"50 Digital Ideas you really need to know" by Tom Chatfield

This series is very up and down. Some of the books are brilliant (Philosophy, Physics, Maths), some have got lots of good bits (Economics) and some have the occasional nugget of gold within considerable yawn (Literature). This is in the third category.

Bizarrely, Chatfield tackles each of the issues in terms of their history which, in the context of the internet, dates back to the old pre-web days of the 1980s. Sometimes he goes back all the way to the birth of computing. I suppose this was a good tactic because I knew less about this than anything else. Where I had some knowledge of a topic his necessarily shallow approach added very little to what I knew so I had little new to think about.

Disappointing. Useful for reference.

February 2012; 203 pages

"Wikinomics" by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams

“If you’re going to be naked, you better be buff.” (p293)

A fascinating book although a little out of date despite being “fully revised and updated for paperback”. The pace of internet change is such that 2008 is long ago. Thus it recognises that facebook is growing and on the horizon but doesn’t realise quite how massive it will be by 2011. It applauds del.icio.us although that service has been effectively closed down by Yahoo. Twitter isn’t mentioned.

My biggest reservation is that although I could understand the many reasons for going open and sharing and collaborating etc that companies demonstrated and although I understood that all these things helped massively cut costs and improve rapidity and market responsiveness they failed in their ultimate promise in that I failed to understand how these things could be used to make money (rather than just saving on the costs front). Google is basically an ad company. Amazon sells books. eBay is a traditional auction house taking a cu of the selling price. But how else do you make money? Ask Twitter.

August 2011; 315 pages