What I’ve been reading

One of the nice things about this sum­mer is that I’ve had more time to read. Here’s a sample:

When Sysad­mins Ruled the Earth by Cory Doc­torow. In this short story, a sysad faces the ulti­mate out­age. Avail­able for free as PDF, HTML and a pod­cast at his web site, or buy the the Locus award win­ning com­pi­la­tion from Ama­zon.

Com­pa­nies should learn how to play “tag”

Every­thing is Mis­cel­la­neous by David Wein­berger. A mind-bending book about the mod­ern Web, with seri­ous impli­ca­tions for com­pet­i­tive strat­egy. This may become an optional read­ing for IS 7010 in the fall. I was pleased to learn that my tag­ging strate­gies can work bet­ter than tra­di­tional knowl­edge man­age­ment tech­niques! Weinberger’s dis­cus­sion of Wikipedia is bal­anced and inter­est­ing. Can com­pa­nies sat­isfy new key suc­cess fac­tors by let­ting users sort data as they see fit? See these inter­views at Boing Boing, read chap­ter 1 for free at the book’s web­site, or buy the book at Ama­zon.

The Dif­fer­ence Engine by William Gib­son and Bruce Ster­ling. A 1991 steam­punk clas­sic by two excel­lent writ­ers. In 1855 Eng­land, a new rul­ing class has taken power with the help of mechan­i­cal com­put­ers. But watch out for those pesky Lud­dites! Buy the book at Ama­zon.

Tagged as: Amazon, authority, book, competitive-advantage, computer, hardware, Internet, key-success-factors, ksf, mashup, network, podcast, social, steampunk, strategy, value-chain, Wikipedia