A short, sort of review of Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows. What Google is Doing to our Brains.”
Many technology writers deify or reify technology. There is often an assumption that more technology is by definition a good thing. Nicholas Carr’s recent book challenges that. This is probably why many tech types don’t seem to like it. Looking through my blog archive, I’ve often disagreed with Carr, but rather than just base my [...]
AbleAdvisory: Living With Complexity (book)
Here’s a thumbs up to Don Norman’s (for a discussion on complex v. simple software applications and bootstrapping click thru to Joel Spolsky’s discussion on simplicity) New book, Living with Complexity. Business Week has named named him one of the…
On innovation
(image of Scott Berkun presenting via Chasingfun cc attribution. Thanks!) In this interview on the O’Reilly blog Scott Berkun nails it. How do you define “innovation”? Scott Berkun: I strongly recommend people use this word as little as possible. It’s mostly a distraction. Many great ideas and breakthroughs were achieved without people worrying if they [...]
Hi and lo-tech in Pacific Northwest
I took my son, Tommy along on a book trip to the great Northwest and I am so glad I did. It gave me a chance to do some detours I have missed out on since 1990 when my wife and I had been to some of them. Just north of Seattle, we toured the Bo…
The Kno is Not a Tablet. It’s a Workout Device
Seriously. At 5 and a half pounds it’s not exactly a lightweight tablet you would want to hold for hours. I have a very simple test for you: if you have an average 14”-15” laptop around, flip it open, hold it vertically, just like this: … and tell me how long you could comfortably hold [...]
‘The New Polymath’ is a Firehose of Innovation Stories
For years Vinnie Mirchandani has chronicled all kinds of innovation on his his must-read blog New Florence. New Renaissance. Now he’s taken his examination of technology and how it affects business to a whole new level with his new book…
Fred Brooks : The Design Of Design
After a long time, I got the opportunity to read a new book, that I would have loved to read several years back aptly named – The Design Of Design. Several decades back, the onset of a discipline called software engineering started with a big problem…
The gift of a book
I have benefited from generosity of many, many in the research, interviewing, proofing, reviews, now marketing of the book. So, in turn I and others are turning around and giving back in several ways: I have had book drawings at Sapience Cologn…
An author’s hour in heaven
When I started to write the book, a friend of mine wise cracked “All you need is a hairdo like Malcolm Gladwell’s”. You know I would kill for that hair But I am just as flattered by this comparison Tom Foydel makes between The New Polymath and Gladwell’s Outlier. Or the one Sadagopan makes with [...]
Great Read for Small Businesses and Startups: The Referral Engine
I loved John Jantsch’s book, “The Referral Engine“. Like the book jacket says, it’s about teaching your business to market itself. It’s funny, but I expected the book to be about something else from the title. I guess I had visions of multi-level marketing when I heard the word “referral”. While the strategies and tactics the [...]
