Books

James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, published in 2004, has been influential in financial markets and corporate transformations. It also has plenty of ideas relevant to social networking’s future. The book’s leading concept is that that collective intelligence – aggregating diverse opinions – can out-perform judgments made by alleged experts and executives. Estimates are better when they pool many invidividual investors’ bets; decisions are better when produced by decentralized organizations than by top-down initiatives.

I’ve been reading The Long Tail, the 2006 blockbuster extolling the unlimited consumer choice made possible by the internet. The book was written by Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine. Its title is now part of the marketing lexicon, and aptly captures the author’s thesis: there’s a lot of money to be made by offering goods beyond the top sellers. Niche products individually don’t account for much revenue, but cumulatively they add up to a lot of profit.

Jaron Lanier’s recent book, You Are Not A Gadget, is a broad criticism of the internet. Lanier thinks cyberspace is full of unimaginative software. Web 2.0 is window dressing on a tired paradigm. Silicon Valley is funding trivial applications.not much better than than the hasty business plans of the dot-bomb era. Users have bought into a mash-up universe where authorship is not rewarded and content is divorced from context. Anonymity and incivility rule.

Rework is as much a manifesto as a business guide. The content is less bombastic than some of its advance publicity, but be prepared for a polemic. Authors Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson (the inventor of Ruby on Rails) argue why you should keep your company’s size and products as small as possible. Their attitude toward growth for the sake of growth is skeptical, if not outright antagonistic. Their main exhibit is 37Signals, the company they founded, which has only 15 employees serving millions of customers.