I just received my copy of Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky this past Monday from Amazon. I know I could have quite easily picked it up this weekend at Barnes and Noble, but I was lazy and truthfully quite busy.

In any case, so far I have read about half of the book and am very happy (although not surprised) to say that I like it very much. Although many of the things that Clay discusses in the book thus far are based upon stories he told in the Social Facts class he taught at ITP or things that I have already heard his opinions on (through that class and general discussions with him), the way they are presented in the book make it far from boring or re-iterative. I especially think that the way he discusses "user-generated content" in terms of sharing, collaborating and action is particularly interesting and important to digest, particularly for someone like me who is fundamentally interested in action.

My favorite thought of the book so far: "Love motivates people to bake a cake and money motivates people to make an encyclopedia. Now, though, we can do big things for love"

More to come.....

Posted by Cat at 12:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A friend of mine recently gave me his copy of Linked by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi. Given that he usually has reasonably good reading recommendations and that he thoroughly enjoyed my recommendation of Emergence by Steven Johnson, which I have now read twice, I thought that it would be a good read. Unfortunately, it wasn't all that interesting at all. In the beginning, I had found it somewhat readable, figuring that it would slowly get to some relevant point. It never really did, seeming to simply rehash things I had already known and making conclusions that were somewhat obvious. For someone that has zero background in the idea of networks, perhaps it might be an easy starting point, but towards the end I found it so boring that I'm not even quite sure how I finished it. Big sorry to my friend but this was definitely not worth the effort.

In other reading news, I am finding J2ME in a Nutshell to be quite a good purchase. Java is quite difficult for me to grasp, even after plowing through Head First Java. But this book is slowly making sense to me. I have also just finished Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML, which I borrowed from another webdesigner friend, just to have yet another css reference book. I found myself skipping most of it, but the aspects of css that I didn't yet understand are now very clear. Head First books have a great ability to talk down to you, which is sometimes necessary for me with programming, Its probably not really worth it for anyone else to buy if they know anything at all about HTML, but hey it was a free read so why not.

Posted by Cat at 07:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)