First, this isn’t really a book. It’s a collection of somewhat repetitive articles. I don’t think the format detracts too much, but know what you’re getting into.
Second, it’s an older book in a fast moving industry. It needs to be updated. They should update it every year. They won’t, but they should, so just keep that in mind as you read it. It’s already out of date, despite the 2.0-ness.
What it does do, it does well. That is, even though the author is not a trained economist, he accomplishes the only real purpose of that profession, which is explicate the economic flows that makeup the ecosystem, the industry, the market, the various players within and outside the companies involved.
-Shlok
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“And it is awful here, there is no other way to say it. But I believe that Detroit is America’s city. IT was the vanguard of our way up, just as it is the vanguard of our way down. And one hopes, the vanguard of our way up again. Detroit is Pax Americana. The birthplace of mass production, the automobile, the cement road, the refrigerator, frozen peas, high-paid blue-collar jobs, home ownership and credit on a mass scale. America’s way of life was built here.”
I’ve read and written a lot about how America is dying. Regulatory capture, Wall Street, global arbitrage and deviant entrepreneurs collaborated to massacre the middle class.
But I always came at it from the perspective that the country is mid-collapse. That we still have time. That we can still swing the wheel and, for the most part, make it through. Sure, we’ll pay $8 for a gallon of gas, we’ll overpay for armies of contractors we don’t need, but we will make it through. We’re America after all.
Charlie LeDuff convinced me we may be too late. The book is aptly titled, Detroit: An American Autopsy. What if the land of the free, of prosperity, of two cars and a picket fence succumbed to the corrupt, the incompetent, the immoral?
-Shlok
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Using Evernote to coordinate some quality research work.
Works fine as a personal tool. Nice to have stuff sync across the Mini, iPad, and iPhone. It’s missing a dedicated todo function though. Would be nice to have folks on the team assign stuff directly in there. (Mailbox and Orchestra are owning that.)
Anyway, it’s pretty cool, but Evernote is a total pain in the ass when it comes to shared workflows.
First problem. I create a notebook and want another user to have access. I’m expressing a degree of trust that is the basis for our shared work. The software should reflect that.
Evernote lets her add, change, delete the notes within the folder. Great.
It does not let her ‘tag’ the contents therein. I have to define the tag taxonomy, and then he can use it, but he can’t add tags to it. So now I have to spend time processing what he puts in rather than letting him do that for me. Or no one – in which case we all use the search function, a dirty solution.
I mean, fair enough. There’s a workflow where that makes sense. One notebook/product owner. Fine.
But there’s a dozen cases where it doesn’t. Why force a notebook owner to manage a taxonomy/notebook if they don’t want to?
That kind of friction is how pretty software with baked in flows turns into a stupid infodump.
More annoying is the stubbornness of this. There’s little hope of adding an option that corrects this massive flaw (their forum has had this requested, repeatedly, since 2011 with the CTO just repeatedly brushing it off).
Second problem: That manager-dictated-taxonomy only applies to a specific notebook. I have to recreate/create a new one for each additional notebook. And there’s no sub-notebooks on shared notebooks. So I’m either forced to use one notebook for the entire business and just fill it with thousands of documents that I have to manage the tags for, or a few dozen notebooks where I have to manage tags for each, share specifically.
-Shlok
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Krishna: A Journey Within by Abhishek Singh
The art in this graphic novel by is absolutely stunning – moreso because the creator did every aspect of this book. The writing is over the top at times – “The dawn of my childhood was nestled in a cradle of dreams” – though the story does not suffer for these indulgences.
That said, I wish there was more: when Krishna gives the two sides the option of either him or his army; Balarama leaving the battlefield; the lifting of Govardhan. These are major moments in the Krishna story that are inexplicably missing. I mean, edits have to be made somewhere, I get that. But I really, really, would have liked to see those scenes.
Major props to Image for putting this out. Indian mythology needs more reimaginations, more variants. It’s ossifying and dying, which sucks, because this stuff is rich and amazing and can be formative. (It was for me anyway.)
-Shlok
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Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator
This book is not your classic marketing tome filled with case studies. And it’s definitely not a tell-all featuring Tucker Max, Dov Charney, and Robert Greene drunkenly grinding on a beach somewhere.
No. This is a book for thinkers. For those who have spent time working and navigating the information terrain. For those who found that it is easy to de-tether from reality and drift. For those who see that there’s great potential in the web but find it falling far short of that mark, instead dying on a vine, desperately reaching for dwindling CPC/CPM dollars.
Trust Me, I’m Lying is a critique of the top .01% of blogs (that hallowed tier of Mashable, Gawker, Jezebel, Business Insider, etc) and the control they exert over your reality.
And if there’s one person in the world who can explain that in depth, it’s Ryan Holiday.
Because Ryan has wielded the flow of electronic information as a weapon. He’s both made kings and taken down targets. It’s no surprise that he is methodical and exacting in his explanation of how knowledge don’t matter in a world where only pageviews do. How every headline is evil. How truth is immaterial. He even goes far as to describe the evolution of text media, and how we’ve been down this yellow journalism road before.
His honesty is refreshing, his vision scary. Exactly the kind of book worth reading.
-Shlok
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