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Love Books? Have Cell Phone? Earn Hundreds Of Dollars Searching For Used Books
Love Books? Have Cell Phone? Earn Hundreds Of Dollars Searching For Used Books
(ContentDesk) August 17, 2005 -- Daniel Eaton, Jr. makes several hundred dollars a week armed with just a cell phone as he combs thrift stores, used and discount bookstores and Friends of the Library sales looking for for BookSweep.com, an international retailer of used books.He's one of more than 800 of what BookSweep.com calls Professional Book Buyers (PBBs) scattered across the nation. And the company is looking for more just like him.The Book Buyers use their cell phones to look for used books. They place a call into the company's software system and then punch in the book's price plus its International Standard Book Number (ISBN) via the phone's key pad to see if the book is of value to the company. If yes, the PBB hears a "buy" order and he or she will receive from $1.50 to $2.50 commission for each book purchased. Book Buyers then pack up the and ship them at BookSweep's expense to company headquarters in Utah."Many of our full-time Book Buyers are bringing in $500 or $600 a week, said Steve Jenson, 31, of Hyrum, Utah, BookSweep.com co-owner. "Most of our Book Buyers do this part time and make $100-$200. We have families who use it, single parents, students, full timers – all demographics have found it a great and easy way to make money."Book Buyers need have no experience as booksellers. But a love of and used bookstores is helpful. Book Buyers are not BookSweep.com's employees, but are independent contractors. For more information, check out the company's Web site: www.booksweep.comIman Khatibn, 25, is one of BookSweep.com' many part-time Book Buyers. The Stockton, CA, resident looks for just three to four hours a week with her two young children by her side. She purchases and ships 50-100 a week to BookSweep.com, bringing in a minimum of $75 to more than $200 a week for less than half a day's work."BookSweep.com is the easiest and most enjoyable job a person could have," she said. "You can do it anywhere in the country and you don't have to pay a babysitter while you search because you can take your kids with you. You don't even need to work that many hours to make the money you want to make."Khatibn said she plans to grow her book buying work into a full-time income.Eaton, a former clerk at Barnes and Noble, already works 40-60 hours a week as a Book Buyer. About three-quarters of his gross income comes from BookSweep.com."I decided earlier this year that I wanted to find another business opportunity," he said. "I'd sold Star Wars collectibles off and on at eBay for a few years, but I decided to focus on when I discovered BookSweep.com because their system makes its so much easier find the books."Jenson and his friend Norm Poulsen, 30, of Boise, Idaho, started BookSweep.com in July 2004. The two former Utah State University buddies had been online booksellers for about five years prior to founding BookSweep.com, selling they found on Amazon.com, eBay and other sites. They brainstormed a way to bring the power of using Book Buyers nationwide to help them grow their inventory and hired a developer
through Utah State's Innovation Campus to create their BookSweep.com software.They started storing in the garage of the woman who is now their warehouse operations manager, but outgrew that space within a month. They then moved into a 2,200-square-foot warehouse, yet needed to expand the warehouse in October 2004 to its current 5,000 square feet. They now house 35,000 and their accountant has valued their eight-employee company at close to $1 million, Jenson said.Contact:Steve Jenson/Norm Poulsenwww.booksweep.come-mail protected from spam bots / e-mail protected from spam bots435-760-9600 / 360-970-5903.
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Googled: The End of the World as We Know It by Ken Auletta | Book review
<div class="track"><img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.20.3/57437?ns=guardian&pageName=Googled%3A+The+End+of+the+World+as+We+Know+It+by+Ken+Auletta+%7C+Book+review%3AArticle%3A1359698&ch=Books&c3=Obs&c4=Computing+and+the+net+%28Books+genre%29%2CBusiness+and+finance+%28Books+genre%29%2CGoogle+%28Technology%29%2CBooks%2CTechnology%2CCulture+section%2CSergey+Brin+%28Media%29&c6=John+Lanchester&c7=10-Feb-21&c8=1359698&c9=Article&c10=Review&c11=Books&c13=&c25=&c30=content&h2=GU%2FBooks%2FComputing+and+the+net" width="1" height="1" /></div><p class="standfirst">Google's mix of innocence and arrogance has served it well so far. But this book suggests the future may not be so simple, says John Lanchester</p><p>No company in history has grown as fast as Google. This is a matter of money ? within 400 weeks of its founding, it was earning revenues of $20bn a year ? but also of reach. The 1998 start-up has reached deep into the everyday experience of millions, put itself in the centre of the internet culture that is defining the new century, and had a disruptive impact on some industries and a potentially terminal one on others: advertising, television, newspapers, telephony, and publishing. From a technological and economic point of view, Google is one of the wonders of the world.</p><p>That's not the same thing as saying it is an unequivocal force for good. With most companies, that caveat would be a side issue, but since Google's mission statement is "Don't be evil", and since the <a href="http://investor.google.com/ipo_letter.html" title="founder's letter which accompanied its share prospectus">founder's letter which accompanied its share prospectus</a> stated an ambition to "make the world a better place" six times in eight pages, people hold it to a higher standard. A good book, David Vise's <em>The Google Story</em>, has already been written about the early years of the company. Now, though, Google has grown so big and so powerful that the moment for simple gee-whizzery is past. Ken Auletta, one of America's best business journalists, has turned his attention on the firm, with particular reference to the challenges it faces. Many of these bear on the tension between the company's good intentions and the actual consequences of what it does.</p><p>In <em>Googled</em>, Auletta identifies one central, crucial characteristic of Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the company's founders. They don't ask for permission: they do the thing they want to do, and rely on the fact that people will understand the point of it afterwards. This goes right back to the earliest days of Google. Search engines don't actually search the internet itself: if they did, the net would grind to a halt under the effect of all the searches being made. This is spectacularly true today, when Google makes three billion searches every day, but it was true even at the beginnings of the net. What Google does instead is make a copy of the entire internet ? everything they can get access to ? store it on their own servers, and then index it. It is this index that Google searches. In addition, the company keeps a copy of every search ever made, which in turn speeds up subsequent searches. The computer power involved is unimaginably huge. Google won't reveal the figures, so all we know is that it involves millions of bog-standard PCs cabled together.</p><p>Note the key fact: the basic move in Google's rise to dominance was copying stuff without asking. Don't ask for permission, and rely on the fact that people will love the results when they see them.</p><p>This model has stood the company in very good stead, but it plainly involves an attitude in which innocence and arrogance are emulsified together. Auletta is very good on this: the complete sincerity of the Googlers' good intentions, blended with their oblivious indifference to other people's perspectives. There are examples of this on virtually every page of <em>Googled</em>. A small but telling one came with Gmail, the company's email programme, which offered users a then-unprecedented gigabyte of free storage. When it first arrived, Gmail had no delete button. All your emails were stored for ever. Larry Page was insistent on the point, and wanted to teach people that there was so much free space that there was now no need to delete anything. But the inability to delete freaked users out, and Google grudgingly put a small delete button on the page. Not a big issue, but one pointing to a cultural gap between engineers who are certain they are right, and customers who persist in wanting what they want.</p><p>Google is often written about as a ra-ra success story, but <em>Googled</em> is a surprisingly downbeat book. Auletta looks at the company in its pomp, and sees problems and threats everywhere. At one point in 2008, Google was offering 150 products. Only one ? targeted advertising ? made real money. Some of them cost a huge amount: YouTube, for instance, lost $500m in 2009. For most companies, half a billion dollars is quite a lot to lose ? and that hasn't been Google's only problem. The two hottest things on the net over the past few years, Facebook and Twitter, have both been social-networking sites ? a trend that Google missed. The company's activities in China, and its public agonising about them, made them look as if they put profits above ethics, but wanted to be admired for feeling uncomfortable about the fact.</p><p>At the same time, the violation of copyright involved in <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/sep/07/google-library-digitisation-new-zealand" title="Google's programme to digitise books">Google's programme to digitise books</a> has caused a bitter backlash. That was an example of the no-permission policy going badly wrong, because as Brin told Auletta, if they had asked authors and publishers, "we might not have done the project". That's interesting to learn, and it's also interesting that the book-scanning machine used was built by Larry Page himself, as the "20 per cent" project he undertook in the time the company gives engineers to work on their own ideas. It would be nice to see one of these machines, but Google won't reveal anything about them ? they never give anything at all away about their own technology.</p><p>That's an issue. Google's mission is "to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", but that doesn't extend to its own intellectual property, which it guards with ferocity. As its share prospectus says: "Our patents, trademarks, trade secrets, copyrights and all of other intellectual property rights are important assets for us... any significant impairment to our intellectual property rights could harm our business or our ability to compete." That's true, but it is hypocritical to pretend that the same isn't true for everybody else.</p><p>Auletta's superbly reported book is fair and balanced but it offers little to contradict the view that the company has little understanding of the businesses it is trying to disrupt. There is a vivid moment when Brin tells Auletta, apropos <em>Googled</em>, that "people don't buy books" and "you might as well put it online. More people will read it and get excited about it". Auletta points out the failure of early attempts to do that, and then goes on to grill Brin:</p><p>"Following Google's business model, would he expect authors to generate their income by selling advertising in their books? If there was no advance from a publisher, who would pay to cover the writer's travel expenses? (I made 13 week-long round trips to Google [in California] from New York, rented a car, stayed at hotels, and paid for dinner interviews most nights.) With no publisher, who would edit and copyedit the book, and how would they get paid? Who would pay lawyers to vet it? Who would hire people to market the book so that all those potential online readers could discover it? The usually voluble Brin grew quiet, ready to change the subject."</p><p>I'll bet he did.</p><p><em>John Lanchester's latest book is </em>Whoops: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay<em> (Allen Lane)</em></p><div class="related" style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><ul><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/computingandthenet">Computing and the net</a></li><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/businessandfinance">Business and finance</a></li><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/google">Google</a></li><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/sergeybrin">Sergey Brin</a></li></ul></div><br/><div class="terms"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk">guardian.co.uk</a> © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our <a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html">Terms & Conditions</a> | <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds">More Feeds</a></div><p style="clear:both" />
Et cetera: Steven Poole's non-fiction roundup | Book reviews
<div class="track"><img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.20.3/83445?ns=guardian&pageName=Et+cetera%3A+Steven+Poole%27s+non-fiction+roundup+%7C+Book+reviews%3AArticle%3A1342112&ch=Books&c3=Guardian&c4=Books%2CCulture+section%2CGoogle+%28Technology%29%2CComputing+and+the+net+%28Books+genre%29%2CArt+%28Books+genre%29&c6=Steven+Poole&c7=10-Jan-30&c8=1342112&c9=Article&c10=Feature%2CReview&c11=Books&c13=Steven+Poole%27s+non-fiction+choice+%28series%29&c25=&c30=content&h2=GU%2FBooks%2FGoogle" width="1" height="1" /></div><p class="standfirst">Communications technology, books and 'convergence and bizarre associations'</p><p><strong>A Better Pencil</strong>, by Dennis Baron (Oxford, £13.99)</p><p>Computers are destroying the written word and generating a cultural tsunami of incivility and illiteracy, moan today's bookish technophobes; yet, as linguist Baron's highly enjoyable book shows, such alarm has greeted every new communications technology in history. Writing was going to destroy people's memories; printed books were more superficial than inscribed parchment; pencils with rubbers on the end were going to rot schoolchildren's minds because they would no longer need to think before scribbling; typewriters were going to leach all the humanity from letters. Thoreau was sceptical of the newfangled telegraph, though he was himself a communications-technology entrepreneur, being in the pencil-manufacturing business.</p><p>Baron's argument ranges from the Unabomber ("It would be difficult to argue that one goal of the do-it-yourself bomber is to restore craft, artistry, and human dignity to the manufacture of explosives") to the surprisingly difficult task of writing on clay tablets, and the difficulties of early typewriters or the first computer word-processing programs. He writes with infectious curiosity and wit, and a confidence that writing is in no danger from modern gadgets: most of what we do on them, after all, is still "word-processing".</p><p><strong>The Case for Books</strong>, by Robert Darnton (PublicAffairs, £13.99)</p><p>Computers may not be threatening writing, but are they threatening reading? In a series of incisive articles for the New York Review of Books, reproduced here, book historian Robert Darnton has limned the potential dangers to scholarship of the Google Book Search project. It has sloppy quality control ("Google employs thousands of engineers but, as far as I know, not a single bibliographer"), and will be an unchallengeable monopoly that could, if it wanted, raise prices sharply.</p><p>Like any bibliophile, Darnton finds the prospect of a universal digital library appealing; but physical libraries, he argues, will not be made obsolete. The volume also includes essays in book history: pieces on commonplace books, the compositing of Shakespeare's plays, or Voltaire's deal-making with pirate publishers. Several of Dennis Baron's lessons are echoed here: there was never such thing as a fixed, authoritative text; the physicality of books enables serendipitous discovery; and, in a rather beautifully huffy formulation, "computerised texts communicate a specious mastery over space and time". For a moment, luxuriance in specious masteries sounded like a fine description of our whole age.</p><p><strong>Everything that Rises</strong>, by Lawrence Weschler (Atlantic, £15.99)</p><p>This is one book that revels in its physicality: confidently square and printed on semi-glossy paper, the better to display the images from painting, photography, graphic art and reportage between which the author argues for "convergence, bizarre associations, eerie rhymes, whispered recollections", constructing a kind of benign conspiriology of the image. A skyline of New York City post-9/11 is placed atop Vermeer's <em>View of Delft</em>; Monica Lewinsky is inserted into the <em>Mona Lisa</em>; and the facial similarity between Newt Gingrich and Slobodan Milosevic prompts a comparison between their rhetorical behaviour: "fundamentalist, peremptory, and intolerant". The book's governing idea ? that any connection, no matter how apparently arcane or arbitrary, may conceal some truth ? occasionally leads Weschler into mere juxtaposition, but the cumulative effect is mesmerising. By the end I was looking at my surroundings with a newly suspicious eye.</p><div class="related" style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><ul><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/google">Google</a></li><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/computingandthenet">Computing and the net</a></li><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/art">Art</a></li></ul></div><div class="author"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/stevenpoole">Steven Poole</a></div><br/><div class="terms"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk">guardian.co.uk</a> © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our <a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html">Terms & Conditions</a> | <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds">More Feeds</a></div><p style="clear:both" />
Fun Inc: Why Games are the 21st Century's Most Serious Business by Tom Chatfield | Book review
<div class="track"><img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.20.3/8988?ns=guardian&pageName=Fun+Inc%3A+Why+Games+are+the+21st+Century%27s+Most+Serious+Business+by+Tom+C%3AArticle%3A1336539&ch=Books&c3=Obs&c4=Books%2CTechnology%2CCulture+section%2CGames+%28Technology%29%2CComputing+and+the+net+%28Books+genre%29&c6=Naomi+Alderman&c7=10-Jan-18&c8=1336539&c9=Article&c10=Review&c11=Books&c13=&c25=&c30=content&h2=GU%2FBooks%2FGames" width="1" height="1" /></div><p class="standfirst">Here is a compelling defence of the much maligned but fantastically successful computer game</p><p>It's a curious fact that, though videogames are now the world's largest entertainment industry in financial terms, they are rarely reviewed in the mainstream media. There's a thriving world of academic discussion about gaming but <em>Newsnight Review</em> or <em>The Culture Show </em>hardly ever feature them, and newspapers give them far less coverage than those other pointless-but-fun games played on a field with a ball. It's curious too that, despite their financial success, it's so easy to find people who've not only never played a videogame but who feel viscerally that they're a pernicious waste of time. If games are an artform, arts journalism is mostly uninterested. If they're a sport, they're not one we treat as admirable. The sale of games is increasing by 20% a year but, outside the gaming press, we're not really talking about them.</p><p>Tom Chatfield's absorbing new book about the gaming industry is therefore to be welcomed. It is cool-headed on issues that can frequently be the subject of overblown hysteria. Chatfield deals thoughtfully with the suggestion that computer games can be "addictive", pointing out that while troubled people might seek refuge in the imaginary world of a game, an Amsterdam institute set up to treat videogame addiction recently announced that it was abandoning an "addiction style of treatment" because of a lack of evidence that any of its patients really were addicted. He is interesting, too, on the flimsy data connecting videogame violence with real violence and entertainingly demolishes a <em>Sunday Times</em> article purporting to link a German school shooting with the game <em>Far Cry 2</em>.</p><p>The book is at its best, though, when celebrating the delights and curiosities of videogames. Chatfield introduces the reader to the NeuroSky ("worn like an elaborate pair of headphones, it allows the user to control an electronic device with the power of their mind ? purely by concentrating") and demonstrates how patterns of infection in an online game are now being used by epidemiologists to study population responses to a pandemic.</p><p>More importantly, Chatfield's open-minded approach allows games to be a window to human experience. Did you know, for example, that the amount of time a jump lasts in a game is remarkably consistent across a whole range of titles? A game jump is "around double the duration of the time that an ordinary human can lift themselves off the ground for". Or that, in online games which could theoretically award millions of (imaginary) gold pieces and mystic swords to every player, "the most successful... emerged as those that imposed brutal regimes of scarcity on their players"? What does it say about us that, given a potential electronic heaven where all our wishes could be granted, we have opted to create starkly unequal worlds, where there'll never be enough mystic swords for everyone?</p><p><em>Fun Inc </em>gives the impression of having been written by someone with a huge amount of absorbing material to present. There are so many anecdotes and byways that the argument can become buried. This isn't a tremendous problem, however, because the case Chatfield presents is, for all the information he's compiled, a fairly clear one. Games, he says, have been ignored or fretted over too much. Like television, film, and even reading before them, they're a victim of our recurring fear that new technologies offer "a perilous, even sinful, amount of ease".</p><p>But, Chatfield suggests, our hunger for playfulness is actually a positive sign: in these imaginary worlds we can both escape and strengthen ourselves. The games we create can be both "a critique of what is lacking in many lives", and "a channel through which those lives might be changed".</p><p>For that perspective, this book will make a thought-provoking read for those already won over to the delights of computer games, and an even more important introduction to them for those who remain sceptical. </p><p>Naomi Alderman is an author and games writer. Her new interactive short story is at thewinterhouse.co.uk</p><div class="related" style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><ul><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/games">Games</a></li><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/computingandthenet">Computing and the net</a></li></ul></div><div class="author"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/naomialderman">Naomi Alderman</a></div><br/><div class="terms"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk">guardian.co.uk</a> © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our <a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html">Terms & Conditions</a> | <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds">More Feeds</a></div><p style="clear:both" />
Review: Winners & Losers by Kieran Levis
<div class="track"><img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.20.3/68775?ns=guardian&pageName=Lords+of+cyberspace%3AArticle%3A1231248&ch=Books&c3=Obs&c4=Computing+and+the+net+%28Books+genre%29%2CBooks%2CInternet%2CTechnology%2CCulture+section&c6=David+Rowan&c7=09-Jun-14&c8=1231248&c9=Article&c10=Review&c11=Books&c13=&c25=&c30=content&h2=GU%2FBooks%2FComputing+and+the+net" width="1" height="1" /></div><p class="standfirst">The story of the internet is a gripping tale ... but it has been better told elsewhere, writes David Rowan</p><p>In this new world of universal, freely available information, the intense competition for attention ensures that only a commentator with something exceptional to say can keep a fickle crowd from clicking away to something better. So when it comes to understanding the internet revolution and, for inexplicable sentimental reasons, you choose as your data-delivery medium the cultural anachronism known as the hardback book, you can fill your virtual basket with any number of definitive accounts. For an eyewitness view of eBay's rise, you'll learn all you need from Adam Cohen's gripping history, The Perfect Store. If it's Google that excites you, you'll feel extremely lucky to discover Randall Stross's Planet Google. As for the dotcom era's defining business biography, try Michael Lewis's The New New Thing</p><p>Kieran Levis has synthesised all the above books, and more besides, to tell the compelling stories of the digital revolution's creators and casualties. "Synthesised" because his book, for want of any apparent primary research of its own, is to a large extent an efficient if pedagogic summary of many other people's work. Levis is principal of Cortona Consulting, "which advises companies on business and marketing strategy" and, we are told, he spent five years researching and writing this book.</p><p>If only he had spent part of this time interviewing some of the protagonists, thus getting genuine inside information on Amazon, IBM or Kodak, then he could have so easily blogged his way to the top of the online buzz charts and made this the new new must-read. What we get instead is a solid account of smart, nimble upstarts slaying old-industry behemoths and of flawed creative geniuses creating and destroying fortunes. </p><p>Levis conveys the excitement of Sony's disastrous foray into movies, leading to its $3.2bn writedown in 1994; he astutely chronicles the absurd lack of research that cost Louis Borders and his investors $1.2bn on the bankruptcy of online grocer Webvan. All the new era's disruptive heros can be found here: Google, Microsoft, Nokia, BSkyB, AOL; even, rather unnecessarily, Naxos and Starbucks. There are useful explanations of terms such as "disruptive technology", with discursions into the writings of Isaiah Berlin and Joseph Schumpeter to aid the reader's understanding of business organisation and strategy. </p><p>Practical "takeaways", as they say in business school, include pattern-spotting, albeit of an obvious variety: "The comparatively small number of companies who have been able to innovate repeatedly over long periods, such as HP, 3M, Glaxo and GE, tend to have had strong relationships with their employees, customers and suppliers." We learn that Netscape, whose public stock offering on 9 August 1995 marked the start of the dotcom goldrush, failed because it lacked a clear, radical, strategic vision or enough "distinctive capabilities" to compete with Microsoft. </p><p>Levis points to some valuable lessons from the era: the apparent conflicts of interest, for instance, that allowed Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker to talk up "name your own price" travel website Priceline. Yet he fails to explain his own apparent conflict; I was puzzled by his repeated references to one of these "outstanding successes", the Open University, as an example of good practice, until I learnt from his website that the Open University is one of his clients.</p><p>I could tolerate his clichés: Microsoft's Encarta selling "like hot cakes"; the Microserfs "toil[ing] away under Bill's eagle eye"; Apple's "endless rollercoaster ride". The factual and spelling errors were more alarming: "By 2007, Apple's share of the PC market had doubled to 63 per cent" (maybe one-tenth of that); Google helping readers to access "the 175,000 books published each year" (381,250 last year in English alone, according to Nielsen BookData, with 120,947 in the UK).</p><p>The ultimate value of this book lies in the one-page passage listing "eight essential attributes" of a successful lasting business, such as "1) The ability to recognise significant changes in the competitive environment and adapt to them" or "4) A strategy that is distinctive, coherent and realistic". I'm not suggesting that Winners and Losers should be recast as a set of Twitter updates. But 417 pages demands an awful lot of attention in a competitive information economy.</p><p>? David Rowan is editor of Wired magazine's UK edition.</p><div class="related" style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><ul><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/computingandthenet">Computing and the net</a></li><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/internet">Internet</a></li></ul></div><div class="author"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/davidrowan">David Rowan</a></div><br/><div class="terms"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk">guardian.co.uk</a> © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our <a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html">Terms & Conditions</a> | <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds">More Feeds</a></div><p style="clear:both" />
Review: Communication Revolution by Robert W McChesney
<div class="track"><img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.20.3/70482?ns=guardian&pageName=Review%3A+Communication+Revolution+by+Robert+W+McChesney%3AArticle%3A1187089&ch=Books&c3=Guardian&c4=Computing+and+the+net+%28Books+genre%29%2CBooks%2CCulture+section&c6=Steven+Poole&c7=09-Mar-21&c8=1187089&c9=Article&c10=Review&c11=Books&c13=&c25=&c30=content&h2=GU%2FBooks%2FComputing+and+the+net" width="1" height="1" /></div><p>We are at a "critical juncture" in media history. The "communication revolution", justly pursued, will deal a "mighty blow" to "militarism and chauvinism", and "significantly" repair the environment. Exciting if true. After a leisurely history of the academic field of "communication" that takes up half the book, McChesney does finally get around to describing, and explaining well, the issues of media reform he enjoins his colleagues to address, such as community-owned newsrooms, or "Net Neutrality", the principle that there should be no fee-based prioritisation of internet traffic. "Without Net Neutrality," he explains, "there is no hope for ubiquitous high-speed broadband, because the business model of the ISPs is built on there being a very visible and decrepit 'slow lane' to scare websites and users into paying ... more." Our own communications minister, Lord Carter, might find this a useful corrective to his doltish view that net neutrality in the UK would hinder "innovation".</p><div class="related" style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><ul><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/computingandthenet">Computing and the net</a></li></ul></div><div class="author"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/stevenpoole">Steven Poole</a></div><br/><div class="terms"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk">guardian.co.uk</a> © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our <a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html">Terms & Conditions</a> | <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds">More Feeds</a></div><p style="clear:both" />
Review: Click: What We Do Online and Why It Matters by Bill Tancer
<div class="track"><img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.20.3/9586?ns=guardian&pageName=Review%3A+Click%3A+What+We+Do+Online+and+Why+It+Matters+by+Bill+Tancer%3AArticle%3A1187086&ch=Books&c3=Guardian&c4=Computing+and+the+net+%28Books+genre%29%2CBooks%2CCulture+section&c6=Steven+Poole&c7=09-Mar-21&c8=1187086&c9=Article&c10=Review&c11=Books&c13=&c25=&c30=content&h2=GU%2FBooks%2FComputing+and+the+net" width="1" height="1" /></div><p>This author runs an internet "search marketing" company called Hitwise. Funnily enough, internet-search data, it says here, provides "limitless insights into what affects us and ultimately who we are". As a finite book, Click sadly can't include "limitless" insights, but it does aim to be a Freakonomics for Google queries, decorated with celebrations of the author's own PowerPoint chops.</p><p>So what about these insights? Well, a burst in searches about diets and giving up smoking every New Year prompts the lesson: "In January we feel a sense of control in resolving to change." Making much of a supposed mystery as to why American teenagers search for "prom dresses" in January when prom season is not till May, meanwhile, Tancer eventually reveals that glossy prom-themed magazines are published in late December: so there was no puzzle. A lot of internet-search behaviour, indeed, turns out to be driven by TV and other "old media", and doesn't explain anything new after all. Happily, Tancer still thinks paper books are important enough for him to write one as a self-advertisement.</p><div class="related" style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><ul><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/computingandthenet">Computing and the net</a></li></ul></div><div class="author"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/stevenpoole">Steven Poole</a></div><br/><div class="terms"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk">guardian.co.uk</a> © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our <a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html">Terms & Conditions</a> | <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds">More Feeds</a></div><p style="clear:both" />
Review: Cyburbia by James Harkin
<div class="track"><img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.20.3/72456?ns=guardian&pageName=The+good+and+the+bad+of+digital+dependency%3AArticle%3A1172844&ch=Books&c3=Obs&c4=Computing+and+the+net+%28Books+genre%29%2CBooks%2CCulture+section%2Cdonotuse+Observer&c6=Rafael+Behr&c7=09-Feb-22&c8=1172844&c9=Article&c10=Review&c11=Books&c13=&c25=&c30=content&h2=GU%2FBooks%2FComputing+and+the+net" width="1" height="1" /></div><p class="standfirst">Rafael Behr on a cautionary history of cyber society</p><p>We spend a lot of time giving and receiving feedback: filling in customer satisfaction forms; awarding marks out of 10; appraising and being appraised. It feels like a pretty natural process, but we use a word from electrical engineering to describe it. We are feeding data back into a system so it can correct itself and work more efficiently. That isn't the only linguistic overlap between circuitry and sociability. No one wants to be "out of the loop" and it is good to be "switched on" or, better still, "plugged in".</p><p>These, as James Harkin shows in Cyburbia, are no ordinary metaphors. They express an idea that has become subtly but deeply embedded in our minds - that human social activity resembles an electronic network. If that doesn't sound very radical, it is because the internet has thoroughly infiltrated our lives and so much of our social interaction is now mediated through machines. But not so long ago, the idea of equating organic social systems to technical networks - cybernetics - was the province of only a handful of scientists, hippies and futurologists based around San Francisco Bay. Harkin charts the history of this maverick field, how it was born in an obscure military experiment during the Second World War, was nurtured in the quasi-communist ideology of 1960s West Coast counterculture and then emerged as an intellectual orthodoxy for the digital age.</p><p>Much of our world has now become a cybernetic fantasy. Our status is defined by the volume of digital traffic that flows through us; we have links instead of contact; our knowledge of facts and figures is outsourced to Google. We are morbidly afraid of disconnection. It is, Harkin argues persuasively, both a wonderful and a sinister new stage in the evolution of human society. He compares it to a mass migration, as when rural populations flocked to cities during the industrial revolution or, more pertinently, when the post-industrial middle classes fled the city for the suburbs. </p><p>It is a neat analogy. People immerse themselves in life online in search of new identities, freedom and anonymity. But the communities they form often end up demographically homogenous, hostile to newcomers, culturally sterile and home to all manner of discreetly conducted perversion: welcome to cyburbia.</p><p>There is nothing unusual about cyber-scepticism. But rarely is it expressed by someone with Harkin's genuine enthusiasm for the technology. Writers who are steeped in new media tend to evangelise for it and those who reject the evangelical vision tend to be motivated more by fear than insight. Harkin admires the digital revolution, but is not in thrall to it. He also describes the technology fairly lucidly for the uninitiated.</p><p>But Cyburbia is more than an account of how old-fashioned, analogue social dysfunction ends up being replicated online. Harkin believes something more profound is happening, perhaps even at the level of cognitive changes in our brains. He cites research showing a marked effect on the prefrontal cortex (where memories are formed) as a result of constant switching between different data streams - check email; send text; surf web; change TV channel; chat on Instant Messenger; check Facebook; check email again. </p><p>Crudely speaking, the kids who are growing up surrounded by this technology will have better hand-eye co-ordination than their parents, but shorter attention spans. They will be better at holding many things in their heads at once, but worse at remembering them afterwards. </p><p>The way we handle information and pass it on is changing. The shift, over a generation or two, could ultimately be as profound as the ancient transition in civilisation from oral to written culture. Forget all those grandiose claims that the web was the most important innovation since the printing press. It may, in fact, turn out to be the biggest thing since the alphabet.</p><p>One of Harkin's most penetrating critiques is an account of how the US army's reliance on computer technology hampered its counter-insurgency tactics in Iraq. GIs were all wired up to each other, constantly feeding information back and forth across the battlefield. But they ended up paralysed by data overload. The network functioned brilliantly, but purely for its own sake. </p><p>That is the danger Harkin sees in our ultra-networked society. Of the millions of communications that bind us together, few convey messages of any importance. Real human interaction risks being lost in a fog of self-sustaining, vacuous digital chatter. You don't have to wander very far into cyburbia to find evidence of communication chasing its own tail: misinformation attracting comment and hysterical rebuttal in an infinite polemical regress. It is the cultural equivalent of that unbearable, high-pitched whine you hear when a microphone picks up the signal from a loudspeaker, which is, after all, also a kind of feedback.</p><div class="related" style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><ul><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/computingandthenet">Computing and the net</a></li></ul></div><div class="author"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/rafaelbehr">Rafael Behr</a></div><br/><div class="terms"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk">guardian.co.uk</a> © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our <a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html">Terms & Conditions</a> | <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds">More Feeds</a></div><p style="clear:both" />
Review: The Future of Reputation by Daniel J Solove
<div class="track"><img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.20.3/13884?ns=guardian&pageName=Review%3A+The+Future+of+Reputation+by+Daniel+J+Solove%3AArticle%3A1153289&ch=Books&c3=Guardian&c4=Computing+and+the+net+%28Books+genre%29%2CBooks%2CCulture+section%2CPrivacy+and+the+net%2CYouTube+%28Technology%29%2CTechnology%2CSocial+networking%2CMedia&c6=Steven+Poole&c7=09-Jan-17&c8=1153289&c9=Article&c10=Review&c11=Books&c13=&c25=&c30=content&h2=GU%2FBooks%2FComputing+and+the+net" width="1" height="1" /></div><p>A young South Korean woman lets her dog crap in a subway carriage. Someone videos her and posts it on the internet. Soon she is known globally as "dog poop girl", and denounced on Korean news. Publicly vilified, she drops out of university. One question this book considers is: did she really deserve that? In such cases, the capacity to punish misdemeanours with a glowing Scarlet Letter permanently branded on someone in cyberspace has surely outstripped justice. Elsewhere, Solove persuasively identifies the law's current "binary" notion of privacy as problematic; and argues for an enforceable system that lets us limit the flow of information to our various social networks. His nuanced and anecdote-rich text can conjure winces of vicarious embarrassment. Would you be happy for your private emails, or even your FaceBook updates, to be posted on a blog and crop up whenever someone Googles you? Reader, I shuddered.</p><div class="related" style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><ul><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/computingandthenet">Computing and the net</a></li><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/privacy-and-the-net">Privacy and the net</a></li><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/youtube">YouTube</a></li><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/socialnetworking">Social networking</a></li></ul></div><div class="author"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/stevenpoole">Steven Poole</a></div><br/><div class="terms"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk">guardian.co.uk</a> © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our <a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html">Terms & Conditions</a> | <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds">More Feeds</a></div><p style="clear:both" />
Review: The Numerati by Stephen Baker
<div class="track"><img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.20.3/36289?ns=guardian&pageName=Review%3A+The+Numerati+by+Stephen+Baker%3AArticle%3A1122345&ch=Books&c3=Obs&c4=Computing+and+the+net+%28Books+genre%29%2CSociety+%28Books+genre%29%2CBooks%2CCulture+section%2Cdonotuse+Observer%2CMarcus+du+Sautoy&c6=Marcus+du+Sautoy&c7=08-Nov-23&c8=1122345&c9=Article&c10=Review&c11=Books&c13=&c25=&c30=content&h2=GU%2FBooks%2FComputing+and+the+net" width="1" height="1" /></div><p class="standfirst">Every time you do a web search, or use a loyalty card, one of the 'numerati' does the maths on you, writes Marcus du Sautoy</p><p>Can you predict what the next numbers will be in each of these strings of digits? </p><p>123454321234543212... </p><p>11235813213455... </p><p>993751058209749... </p><p>The first sequence has a clear rhythm to it. The second is a little more tricky, but look closely and you might notice that it uses the previous numbers in the string to build the next one. This is the Fibonacci sequence, nature's favourite set of numbers and the first code to be cracked in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. The third sequence is much trickier. At first it looks random but if you come at it armed with the right knowledge you might recognise that it is part of the decimal expansion of pi, starting at the 44th decimal place. Once you know this you have total control over the sequence and can predict every twist as it speeds off to infinity. </p><p>Mathematics is all about spotting patterns, finding the underlying logic in the seemingly random and chaotic world around us; and using this information to predict future behaviour. Traditionally maths has been used to make predictions about inanimate objects, like the orbit of planets or the weather. But as Stephen Baker explains in The Numerati, mathematicians are increasingly turning their attention to human behaviour. What if those strings of numbers are records of the things you've bought, places you've travelled to, websites you've visited, parties you've voted for? Find the pattern in the numbers and mathematicians will be able to predict - with surprising accuracy - what your next move will be. The 'numerati' is the name Baker gives to the group of latterday fortune-tellers whose job it is to decode our behaviour. His book explores the lives of such people and attempts to analyse how powerful they have become.</p><p>Until recently, the abstract language of mathematics seemed to have no relevance to the murky worlds of consumer trends, political preferences and dating. The change that has made the rise of the numerati possible is digitisation. All of us today leave an extensive trail of numbers wherever we go. Almost everything we do - from visiting a website to texting a friend - is translated into ones and zeros, which are stored somewhere and available to those who know how to access them. For example, every time we enter a search into Google, a simple code called ASCI translates each letter we type into a string of 0s and 1s, which are sent out across the internet. </p><p>When we unload our shopping trolleys at the checkout, the bar codes of our purchases are stored by our loyalty cards, providing a record of our eating habits. When we walk down the road, our movements are likely to be tracked by CCTV, converted into digital code and stored on computer mainframes. Even our moods and thoughts get translated into zeros and ones by the technology we love and rely on, as thousands of us pour our states of minds on to blogs. Forget astrology and the stars; your future is encoded within the trail of numbers that you leave behind you.</p><p>For those with the ability to interpret it, this data trail is a goldmine. Advertisers and politicians have long dreamed of being able to target their messages - or products - at individuals on the basis of highly detailed information about them. Now this dream is becoming reality. By analysing the geometry of our mathematical pathways, mathematicians can cluster people with shared interests and passions, creating ever smaller, more specific groups to target. </p><p>For example, Baker talks to one of the numerati, Dave Morgan of AOL, who picked up a correlation between people visiting the Alamo Rent A Car website and surfing romantic movie sites. It isn't an obvious match; only in retrospect could it be traced to an escapist tendency. But once the pattern was identified, advertisers could find all sorts of clever ways to exploit it - for example, by bombarding this particular group with offers for weekend breaks in country hotels.</p><p>Baker argues that the numerati have become incredibly powerful in a range of fields, from the workplace to the voting booth, from health care to counter-terrorism. He even puts the maths to the test to see if a dating agency can pair him with his wife; when he eventually unchecks the box requesting someone several decades too young, Mrs Baker pops up top of the list. There is no denying that the digital revolution has opened up exciting new territory for mathematicians. The numerati are no fantasy; they exist. Baker is telling us about a phenomenon that is important and often overlooked. That makes his book urgent and exciting.</p><p>But there are also significant flaws. Baker's slick journalistic style grates after a while - especially when we are forced to hear about him supping yet another coffee in a cafe as he waits for his next interviewee. And maybe it's because I'm a maths nerd, but I hoped for more detail about the maths involved. Baker's mathematical descriptions are often superficial, and indeed he seems to regard the maths as little more than magic. His numerati come across as sorcerers armed with mysterious, secret knowledge, not as scientists with tools that can be rationally analysed. This has the effect of making them seem more sinister than they are. </p><p>The book becomes more interesting when Baker turns his attention to the political implications of the numerati's activities. There are clear issues of civil liberties at stake, as well as of consent. Most of us have no idea how much of our lives are being tracked. If we did, we would probably be horrified. At the same time, it is hard to deny that the numerati do much that is good. Baker's analysis is pretty balanced, and he spells out why we should be grateful to the numerati, as well as concerned in some areas. Increasingly, for example, the numerati use their skills to monitor health care; homes for the elderly are being wired with technology that can record fluctuations in weight or a decrease in mobility, triggering a hasty visit from a doctor. If you're joining a dating agency, you want to exploit the skills of mathematicians to find the perfect partner. And, as Baker points out in his chapter on the use of the numerati by pollsters, anything that helps politicians target individuals on issues that they care about, rather than simply trotting out bland platitudes, is a good thing. </p><p>There is a tendency within our society to view science with suspicion, whether it is stories of nano-robots infiltrating our body and messing with our DNA, black holes appearing in the Large Hadron Collider in Cern that will swallow up the universe, or genetically modified crops sweeping the world and destroying all in their path. All scientific progress involves steps into the unknown, and that inevitably entails risk. That is why books like this are valuable. Once you know about the science and its implications, you are in a much better position to distinguish sinister developments from mere hype.</p><p>So when it comes to Baker's numerati, all of us have a responsibility to understand how much companies and government can or cannot use or abuse the maths. This book won't make you an expert on how the mathematicians do their tricks, but it will make you more aware of the the implications. Read it and you'll have a much better idea of who has got your number. </p><p>? Marcus du Sautoy is the new Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford and author of Finding Moonshine (Fourth Estate).</p><div class="related" style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><ul><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/computingandthenet">Computing and the net</a></li><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/society">Society</a></li><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/marcus-du-sautoy">Marcus du Sautoy</a></li></ul></div><br/><div class="terms"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk">guardian.co.uk</a> © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our <a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html">Terms & Conditions</a> | <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds">More Feeds</a></div><p style="clear:both" />
Review: Planet Google by Randall Stross
<div class="track"><img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.20.3/8830?ns=guardian&pageName=Review%3A+Planet+Google+by+Randall+Stross%3AArticle%3A1110079&ch=Books&c3=Guardian&c4=Books%2CComputing+and+the+net+%28Books+genre%29%2CCulture+section&c6=Andy+Beckett&c7=08-Nov-01&c8=1110079&c9=Article&c10=Review&c11=Books&c13=&c25=&c30=content&h2=GU%2FBooks%2FComputing+and+the+net" width="1" height="1" /></div><p class="standfirst">Andy Beckett discovers how Google became one of the world's most important companies</p><p>Three years ago, when Google and its products were not quite so potent and ubiquitous, a reporter for the technology website CNET News did a quick experiment with the company's internet search tools. For half an hour she would find out as much personal information as possible about a revered Silicon Valley business executive. In a few dozen predictable clicks and keystrokes, she had his home address, his hobbies, the level of his wealth and his political affiliations. As a case study of how Google has eroded the privacy of even the most powerful it was a useful and justifiable exercise, especially as she did not include the most sensitive material in the story she wrote.</p><p>The executive did not see it like that. His corporation informed CNET that its use of "private information" had been highly inappropriate. As a punishment, the corporation would not speak to CNET reporters for a year. After a few weeks, the ban was quietly lifted, but among those who follow the computer industry the incident has not been forgotten, for one reason. The prickly executive involved was Eric Schmidt, the CEO and public face of Google.</p><p>This sharp-eyed book, written by a business professor who teaches in Silicon Valley and has been publishing volumes on related topics since the mid-90s, is full of such telling revelations about one of the world's most important companies. Despite the subtitle, this is not really a study of the social effects of Google's unprecedented attempt to "organise the world's information and make it universally accessible", as the firm's first press release put it in 1999. Instead, it is a restless examination of Google's strengths and weaknesses, and contradictions. Stross is not a hatchet man or a frustrated outsider: his thank-yous to Google staff from Schmidt downwards take up three paragraphs of the acknowledgments. But the company that emerges from this book is a more rickety and interesting enterprise than non-geeks might imagine.</p><p>For a start, Google is still quite small. At the end of 2007, despite almost a decade of feverish growth and handling two-thirds of all internet searches in the US, it had fewer than 17,000 employees, only twice as many as the London borough of Camden. Visiting the Googleplex, the company's main compound, Stross finds that "the signature buildings are not much bigger than those of a single suburban high school". Similarly, for all Google's proliferating, seemingly all-pervading desktop services, from Google Maps to Google Apps, from Google Book Search to Google Earth, from Gmail to YouTube, which it bought in 2006 for almost £1bn, Google still only has one business in the traditional, profit-driven sense: the selling of modest text-only advertisements next to its internet search results.</p><p>Stross describes lucidly how the company came up with and refined its search business. He points out that Google's ingenious strategy - making billions by matching ads to content it does not own - is reliant on much of the internet remaining an open, under-commercialised environment. "If even a small number of owners of [popular] websites were to exclude Google ... demanding, perhaps, that Google share revenue earned by indexing their sites ... then Google's ability to operate as it has would end," he writes.</p><p>The book also deals properly with the physical side of building a digital empire. Early on, Google chose as its hardware "a system cobbled together with inexpensive PC components" rather than more costly specialist equipment. This was a clever, counter-intuitive decision, the first of many. Google's racks of cheap servers could easily be expanded or others added. The company then set about placing them as close to its potential customers as possible. Stross explains: "As fast as electrons travel, physical distance still affects [online] response speed ... Reducing [it] by even a fraction of a second mattered to users, as Google discovered when it ran experiments to see if users noticed a difference between [a wait of] 0.9 seconds [and one of] 0.4 seconds ... Users were conspicuously more likely to grow bored and leave the Google site after waiting that interminable 0.9 seconds."</p><p>As quick and pragmatic as its customers, Google spent the early years of this decade securing premises across America for its servers: first in commercial spaces desperate for tenants after the 2001 dotcom crash, then in its own purpose-built "data centres". Such was the surging demand for its services, and the amount of power the company was consuming as a result, the first such facility was established in a town with its own hydro-electric power station.</p><p>Google's data centres function with almost no human intervention; their interiors are kept dark to save power, and research visits are not allowed. For some of Google's critics, these places are the perfect symbol of an enigmatic, over-mighty company. But Stross, for all his scepticism, does not see Google as a sinister monolith. Instead, he portrays it as an eccentric corporate environment, where teams of young Californians with PhDs work obsessively and autonomously, where grand company projects rise and fall, or are left half-completed, depending on the level of interest in the cubicles, and where an impatience to conquer the next digital frontier coexists with a deep conservatism that has kept Google wedded to the same basic internet search concept for 10 years.</p><p>Whether web users will remain satisfied for many more years with the long shaggy lists of online sources that Google offers them is a question, frustratingly, that Stross does not properly answer. He does outline the menace to the company posed by the highly successful social networking site Facebook, "a miniature web universe - behind a wall, inaccessible to Google". And he lists other threats. Google's copyright dispute with publishers over its desire to make all books electronically searchable remains unresolved. Google's ad revenue may shrink, and no longer be sufficient to subsidise all its other, more experimental activities. Like most of today's swaggering web businesses, Google may have come through the dotcom crash but it has never experienced a broader recession. Finally, there are the discouraging precedents offered by industry history. "No computer company," writes Stross, "has ever been able to enjoy pre-eminence that spans two successive technological eras." </p><p>This is a slightly dry book, the prose compact rather than elegant. But when so much of what is written about Silicon Valley and the web generally is still either self-servingly evangelical or sour and conspiratorial, agnostics about the whole enterprise have to find insight where they can. And Stross does include at least one rare piece of reassurance for journalists or fans of old media. According to him, Google News, the company's online attempt at sifting and presenting news stories by purely electronic means, has not been a great success. Its competitor Yahoo News gets three times as much traffic. The Yahoo site's secret? It is edited by humans. </p><p>? Andy Beckett is writing a book about British politics in the 1970s</p><div class="related" style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><ul><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/computingandthenet">Computing and the net</a></li></ul></div><div class="author"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/andybeckett">Andy Beckett</a></div><br/><div class="terms"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk">guardian.co.uk</a> © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our <a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html">Terms & Conditions</a> | <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds">More Feeds</a></div><p style="clear:both" />
Review: The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen
<div class="track"><img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.20.3/72077?ns=guardian&pageName=Review%3A+The+Cult+of+the+Amateur+by+Andrew+Keen%3AArticle%3A1102322&ch=Books&c3=Guardian&c4=Computing+and+the+net+%28Books+genre%29%2CBooks%2CCulture+section&c6=John+Dugdale&c7=08-Oct-18&c8=1102322&c9=Article&c10=Review&c11=Books&c13=&c25=&c30=content&h2=GU%2FBooks%2FComputing+and+the+net" width="1" height="1" /></div><p>Keen was once a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, but has since undergone a Damascene conversion and now views the so-called Web 2.0 of YouTube, MySpace, Wikipedia and millions of blogs as culturally corrosive. This is a celebration of traditional media and the experienced professionals who provide reliable information and classy entertainment. By dispensing with these elite experts, creators and gatekeepers in pursuit of "democratisation", Keen argues, Web 2.0 licenses the talentless to show off and the unqualified to give their views; forcing bookshops, record stores or newspapers to close as sales decline or advertising is switched. Keen does overpolarise - he only grudgingly concedes that not everything served up by new media is trashy, paints an over-rosy picture of mainstream news providers and includes Hollywood studios in his list of threatened pillars of civilisation. But most of his points are well made, and he comes up with thought-provoking solutions, including government intervention to curb excesses.</p><div class="related" style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><ul><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/computingandthenet">Computing and the net</a></li></ul></div><div class="author"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/johndugdale">John Dugdale</a></div><br/><div class="terms"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk">guardian.co.uk</a> © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our <a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html">Terms & Conditions</a> | <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds">More Feeds</a></div><p style="clear:both" />
Review: From Counterculture to Cyberculture by Fred Turner
<div class="track"><img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.20.3/88731?ns=guardian&pageName=Review%3A+From+Counterculture+to+Cyberculture+by+Fred+Turner%3AArticle%3A1036579&ch=Books&c3=Guardian&c4=Computing+and+the+net+%28Books+genre%29%2CTechnology%2CSociety+%28Books+genre%29&c6=Steven+Poole&c7=08-Aug-26&c8=1036579&c9=Article&c10=Review&c11=Books&c13=&c25=&c30=content&h2=GU%2FBooks%2FComputing+and+the+net" width="1" height="1" /></div><p>Not so long ago, it was thought that the internet might prove to be the kind of utopian space that Negri hopes to find. Turner's enjoyably deep cultural history traces the roots of 1990s techno-utopianism in the acid tests and communes of the 1960s. He tells the story through the central figure of Stewart Brand, founder in 1968 of the "Whole Earth Catalog", which promoted American Indian fashions, self-sufficient living, and cybernetic theory. The last, of course, came straight out of the military-industrial complex that Brand and fellow enthusiasts saw themselves as rebelling against. </p><p>This and similar tensions are deftly traced as Turner continues the story through the hobbyist computer scene of the 1970s and then Brand's legendary internet bulletin board, the Well, to the electro-optimism of the dotcom boom and Wired magazine, which in 1997 stated on its cover: "We're facing 25 years of prosperity, freedom and a better environment for the whole world. You got a problem with that?" It's quite touching in retrospect. Meanwhile, Brand himself becomes a kind of meta-entrepreneur, linking global networks of idealistic businesspeople, what Slavoj Zizek would call "liberal communists". They didn't beat the system; they joined it.</p><div class="related" style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><ul><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/computingandthenet">Computing and the net</a></li><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/society">Society</a></li></ul></div><div class="author"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/stevenpoole">Steven Poole</a></div><br/><div class="terms"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk">guardian.co.uk</a> © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our <a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html">Terms & Conditions</a> | <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds">More Feeds</a></div><p style="clear:both" />
Review: Coming of Age in Second Life by Tom Boellstorff
<div class="track"><img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.20.3/39175?ns=guardian&pageName=Review%3A+Coming+of+Age+in+Second+Life+by+Tom+Boellstorff%3AArticle%3A1036392&ch=Books&c3=Guardian&c4=Computing+and+the+net+%28Books+genre%29%2CTechnology%2CSociety+%28Books+genre%29%2CCulture+section&c6=Steven+Poole&c7=08-Aug-26&c8=1036392&c9=Article&c10=Review&c11=Books&c13=&c25=&c30=content&h2=GU%2FBooks%2FComputing+and+the+net" width="1" height="1" /></div><p>The movement from techno-idealism to disillusion is recapitulated here in accelerated mode, as the anthropologist author recounts his three years of "fieldwork" in the virtual world Second Life. Its inhabitants begin by dreaming of revolutionary possibility, and end by bitching about neighbours putting up ugly houses and spoiling their view. Meanwhile, the world's corporate owners, Linden Lab, appear to have recreated the kind of political economy from which many hoped to escape. </p><p>Nonetheless, Boellstorff's book is full of fascinating vignettes, recounting the blossomings of friendships and romances in the virtual world, and musing fruitfully on questions of creative identity and novel problems of etiquette. If you step away from your computer while logged in to Second Life, your avatar just stands there in the virtual world, not answering people's questions, so they are not sure whether you are "there" or not. Your self is temporarily disconnected from the body that represents you to others in the digital world. The blanket excuse, once you return, is to say that you were afk, short for "away from keyboard". I propose to start trying this in real life.</p><div class="related" style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><ul><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/computingandthenet">Computing and the net</a></li><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/society">Society</a></li></ul></div><div class="author"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/stevenpoole">Steven Poole</a></div><br/><div class="terms"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk">guardian.co.uk</a> © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our <a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html">Terms & Conditions</a> | <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds">More Feeds</a></div><p style="clear:both" />
Das Wikipedia - online resource goes into print
<div class="track"><img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.20.3/43994?ns=guardian&pageName=Das+Wikipedia+-+online+resource+goes+into+print%3AArticle%3A1009759&ch=Technology&c3=Guardian&c4=Wikipedia%2CInternet%2CReference+and+languages+%28Books+genre%29%2CComputing+and+the+net+%28Books+genre%29%2CBooks%2CCulture+section%2CPress+and+publishing%2CMedia%2CGermany%2CWorld+news%2CTechnology&c6=Jess+Smee&c7=08-Jul-22&c8=1009759&c9=Article&c10=News&c11=Technology&c13=&c25=&c30=content&h2=GU%2FTechnology%2FWikipedia" width="1" height="1" /></div><p class="standfirst"><strong>· </strong>Lexikon boasts 50,000 of site's most visited subjects<br /><strong>· </strong>Book lists up to 90,000 contributors over 30 pages</p><p>Sometimes a book spine just isn't long enough - especially when its list of authors runs to 90,000. Due to hit the shelves in September, a published encyclopedia of German Wikipedia entries, the first of its kind, will list in a single volume the 50,000 most commonly searched terms on the German Wikipedia website over the past two years. </p><p>That means France's first lady, Carla Bruni, Playstation3 or trivia about the US television series House, starring British actor Hugh Laurie, have earned their place among more typical encyclopedia fodder such as politics and geography.</p><p>The Wikipedia Lexikon has turned into something of "a document of the zeitgeist", said Beate Varnhorn, a director at its publisher Bertelsmann Lexicon.</p><p>All entries, which include high-profile events such as the 2007 G8 summit in Heiligendamm, have been shortened and checked factually. Dotted with images and photographs, its creators aim to reach people who do not use Wikipedia online.</p><p>Each Wikipedia entry has a number of contributors, who tweak and add to the information left by other site users, which means an unprecedented list of authors, Varnhorn said. The extensive list of contributors, compressed and separated by commas, will stretch over 30 pages of the 1,000-page tome.</p><p>With a price tag of €19.95 (£16), €1 from every Wikipedia Lexikon sold will be given to the German chapter of Wikimedia, the non-profit group behind Wikipedia, for the use of its name.</p><p>The publication reverses the industry trend towards the internet and away from traditional print. Earlier this year, Brockhaus Encyclopedia, the German equivalent of the Encyclopedia Britannica, announced plans to make its 30-volume leather-bound set accessible online.</p><p>Publishers of the Wikipedia Lexikon insist it is too soon to say farewell to the book format. </p><p>"Unlike Brockhaus, we think the market for print reference books remains positive," said Varnhorn. "The book is highly flexible, I can use it on the sofa while watching television, at the desk, in the garden or in bed, without having to turn on the computer."</p><p>German Wikipedia, Germany's sixth-most-visited website, is the second largest in size after its English-version equivalent. It has been estimated it would take at least 750 thick volumes to print all the articles in the English-language version.</p><p>The sheer size of the articles on the German Wikipedia site proved too daunting for a publisher who planned to convert it into print a few years ago. </p><p>"It turned out that even on very thin paper, the German Wikipedia would fill an [Ikea] shelving unit," said Arne Klempert, the director of Wikipedia Germany. "In the end it didn't happen."</p><p>He said the launch of the Lexikon would be closely watched and might inspire similar tomes in other languages - with similarly lengthy lists of authors.</p><div class="related" style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><ul><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/wikipedia">Wikipedia</a></li><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/internet">Internet</a></li><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/referenceandlanguages">Reference and languages</a></li><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/computingandthenet">Computing and the net</a></li><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pressandpublishing">Newspapers & magazines</a></li><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/germany">Germany</a></li></ul></div><div class="author"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/jesssmee">Jess Smee</a></div><br/><div class="terms"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk">guardian.co.uk</a> © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our <a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html">Terms & Conditions</a> | <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds">More Feeds</a></div><p style="clear:both" />
Leader: In praise of... the $100 laptop
<div class="track"><img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.20.3/48059?ns=guardian&pageName=Leader%3A+In+praise+of...+the+%24100+laptop%3AArticle%3A476713&ch=Comment+is+free&c3=Guardian&c4=Computing+and+the+net+%28Books+genre%29&c6=Leader&c7=08-Jan-12&c8=476713&c9=Article&c10=Editorial&c11=Comment+is+free&c13=&c25=Comment+is+free&c30=content&h2=GU%2FComment+is+free%2Fblog%2FComment+is+free" width="1" height="1" /></div>Everyone wins from the decision of the organisation behind the admirable One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) scheme to let consumers in the US buy one of its machines - designed to bridge the digital divide in poor countries - as long as they also buy one for a deprived child. OLPC, the best known of a number of projects to get cheap computers and mobiles to developing countries, eventually hopes to sell them for $100 each when production runs are large enough. For a limited period American consumers can buy two for $188 each as long as one goes to an impoverished child. This not only plugs what hopefully will prove a temporary shortfall in orders from governments of developing countries, but also meets a genuine demand from early adopters in the US to get their hands on a gizmo that might command a premium price anyway. It fulfils a basic human need to do something for a good cause - with the added kudos that anyone who sees a buyer in the US with one of these mean machines will know they have given to charity without having to say so. The OLPC is a good example of what CK Prahalad argued in his book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: that the best way to help the very poorest - the four billion people living on $2 or less a day - is to treat them as potential entrepreneurs and customers rather than just recipients of aid. Maybe the OLPC's selling technique could be applied elsewhere. What about one drug for poor countries for every proprietary one you buy?<div class="related" style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><ul><li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/computingandthenet">Computing and the net</a></li></ul></div><br/><div class="terms"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk">guardian.co.uk</a> © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our <a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html">Terms & Conditions</a> | <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds">More Feeds</a></div><p style="clear:both" />
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