Reading

Tech books

A year or so ago, I wrote about my dead tree web 2.0 reading list, which was all about what books were being published about the interactive web. I’ve bought most of those on the list, plus a bunch of others that folk suggested.

There are other books one can buy about this stuff though, which don’t just talk about the issues and culture of the web, but which actually tell you how to do things.

I don’t tend to buy too many of these, as a lot of the help one needs one can get from the web itself, but I got a couple through the post from Amazon the other day.

Using Drupal is a really good entry level guide to what is a fiendishly complicated, but amazingly powerful CMS. It’s genuinely readable and am really pleased I got it.

Ning for Dummies is a guide to using and setting up your own networks on Ning. As someone who Ninging is entirely based on playing with stuff, it’s great to have a resource to pick up and find out what some of those options I dare not touch do. Again, recommended reading.

One book I have had for a while, which I have to mention here, though, is WordPress for Dummies:

Which isn’t for Dummies at all, in fact it’s for very sensible people. It takes you right the way from setting up a WordPress.com blog to writing your own themes and plugins – awesome stuff.

What techie books do you swear by?

Meatball Sundae

I’m working my way through my dead tree reading list, and right now I’m burning through Seth Godin‘s Meatball Sundae. It’s terrific stuff.

Here’s one nugget from early on in the book -a list of ‘the foundations of new marketing’. It works for stuff other than marketing, though, I reckon, and might serve as a useful way of describing what worldview 2.0 might be:

  • Direct communication and commerce between producers and consumers
  • Amplification of the voice of the consumer and independent authorities
  • The need for an authentic story as the number of sources increases
  • Extremely short attention spans due to clutter
  • The Long Tail
  • Outsourcing
  • Google and the dicing of everything
  • Infinite channels of communication
  • Direct communication and commerce between consumers and consumers
  • The shifts in scarcity and abundance
  • The triumph of big ideas
  • The shift from ‘how many’ to ‘who’
  • New gatekeepers, no gatekeepers

I wonder how many of these things can be applied to government and the governed, rather than producers and consumers?

Bad blood river

William Shaw has a rant on Palimpsest about Tim Butcher’s Blood River:

Of course the real reason why the Congo is a hell hole has to do with the last 150 years of history, not with any darkness. The older part is documented in Hochschild’s brilliant history King Leopold’s Ghost. Back then it was about rubber. That was why Belgium slaughtered around 10 million Africans and brutalised milllions more. The last 15 years are more to do with the way we turn a blind eye to the way companies source the materials they need to make our laptops and mobile phones. Butcher acknowledges these arguments, but you sense he doesn’t really have much time for such liberal explanations. He sees Africa instead as eternally tribal and fractious. He has turned the wheel full circle to a kind of HM Stanley vision of Africa as something that only a strong hand could ever heal; the difference is that Butcher comes from an era which cannot condone such violence. As a result, he creates a picture of a country that nothing can redeem.

Entertaining and illuminating stuff.

Andrew O’Hagan

The Atlantic OceanI’m reading the marvellous The Atlantic Ocean by Andrew O’Hagan at the moment. It’s a collection of essays, mostly taken from The London Review of Books and is a wonderful eclectic collection of writing. Take this little gem, for example, from the opening lines of a piece about celebrity memoirs:

If you want to be a somebody nowadays, you’d better start by getting in touch with your inner nobody, because nobody likes a somebody who can’t prove they’ve been nobody all along.

Thoroughly recommended.

It’s stuff like this that proves, I think, that print has a future. Longer essays like these, don’t really work on the web. It’s hard to concentrate on the screen for too long, and often these pieces need mulling over, book or paper in hand, curled up on the sofa.

Load more posts!