Wikinomics How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams

Wikinomics How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams

This book is about the new world of shared digital information production. It has a lot of spin and hype in the writing, but at the same time it reveals many new ideas. The book is quite entertaining to read and well written. It has a nice exuberant feeling to the writing which is clearly tech evangelist oriented.

With wikis, blogs, and other mass forms of internet communications we have become the producers of a large slice of our own media. Large chunks of the publishing world have been freed up from direct corporate control and formed it communities of production. Anyone with a computer and an internet connection can start creating their own content. This has extended beyond computers to include peripheral devices tethered to computers like camcorders, iphones, and similar things. The book does not talk a lot about this a lot, however.

Suddenly content can be shared in various spaces like Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, and Blogger. I belong to all four of these spaces. More importantly, the content is syndicated and connected together with advertising like Technorati, Entrecard, and other services. Everyone participating in a sense becomes a producer of content.

This has not just extended into the public spaces like blogs and wikis, but has also moved into corporations and universities. This is not as visible to most social networking users. The book covers the use of collaborative technologies in corporations and universities. Things like open source software, patent and idea sharing networks like yet2.com and Innocentive, and modular open source style manufacturing are discussed. It even discusses MITs fab lab which is a modular home manufacturing center.

The book points out we have in a very real sense become the designers of our own products and the producers of our own media. People don't wait to have new features put into their Lego sets they send in custom designs to the factories, or hack new features into their Xboxes. When a news story comes on television it is often the result of someone catching it on camcorder or writing about it on a blog. Sometimes this is better than what the television shows produce.

Welcome to the new world of Wikinomics or massive collaboration. Those who produce the best content win. According to the book, it takes seven skilled people to build a world class content site. This can be done anywhere in the world where people have the skills and the internet connection. The internet runs in an "Always On" mode. (I am not an always on kind of person.) Step in and get ready to face obsolescence in a flash. This world is merciless, full of hype, and offers no guarantees.

Wikinomics is deep and complex. However, it fails to point out that some of the ideas in this book are flawed. For example, in touting the Boeing 787 Dreamliners, they don't acknowledge that for a while there were production problems for the plane. They had not gotten their open source form of sourcing parts together that well.

Also, I found the section on Geek Squad to be an extreme example of hype. I would not buy a computer from Best Buy and saying that Geek Squad are the best possible technicians seems overblown. Having a technician drive up in a black and white volkswagon beetle is not that impressive. Having them fix my computer is.

I also can understand the desire for IBM and Red Hat Linux to push open source for people. For the non-technically minded linux is incredibly complex and not that well documented. IBM clearly makes it fortune from providing consulting services and customizing linux services which can cost a fortune. The initial up front costs can be cheaper, but the customization and technical support requires people who have excellent computer skills.

Despite this if you want to know a bit of history on Wikipedia, or other collaborative projects this book will give the basics as well as many interesting facts. For example, Wikipedia has exactly five full time employees. The site is almost entirely run by volunteers.

The book is great if you want to learn about how business is using collaborative tools. It even includes the hype to go with it. There is a profusion of ideas; ideagoras, peering, wikis, prosuming, Wikipedia, open source, and so much more. In addition to this profusion of ideas, it does include how Wikis and collaborative tools may have an effect on your workplace. A lot of the material is focused on things which are currently happening, not theory.

Morning Thoughts

La Censure by George Lafosse c 1874

Morning Thoughts

I am not happy with the publisher Chelsea Green's decision to limit sales of the book Obama's Challenge: America's Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency to Amazon.com for the first week of the release. This shows a disregard for openness in competition in the book industry. It also restricts people's choices of where to purchase books. In some ways, I am not a fan of Amazon's practices in selling books. I think it was a bad decision on the part of the publisher.

http://news.bookweb.org/6245.html

In a similar vein, September 27- October 4, 2008 is banned book week. There is a site up for booksellers and libraries http://bannedbooksweek.org/ . It shows one of my favorite books on the site, Maurcice Sendak In The Night Kitchen.

We have six of the ten Most Banned Books of 2007. Most are young adult titles or classics. I don't know why they want to ban teenage books so much. I put up a small display of the six books. I am going to try and get the other four as we go forward this month.

I am up to page 200 of Wikinomics. It is getting even more complicated. Wikinomics is writing about mashups, combining two or more sites to create a third sites. For example, you might combine google maps with the location of vacation rentals to create a new kind of information-- maps to vacation rentals.

I also took a break again and started reading Sly Mongoose by Tobias Buckell. I especially like Pepper, the main character who has been in all the novels. Pepper is the essence of being beat down and still going. I also like the new enemy, space zombies. They are a lot of fun to read about. I also like the continuity of setting. The Azteca even though they lose their alien masters, still remain a coherent culture in the novels. They proclaim that the aliens were false gods and become a democracy led by a council.

Today, I plan on doing some weeding of the business books. I still have quite a bit more to do with this.

Morning Thoughts

Information is where it is at. Information cannot be created or destroyed according to some theories much like matter or energy.

Morning Thoughts

I put down Wikinomics for a night to read something a little bit more lightweight. I read Space Vulture by Gary K. Wolfe and Archbishop John J. Myers. This book is something that might have been written in the golden age of science fiction. It is very campy. However, there is a much more complex underpinning of morals to this story. I am going to take some time to review it later. Gary K. Wolfe is famous for creating Roger Rabbit.

Wikinomics is a fairly complex books. It covers a lot of collaborative ideas like prosuming, open source software, wikis, and ideagoras. It really makes you think when you read the book.

Afternoon Thoughts

I just got back from vacation. I did a variety of minor clean up activities, filing some legal looseleafs, making sure there were plenty of books on the display stand, walking around the stacks to make sure everything looked orderly, and picking up various papers to check from my work mailbox.

Most of my orders were processed during my vacation. I returned some of the books which I read during the vacation.

A bunch of science fiction books came in for me to read, Arthur C. Clarke and Frederik Pohl The Last Theorem, Gregory Frost Lord Tophet A Shadowbridge Novel, Mark L. Van Name Slanted, and Tobias Buckell Sly Mongoose. The book I really want to read is Sly Mongoose. I think this book will be nominated for a hugo award.

Library Fines, Good Morning, Afternoon Thoughts

The 2005 Hugo Award from Worldcon.

Library Fines

This is a nice little article on a woman going to jail for not paying $38.00 in library fines. I think it is a bit extreme to call the police for not paying library fines. We have a collection agency that calls to collect money from patrons and attaches the bill to a persons credit card. We also put a block on a card if they have over $10.00 in fines. Still, it is an interesting if a little bit wacky article. The New York Post is a slightly muckraking paper.

http://www.nypost.com/seven/08232008/news/nationalnews/this_nice_woman_was_arrested__handcuffed_125689.htm

Good Morning

Good morning to you all. I am having a nice moring. I have a 16 ounce cup of coffee in front of me from the local deli. Hot and fresh and time to wake up. Today, I am going to do some recaps from the news. There is going to be a Hugo award for the best graphic story. I am surprised that Locus and SFSite have not picked up on this yet.

http://www.icv2.com/articles/news/13139.html

Steven Brust author of the Taltos novels has written a free fan fiction novel based on the television series Firefly. You can get it here. I hear the magical call of the word free.

http://dreamcafe.com/firefly.html

Afternoon Thoughts

I have been reading some more of Wikinomics. I am learning some interesting facts. Wikipedia has five full time paid staff members, the rest are volunteers. It takes approximately seven people to build a web company from scratch that can start on the way to becoming a top competitor in the web industry. (A pretty wild claim). Still a quite entertaining read.

Good Morning

Image of the Canadian Library of Parliament from 1877. The picture looks more like the outside of a gothic castle than a library to me.

Good Morning

Yesterday was a day for lawyers and accountants. A day which I wish would have magically and permanently disappeared. There is nothing like getting up to go to see a lawyer early in the morning, then going and spending an afternoon with an accountant to try and solve a financial fiasco. It is a blessing that day is over.

I read some more of Wikinomics which is turning out to be a very entertaining and informative book.

I also rejoined Technorati. My anger is now over against Technorati. I realized that I probably should not have gone on a favoriting binge. It is like the endless clicking on Entrecard which I still can't get to work in my browser at home. Technorati is basically a way to get more traffic on a blog and be recognized.

Afternoon Thoughts

I got a chance to go to the library this afternoon and return some books. I also got a chance to spend a little time on the library computers. It wasn't that exciting this afternoon.

Morning Thoughts, Afternoon Thoughts

This image was taken by a government employee. I think this image is in the public domain. Anyways, there it is a great photograph of Elvis with Nixon.

Morning Thoughts

I don't know what happened to me yesterday morning. I couldn't get myself to write anything at all. Right now, I am drinking my coffee a little bit before noon. I read a little bit of Snopes this morning. A little odd and humorous news.
http://www.snopes.com/daily/index.asp

I am trying to do very little. I went to the laundromat yesterday and read some more of Manga The Complete Guide by Jason Thompason. Jason Thompson is an editor for Viz publisher which publishes manga. It was a very interesting book to read through. One of the huge faults with this book is that it only reviews manga from Japan that has translated into english. There is no coverage of original American manga from companies like Tokypop, Del Rey Manga, or Darkhores. There is now a lot of manga style comics being written by authors from others countries than Japan like Korea, China, and Canada.

Still the book is quite interesting. It reviews manga from the very beginnings starting with Four Immigrants Manga all the way through 2006. It uses a star rating system for the different manga comics with stars and half stars. I think it is pretty accurate. There is a lot of material covered Ranma 1/2, Lone Wolf and Cub, Iron Wok Jan, Harlem Beat, Sailor Moon, and a huge variety of subjects are covered.

In addition to the coverage of individual reviews there are two page overviews of different subjects in manga like Cooking, Crime and Yakuza, Fantasy, Japanese History, Otaku, Martial Arts, and many other subjects. This is quite interesting. It also includes discussions of the more risque material in manga, cross dressing, gay and lesbian, and sex.

There are separate review sectsions for Yaoi and Gay Manga, and Adult Manga. As part of its rating system, the book discusses many of the issues with differences in culture. The Japanese have very different taboos about nudity than westerners or people in the United States. They also have a tendency to include sexual innuendo about little girls. This is something we are careful about in our library.

We have had some interesting issues with Sailor Moon and older men (There is even a "Sailor Moon" fan made dating sim which is quite creepy.) Because of the issues of sexuality, we have to be very careful when ordering things for teenagers. Some of the material goes right to the adult section where there are less problems.

Ranma 1/2 for people in the United States also has some interesting connotations. When water is thrown on him, he turns into her. For some people in the United States this is more x-rated than sex. It would be no problem in the adult section, but some people sometimes object to it being in teen section or getting the book at all.

Still even in the adult section, the material can be quite explicit. I was surprised at how explicit Path of the Assassins was. It is on the top 50 bestselling manga by Diamond Comic Distributors. Just because something sells well does not make it non-explicit.

There is a glossary and an artist index. The artist index includes the titles they have published as well as links to their website if it is available.

The book has numerous black and white illustrations of covers. The back has a photo credits section. There are also a few panels from different manga in the book.

I think that this is an excellent guide to Japanese Manga. The key here is that it only covers manga in translation to english from Japanese. This is an awful lot of material.



Afternoon Thoughts

I looked at 101 Ways To Promote Your Website by Susan Sweeney, C.A. . In a way I was not impressed with the book. On the cover it says "Main Selection of Computer Books Directs book club" I wanted to see if this club still existed, so I looked it up and the membership is closed. There are also a lot of complaints Computer Books Direct from various people. This knocked the book down a little bit in my mind. I also read the very short section on blogs and was not impressed with her suggestions for promoting blogs. They were very basic. So, I am putting the book down for now.

I also took a few minutes to start reading, Wikinomics How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams. It seems entertaining so far. They have a blog promoting the book which has a nice fluffy branded feeling to it. http://www.wikinomics.com/blog/

I went to my local library today. However, I got there a bit late. The computers were closing in fifteen minutes so I decided to take a pass. I picked up a few items to read, The Darkness, A Vampire Huntress Legend by L.A. Banks and The Discworld Graphic Novels The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett. I am hoping this will have a nice dose of humor in it. I also picked up a DVD, Inuyasha, I have not watched any of the television series anime, I have watched quite a few anime movies that are stand alone. So, this will be a slightly different experience for me.

Entrecard is still not working on my home computer. I wish they could tell me what was wrong with it, but they have not been able to.

Morning Thoughts

Morning Thoughts

I felt a little tired on the train in. Then I drank some coffee and still felt a little tired. Then I took a light nap and did not miss my stop. I'm still a tiny bit groggy.

When I got in to work, I went to my main focus right now, weeding out the business management books. We have a lot of really old material. Mixed in with this is a lot of new material which I ordered. One of the books I ordered is Wikinomics How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Dan Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams. Nothing like new economy headgames. Hopefully, this book should be interesting to read.

I was feeling "googley moogley" as The Ferocious Beast says from Maggy and the Ferocious Beast children's cartoon, so I pulled a Youtube video of Don Tapscott about the book Wikinomics. Or if you want to be a little more focused "googley", adjective-- like google the search engine. Not googley like googley eyes. Now for some corporate speak directly from the Google Blog. "What Makes A Design Googley." http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/04/what-makes-design-googley.html

A book came in for me this afternoon, Saturn's Children by Charles Stross. It has an appropriately themed purple haired, purple eyed sexy android on the cover. The main character is named Freya Nakamichi and is a femmebot. Human beings went extinct sometime in the 21st century, and society is run by androids. I like the premise of the book. It should be interesting.