subject of books…..Some of you wanted me to bring back LibraryThing, which I will do. Soon. I’m working on a makeover for the site, and it should go live shortly. In the meantime, here’s what I’m reading while in my current incarcerated state:

I guess I realise just how odd I am when I see the books I’ve chosen as my companions for the next few days.

Some of them, I’m reading for the nth time, n being a number greater than 5. Here’s a quick summary:

The Social Life of Information by Seely Brown and Duguid : I probably read this at least once a year. I think it should be required reading for anyone working with information.

Son of Rhubarb by H Allen Smith: Maybe for the 6th time, I’m going through the whole H Allen Smith oeuvre this year. Anyone who thinks it is normal to bequeath a baseball team to an alley cat is normal enough for me.

How To Be Decadent by George Mikes: Maybe for the 10th time, I’ve been regaling myself on this wonderful humorist. Ever since How To Be An Alien I have loved reading and re-reading this guy.
White Flame by James Grady: Never read this, but ever since Six Days Of The Condor I’ve enjoyed Grady. Any book recommended by Gerald Petievich and Robert Crais must be worth a look.

Agile Project Management by Jim Highsmith: Probably reading this for the 4th time. If you’re interested in Agile you should read the whole series.

Housekeeping vs the Dirt by Nick Hornby: Never read it, I think I received it as part of my subscription to the Believer. I must have read quite a bit of it in his original columns, but what the hell. Always enjoyable.

Beyond A Boundary by CLR James: Dom, Sam and Gilbert sent this to me while I was in hospital. (Thanks!). Excellent cricket book. One that I haven’t actually read before. Already love it.

Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman: I think it was Bill Barnett, who used to work with me and now works at Wachovia, who recommended I read this. I took his advice. And love the book. Thanks, Bill.

Moral Minds by Marc Hauser: One of these books that appears to belong to the Edward Wilson Consilience class, probably similar to Wilson’s next book, The Creation. I am fascinated by the way the science-religion battle is taking shape. I’ve never had a problem with believing I was created. Hard reading, slow reading, but worth it.

In Darkest England and the Way Out by General Booth: Until you read books like this one, you don’t quite realise how you can learn from history. Written by the founder of the Salvation Army, it could have been written last year. Except for the stiltedness of the language, of course. The commentary on social conditions and the breakdown of the family unit is so similar it’s uncanny.

Free Markets and Social Justice by Cass Sunstein: I’m probably reading this only for the second time, and this time pretty slowly. I think Sunstein is an important read for bloggers. Don’t quite know why, can’t put my finger on it. But I read quite a bit of Sunstein, and it probably shows.

Comeback by Richard Stark: I devour anything by Donald E Westlake, in whatever guise. Two of his series stand out. The Dortmunder “caper” novels, which he writes as Westlake, and the Parker “hardboiled” thrillers, written under the name of Richard Stark. More about Dortmunder later. Soon.

Well, at the very least there may be one or two people out there who now have a holiday read recommendation they didn’t have ten minutes earlier. That’s all for now.

A few people have come up to me and wondered why I share “personal” things on my blog: things like changing my job, or, more recently, having a heart attack and then having a pacemaker fitted.

Fair questions.

And, given I have a lot of time on my hands while I rest and recuperate, I thought hard about them.
I realised for myself that I view the blogosphere as:

• a series of overlapping communities
• communities where people are free to walk around as they please, no walls or doors anywhere
• communities that are moderated rather than led
• communities where conversations take place
• conversations that are open and transparent
• conversations that are persistent and archived and searchable
• conversations that capture a richness of context that is hard to replicate elsewhere

And because I have that view, I don’t tend to recognise things like “content” or “flaming” or “soapbox” or “reportage” and stuff like that.

Once I see myself as part of a community, then it makes sense to behave like any member of any real community. You belong. You share things. You trust other members. You go through rites of passage together.

Together.

I’ve been astonished by the comments and reactions I’ve had while I posted about my recent medical challenges, pleasantly astonished. I’ve learnt even more about community as a result.

I’m really grateful to all of you for that learning. It is very precious. We all need to rediscover our sense of community, of shared belonging and identity, of being able to celebrate together and to mourn together, to learn together as well as to unlearn those things that hold us back.

We are only now beginning to discover the true potential of the blogosphere.

Thomas Madsen Mygdal and his team really had something when they themed reboot 8 this year as Renaissance. It was fantastic. I was privileged to be part of it, privileged to hear talented people share their thoughts and world views. [Thomas, if you read this, I hope you’re planning the next one already, and that you’re going to let us all know soon].

We need to continue to discover our true potential. And the blogosphere helps. As do events like reboot.

I’m not a particular fan of any form of “chain” anything, but it’s not something I’m legalistic about. Kris Tuttle “tagged” me via this post while I was in hospital, so it behooves me to follow suit. [All your fault, Kris :-) ] Here’s my five “little-knowns”:

• 1. I’ve never learnt to swim or to drive. Ever. This is something I plan to correct over the next 12 months.
• 2. I received my first formal proposal of marriage when I was 17. From a man! And only learnt about it when I heard my siblings, parents and grandmother hooting with laughter. [I used to have long hair in those days, and a very short sighted crony of my grandmother’s thought that I was perfect for her grandson. And my grandmother, God bless her soul, couldn’t resist going along for the ride.]
• 3. I spent thirty-odd hours in a coma in the early 1980s after being worked over by a large group of skinheads. Some people say that it explains a lot.
• 4. I still find Blackadder and Fawlty Towers, and for that matter PG Wodehouse or even Laurel and Hardy, really funny. And still watch cartoons when I have an excuse to….the joys of parenthood!
• 5. I once played scrabble for nearly 20 hours non-stop with one of my childhood friends, Viraf Mehta. I believe Viraf was the first non-UK holder of the UK Scrabble Championship. He’s an unbelievable player.

And here are my five tags: AKMA Nilanjana at Kitabkhana
Ron Silliman Kathleen Herding Ric Hayman Over to the tagged.

Given the incredible materialism that passes for Christmas nowadays, I thought it would be appropriate to signal my somewhat timorous return with a random post about advertising.

I’ve always enjoyed Kathy Sierra’s blog, Creating Passionate Users. If you haven’t read it, you should. While there are many reasons to read her blog, one of the minor reasons I liked it was her use of what appeared to be 1950s and early 1960s “advertising” illustrations.

And that got me thinking. As we move to an age where the only true advertisements are recommendations, what is the role of the traditional advertisement going forward?

Recommendations I understand. They can come in many shapes and forms. People you know and trust telling you about products and services they like. A Long Tail aggregation from an anonymous population using collaborative filtering. A Wisdom Of Crowds thing where individual ratings are averaged out. A matching engine that takes your “buying” intentions and connects them with someone else’s “selling” intentions. And and and.

But what about advertisements? What possible role could they play? Despite seeing every man and his dog have an advertisement-based business model, I just couldn’t understand it. Somewhere inside me my Emperor’s-New-Clothes-Alarm kept going off.

Maybe we’re going to start time-shifting ads. Maybe the next generation of set-top boxes will allow you to set your preferences (which decade you’d like, what kind of goods or services, which region, what language, colour or not, average size, et cetera). Then, once your preferences are set (and of course you can amend them whenever) some sort of collaborative filter gets used to pump out the ads you want to see. Where you want to see them. When you want to see them.

Maybe these ads will be downloaded on to your set-top box as part of the installation process.

Have ads become a form of entertainment already? I wonder. And if so, can we have company A sponsor vintage ads put out by company B? Will there be a plethora of copyright and trade mark nonsense to follow?

It could be fun. When people realise that advertising has moved from With to Because. [If you want to know more about the Because Effect, take a look at this and this.] Continue reading “When Advertising meets The Because Effect”