An online notebook
Well done to Richard Smedley who has won my spare – but pristine! – copy of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers in the first and perhaps last competition to be held here on DavePress.
Richard blogs at Good GNUs and is @richardsmedley on Twitter. Am sure he will be sharing his thoughts on the book with us all soon! 😉
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?
Yet more dead tree web 2.0 reading…
And yes, that is WordPress for Dummies – it’s a great book with tonnes of stuff for newbies and experienced WordPressers alike – recommended!
It’s my birthday today, I am now in my 30th year. 29 years old! Hopefully this won’t mean lots of pontificating over the next 12 months about what I have achieved, and what I am going to do with myself in the future.
Anyway, I had some lovely gifts, including a top selection of dead tree web 2.0 reading material:
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| The Future of the Internet Johnathan Zittrain |
Everything is Miscellaneous David Weinberger |
Groundswell Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff |
Plenty to get my teeth into there.
I also got lots of lovely birthday well-wishes via Twitter and Facebook – so thanks to everyone for that. Best of all though was this from Paul Caplan via Flickr:
There are a number of books out there which are covering a lot of the stuff I am interested in with regard to the web and collaboration. It might be worth coming up with a reading list – how about a challenge to read them all by the end of the year?!
These aren’t necessarily all web 2.0 specific books: some cover background and the history of the technology too.
1. Here Comes Everybody – Clay Shirky
2. We-think: The Power of Mass Creativity – Charles Leadbeater
3. A Brief History of the Future: Origins of the Internet – John Naughton
4. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything – Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams
5. Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder – David Weinberger
6. The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual – Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, and Doc Searls
7. The Long Tail: How Endless Choice Is Creating Unlimited Demand – Chris Anderson
8. Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition and Still Can’t Get a Date – Robert X Cringely
9. Naked Conversations : How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers – Robert Scoble and Shel Israel
10. The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy – Andrew Keen
Are there any classics that I have managed to miss? Or are some of my picks utter dross that shouldn’t be touched with a bargepole?
Disclosure: the links to Amazon are associate links, which provide a bit of money towards Palimpsest, the arts and politics discussion forum I run.