Review: Unleashing Web 2.0–From Concepts to Creativity

5 Star, Information Operations, Information Technology

Web 2.0Superb with Very Intelligent Conclusion, June 22, 2008

Gottfried Vossen; Stephan Hagemann

I borrowed this book from someone who knows a great deal about web directions, and I found it to be very very good. Although the authors do not reflect the tsunamis being created by Doug Englebart (Open hypertextdocument system or OHS) and Pierre Levy (Information Economy Meta Language or IEML), this is a very elegantly organized and presented book.

It forced me to question my here-to-fore blind expectations with respect to the Semantic Web where in practice the theory of seamless integration has not been realized. I was especially taken with the author's conclusion that we must continue to develop applications for smallish communities of practice where the human brain continues to be the primary searcher, sorter, and valuation or linkage agent.

Jim Bamford's book on the National Security Agency (NSA), Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency, concludes that one day NSA may–after spending hundreds of billions more of our hard-earned wages, create the ultimate computer–one weighing very little, running on virtually no energy, and able to do petaflop calculations per second: THE HUMAN BRAIN.

I am among a handful of co-founders of the Earth Intelligence Network, and I will conclude this very favorable review with my opinion: the World Brain is emergent, and it is the end-users, as the co-authorrs of this book conclude, that will continue to be the primary content creators, content sharers, and content valuators.

As soon as China and India figure out they can create infinite wealth by handing out free cells phones and offering their respective 1.5 billion poor free information and education “one cell call at a time,” it will be game over for both American and European digital ambitions.

Machine learning has been over-hyped since the 1980's, and while I respect the computational mathematics being pioneered by Google, and various deep web or meta web endeavors, the reality is that search today stinks, yielding less than 2% of relevant information. I don't expect that to be resolved anytime soon. What I *do* expect is for humans empowered by relatively simple tools, to figure out how to do a national referendum from neighbood to nation=state, in 24 hours, and how to mobilize a public cabinet that posts a sensible slate of policies backed up by a balanced budget.

See also:
Mobilizing Generation 2.0: A Practical Guide to Using Web2.0 Technologies to Recruit, Organize and Engage Youth
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas
Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems
Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace (Helix Books)
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

Review: The Whole Digital Library Handbook

3 Star, Information Operations

WHole LibraryExhorbitant Pricing, June 22, 2008

Diane Kresh

I am adding this book to my list of excessively expensive books. I only list those books I would havb bought had the price been reasonable. It cost the publisher less than $5.00 to print this book. Amazon pays 45% of the retail price, so call it a $25 return. That is too much and completely contrary to the desperate need for making it easier for information to be shared.

I urge all authors to post free online copies of their work and to retain original copyright as we do at OSS.Net and Earth Intelligence Network.

Review: Everything Is Miscellaneous–The Power of the New Digital Disorder

5 Star, Information Operations, Information Society, Information Technology

Amazon Page

Valuable Overview, June 25, 2008

David Weinberger

I totally disagree with the reviewers that pontificate against this book. It is not a techno-geek book, or a philosophy book, it is simply a common sense overview that I personally consider to be educated, helpful to the point of essential. At $16, with the Amazon discount, this book is a bargain.

I started with the index, and immediately discovered Meta-Data had 18 lines.

The book opens with examples from Staples (“hacking the physical”) to Apple iTunes (end of bundling) and I am immediately charmed by the combination of an end to fraudulent store organization (Giant supermarket moves everything from one week to the next to force searching which increases impulse buying) and an increase in focus on serving the individual rather than serving up a “one size fits all” solution. Separately I am looking at Chinese medicine for a health intelligence book, and this resonates.

Early on one sees the author agreeing with Jean Francois Noubel (the end of the pyramidal organization) and Jim Rough (rise of the circle of citizen wisdom)–I myself enraged the secret intelligence mandarins by announcing in the 1990's that “in the age of decentralized information central intelligence is an oxymoron.” The author is one of the gurus of what is becoming known as the axis of Cognitive Science and Collective Intelligence (the Art), and he and another 54 authors are brought together in the first collective work of its kind, Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace which is also free online in full pdf or chapter docs. Disclosure: I published the book–I do not know the author personally, but Jock Gill, a gifted communicator, exposed me to the author's earlier work on Open Spectrum, something that inspired my own informal views on “Open Everything” and unlike most of the other contributors that were identified by Tom Atlee or Mark Tovey (the editor), I personally sought his contribution to the book because of my very high regard for his “take” on all this.

I bought the book as a fan already, but the content easily validates my appreciation The discussion of first order pigeon-holing (the Weberian concept of bureaucracy applies), second order cross referencing (naturally limited and often wrong in early generations–Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal System are toast), versus unlimited tagging, chunking, clustering, socially-informed selection, and other aspects of the power of the collective, are all illuminated by this book.

I am further impressed early on with his stellar discussion of Mortimer Adler and the limitations of alphabetization. I was a penniless graduate student when I discovered the Great Books, and as a young officer, spent my first $700 acquiring a set. The Syntopicon that the author mentions in the book is better understood by the image I introduce above, something I created in 1979, my second of four analytic models (the first was on predicting revolution across all domains).

I have two notes at this point:

1) Truth or what can be known constantly changing, a fixed or slow to adapt “index” process cannot scale or survive.

2) 2008 election is already lost–neither candidate offers us what we deserve: listening instead of stump speeches; appointed cabinet and balanced budget now, as part of the campaign, instead of empty promises; and 24/7 interaction with all 65 political parties, instead of focusing on the one third that is their base and a slice of the middle third.

He emphasizes that knowledge is not top down, and with a tip of the hat to Kirkpatrick Sale, author of Human Scale and also facilitator for the nation-wide network of 27 separatist movements, I also post above an image of Epoch B “bottom up” leadership that none of our world leaders understand.

Page 80, discussion of Ranganathan (India) Colon Classification system impresses me. I think to myself, wow, needs to be integrated into Pierre Levy's Information Economy Meta Language, or IEML.

The middle of the book discusses–engagingly, I feel–how the digital world enables infinite variations in relationships and labels that can in turn create infinite variations of just right, just in time, just enough visualizations.

Crowd tagging leads to sub-set clustering which leads to contextual sense-making.

He spend time on Wikipedia. I admire Jimbo Wales and try to attend the Wikimanias, but I have given up on Wikipedia because in the case of the Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) page, I had to give up–while the author would have me engage and patiently lead the recalcitrant along (I have 20 years experience with that in the real world) I have come to a different conclusion: I believe that anyone should be allowed to CREATE, but only master moderators should be allowed to destroy.

The summary of the book's message is offered by the author with four concepts:

1) Filter on the way OUT, not in (this is the difference between the read only publishing model, and the read-write Creative Commons model)

2) Put each leaf on as many branches as possible–unlike the physical world, each leaf can have infinite lives

3) Everything is meta data and everything can be a label (he provides a fine discussion of bar codes, RFIDs, and Thinglinks)

4) Give up control. He admires Wikipedia for doing precisely that. When I first started the modern OSINT movement in 1992, I coined the phrase, “Give up control to gain control” meaning that centralized intelligence had to give way to decentralized sharing and sense-making. The spies still don't get it, but public intelligence in the public interest is here to stay. A corollary here is that the best approach is to include all–optimize inclusiveness and diversity; and where there is conflict or disagreement, postpone exclusion or resolution, more data later will make it easier and easier to come back to…

The final section of the book deals with mapping the implicit, mining the clouds of tags, creating an infrastructure of meaning with infinite potential. I have a note: unites the eight tribes of intelligence (governmenbt, military, law enforcement, academia, business, media, non-profits, and civil societies including religions and labor unions).

Other flyleaf notes:

+ Stupid works. Keep it simple and let it evolve on its own.

+ Bit by bit, not all at once. Provide for innovation at the intersections and on the margins

+ Kind of and sort of rule, not the black and white that did rule

+ I learn of Valdis Krebs and his concepts of social cartography

+ I am engaged with the discussion of information sprawl and natural typologies

+ The author concludes that the search for knowledge will constantly struggle between the simple and the complex (sources and methods).

+ Going meta is what is so cool about web ecology and evolution.

The author does NOT say this, but I mark his book down as being in favor of the human web of sense-making beating out the semantic web and machine learning schools.

Page 230, this is a quote that really grabs my attention: “It's not about who is right and who is wrong. It's how different points of view are negotiated, given context, and embodied with passion and interest. Individual thinking out-loud now have weight, and authority and expertise are losing some of their gravity.” The rest of this page is equally good.

I am surprised to learn that the author holds a PhD in philosophy, and that he advised Howard Dean. I am not surprised to learn that he has been twice renewed as a fellow at the Berkman Center.

Other books that have engaged me and for which I have reviews:
The World Cafe: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World
One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization
Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, Updated Edition

There are many others, most obvious. Please do see the two images I post above–I firmly believe that the last eight years were a gift from heaven, a necessarily catastrophic gutting of our Nation so that we might properly conclude that both political parties stink with corruption, and it is time we put We the People back into the Republic, 24/7. This book is a solid brick in our foundation for understanding why this is both possible, and necessary.

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Review: Anthropologists in the Public Sphere–Speaking Out on War, Peace, and American Power

5 Star, Information Operations, Insurgency & Revolution, Intelligence (Public), Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Public Administration, War & Face of Battle

Anthro PublicPublisher Lazy, Content Shines, June 6, 2009

Roberto J. Gonzalez

It infuriates me to run across mediocre publishers who refuse to use the simple tools that Amazon provides for loading a proper description of the book, providing the table of contents, or even offering “look inside the book” where an index can sell a book faster than the table of contents.

Minus one star for a rotten lazy publisher. Here is the table of contents. Buy the book, along with Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War this is fundamental reading that calls into question both the sanity of how we engage with foreign publics, and the incompetence combined with mendaciousness with which we seek to abuse the profession of anthropology for wrong ways and wrong ends.

The highest praise I can give to this book is that it forced me to think and it inspired new work–my forthcoming article on Human Intelligence: All Humans, All Minds, All the Time (see comment for URL) was directly inspired by this book and the huge mess the U.S. Army is making of the Human Terrain Teams (HTT), code for abused pretend anthropologists without a clue. I have the fly-leaf note: our HUMINT is at war with itself.

The kindest thing I can do for the brilliantly selected and organized contributors to this volume is respect their work by providing the table of contents, which has reminded me better than my own notes of how diverse and valuable this collection is.

Part I: War, Peace, and Social Responsibility
01 Franz Boas, “Scientists as Spies” (1919)
02 Margaret Mead, “Warfare is Only an Invention–Not a Biological Necessity” (1940)
03 Marshall Sahlins, “Once You've Broken Him Down…” (1965)
04 Gerald Berreman, “Contemporary Anthropology and Moral Accountability” (1973)
05 Laura Nader, “Two Plus Two Equals Zero–War and Peace Reconsidered”
06 Beatriz Manz, “Dollars that Forge the Guatemalan Chains”
07 David Price, “Anthropologists as Spies” (2000)
08 Pierre Bourdieu, “Abuse of Power by the Advocates of Reason” (1998)

Part II: Prescient Anthropology: Diagnosing Crises Abroad
09 Robert Hayden, “West Must Correct Its Mistakes in Yugoslavia” (1992)
10 Robert Hayden, “NATO Fuels the Balkan Fire” (1999)
11 Anna Simons, “No Exit From Somalia” (1991)
12 Anna Simons, “Our Abysmal Ignorance About Somalia” (1992)
13 Anna Simons, “The Somalia Trap” (1993)
14 Winifred Tate, “Increased Military Aid to Colombia Won't Curb Drug Trafficking” (1999)
15 Winifred Tate, “Colombia” Rules of the Game”, 2001
16 Lesley Gill, “Unveiling US Policy in Colombia” (2002)
17 Marc Edelman, “The Price of Free Trade: Famine” (2002)
18 Ali Qleibo, “How Two Truths Make One Tragedy” (2000)
19 Jeff Halper, “The Matrix of Control” (2201)
20 Jeff Halper, “After the Invasion: Now What” (2002)
21 Hugh Gusterson, “If U.S. Dumps Test Ban Treaty, China Will Rejoice” (2001)

Part III: Prelude to September 11
22 Ashraf Ghani, “Cut Off the Arms Flow and Let Afghans Unite” (1989)
23 James Merryman, “US Can Strengthen African Ties in Wake of Terrorism with Aid, Clear Policies” (1998)
24 Robert Fernea, “Egyptians Don't Like Saddam, But….” (1991)
25 Barbara Nimri Aziz, “Gravesites–Environmental Ruin in Iraq” (1997)
26 Fadwa El Guindo, “UN Should Act to Protect Muslim Women” (1998)
27 Zieba Shorish-Shamley, Interviewed, “Women Under the Taliban” (2001)
28 William Beeman, “Follow the Oil Trail–Mess in Afghanistan Partly Our Government's Fault” (1998)

Part IV: Anthropological Interpretations of September 11
29 Catherine Lutz, “Our Legacy of War” (2001)
30 David Harvey etal, “Local Horror, Global Response” (2001)
31 William Beeman, “A War Our Great-Grandchildren Will Be Fighting–Understanding Osama Bin Laden” (2001)
32 Janet McIntosh, “What Have 9/11 Investigators Overlooked?” (2002)

Part V: On Afghanistan, Central Aisa, and the Middle East
34 Robert Canfield, “Nation is Home to Afghans, Mujahedeen, Taliban, Afghan-Atabs, to Name a Few” (2001)
35 Ashraf Ghani, “The Follow of Quick Action in Afghanistan” (2001)
36 Nazif Sharrani, “Afghanistan Can Learn From Its Past” (2001)
37 Zieba Shorish-Shamley Interviewed, “Women in the New Afghanistan” (2001)
38 David Edwards and Shahmahmood Miakhel, “Enlisting Afghan Aid” (2001)
39 Kamran Asdar Ali, “Pakistan's Dilemma” (2001)
40 Francesca Mereu etal, “War Destroyed Chechnya's Clan Structure” (2002)

Part VI: Examining Militarism and the “War on Terror”
41 William Beeman, “U.S. Anti-Terrorist Message Won't Fly in Islamic World” (2001)
42 David Price, “Terror and Indigenous Peoples–War without End”
43 John Burdick, “Afghan War Could be Recruiting Tools for Terrorists” (2001)
44 Dale Eickelman, “First Know the Enemy, Then Act” (2001)
45 John Burdick, “Sept 11 Exposes Futile Search for `Perfect' Missile Defense” (2001)
46 Roberto Gonzalez, “Ignorance Is Not Bliss,” (2202)
47 Mahmood Mamdani, “Turn Off Your Tunnel Vision” (2002)
48 Thomas McKenna Interviewed, “The Roots of Muslim Separatism in the Philippines” (2002)

Part VII Academic Freedom and Civil Liberties
49 Roberto Gonzalez, “Lynn Cheney-Joe Lieberman Group Puts Out a Blacklist” (2001)
50 David Price, “Academia under Attack: Sketches for a New Blacklist” (2001)
51 Hugh Gusterson, Interviewed, “Lynn Cheney's Free Speech Blacklist” (2002)
52 Laura Nader, Harmony Coerced Is Freedom Denied” (2001)

Epilogue: Unconventional Anthropology: Challenging the Myths of Continuous War

I was pleased to see several CounterPunch contributions. I respectfully encourage Amazon readers to seek out my CounterPunch short piece on “Intelligence for the President–AND Everyone Else.” Obama is a front for the Borg, he is not getting proper decision-support, and neither is any other element of the government. We need to get back into being the sovereign people.

In addition to the book cited above, I recommend:
War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America's Most Decorated Soldier
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future – and What It Will Take to Win It Back
None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam
Who the Hell Are We Fighting?: The Story of Sam Adams and the Vietnam Intelligence Wars
The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence and the Will of the People
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

Review: Reinventing Knowledge–From Alexandria to the Internet

5 Star, Communications, Education (General), Information Operations, Information Society, Information Technology
Amazon Page
Amazon Page

Internet is NOT a Great Leap Forward in Reinventing Knowledge, August 28, 2008

Ian F. McNeely

Edit of 29 August 2008: Am adding a couple of images to help clarify the importance of actually understanding new ways of creating, sharing, and leveraging knowledge. YES, the Internet has led to an order of magnitude or more knowledge creation and sharing but NO, it has not led to a dramatic change in the definition of knowledge or the role played by knowledge.

With a tip of the hat to SALON and book reviewer Laura Miller, whose review can be found at the URL in the comment, I want to add this book to those I recommend for the growing body of citizens who are truly skeptical of the Internet as a panacea, and suspicious of Google and other “snake oil” vendors.

Use the “see inside the book” feature just under the book cover above to examine details provided by the publisher.

Bottom line: we are entering a period when the “wealth of networks” may reinvent knowledge, but having read and reviewed The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals And Organizations Are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World only to be stunned at the end with its discussion of how many non-human primates are learning 500-1000 human words in sign language, I am now convinced, from a system of systems perspective, that the next big leap in reinventing knowledge will be not the emergence of smart mobs, armies of davids, the power of us, but rather, when Pierre Tielhard de Chardin's noosphere becomes a reality, and all living things have co-equal standing “in communion” with one another.

The nicest thing I can say about this book, other than to recommend it, is to link to other books that support the thesis the book presents: the Internet is NOT the big leap forward.

See also:

In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations
Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway
The Future of the Internet–And How to Stop It
The Age of Missing Information
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
The Biodiversity Crisis: Losing What Counts (American Museum of Natural History Books)
The First Idea: How Symbols, Language, And Intelligence Evolved From Our Primate Ancestors To Modern Humans

Review: Web 2.0–A Strategy Guide: Business thinking and strategies behind successful Web 2.0 implementations.

4 Star, Information Operations, Information Technology

Web 2.0 2Superb Overview of Web 2.0, June 3, 2008

Amy Shuen

I found this book mildly irritating, until I realized that it was in fact perfect for what it sets out to be, an introduction of Web 2.0 concepts for those who know nothing about the Web, i.e. executives who still dictate memoranda, still budget for print advertising, etcetera. O'Reilly has a superb model for leveraging conferences and publishing books, but O'Reilly should have known better than to publish this book in 2008 without reference to Web 3.0. Wikipedia has a fine overview of Web 3.0, start there, I have put the URL in the comment below.

I found the book bland and disappointing, and found–when discussing Amazon, for example, the book reads more like an advertisement and has no clue on all the stuff Amazon is not doing (see the comment for two URLs), such as microtext for micro-cash, creating global intelligence councils on poverty and every other topic using top authors, and creating local citizen intelligence minutemen who can do real-time observation in the context of Amazon's excellent S3 cloud, which is in my view operating at less than 10% of its potential because Bezos has two things on his mind: outerspace and Kindle.

The end notes and the bibliography are the best part of the book. The index stinks. 7 pages for a 214 page book, should have been at least 14–it was an afterthought and done badly.

Better books on Web 2.0 and Generation 2.0 include:
Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies
Mobilizing Generation 2.0: A Practical Guide to Using Web2.0 Technologies to Recruit, Organize and Engage Youth
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

Better books on the larger scheme of things:
Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
New World New Mind Changing the Way We
Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge
The Future of the Internet–And How to Stop It
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

Review: Groundswell–Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies

5 Star, Education (General), Information Operations, Information Society, Information Technology
Grouindswell
Amazon Page

The Book Steve Ballmer Needs to Read, May 17, 2008

Charlene Li

Edit to point to elaborative comment at end of review, with URL.

This book was given to me as a gift, along with Leave Us Alone: Getting the Government's Hands Off Our Money, Our Guns, Our Lives, and the fact that the guy giving me the books is one of two smartest people I know caused me to jump these two books to the top of my week-end stack.

I normally do not buy books coming out of Gartner or Forrester or other similar shops that produce cookie cutter products. I am very glad I was given this book. I was deeply impressed from page one and continually gratified and astonished as the level of detail as the book progressed.

This is a graduate course in New Age Marketing, and the only thing this book does not have is the need to address “true costs” and honor the triple-bottom line (profit, economic and social justice, and zero environmental footprint: memes are cradle to cradle, sustainable design, green to gold).

The book's bottom line: it's about LISTENING to PEOPLE, not about the technologies. The Presidential candidate that dismisses all their advisors and creates a national blog to address the ten high-level threats to mankind, the twelve policies that must be harmonized, and how nothing we do matters unless we give Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and Wild Cards like the Congo a model for avoiding our mistakes while achieving our quality of life, should win. Then they can come to Chicago on Lincoln's birthday and participate in the Citizens' SUmmit being organized by Joseph McCormick, a co-founder and guiding light for Reuniting America (110 million strong and growing).

I am very impressed by the examples, and the fact that they are not presented in a cutesy box fashion but woven into the text.

The authors provide numbers that show how an investment in executive blogging and nurturing customers and partners can give back at least 150% if not more (I think it is closer to 5 to 1 RoI), and on the basis of the totality of the book, I take their word for it. I take this to the next level and would point out that the US Government investment of our dollars in “Strategic Communication” will continue to be a failure because no amount of “PR” is going to overcome the reality of our overbearing presence everywhere.

Very interesting to me was the authors' information, including tables, that shows that Republicans and Independents are not as active in the Web 2.0 environment, and this should be cause for concern among those who wish to challenge the shiftless Democrats and their smoke and mirror enthusiasm for Senator Obama, who is NOT transparent at all (see my review of Obama – The Postmodern Coup: Making of a Manchurian Candidate.

Because of this book I have decided to shift all of my online activity to Citizens-Party.org, leaving Earth Intelligence Network as an archive. My intent is to inspire individual public intelligence minutemen (and women) who can disclose the true costs of all products and services, and help us bring to bear the full diversity of public opinion on such controversial matters as the proposed $700 billion bailout of Wall Street speculators.

Other books I recommend:
Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History Is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World
A Power Governments Cannot Suppress
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
The World Cafe: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter
Escaping the Matrix: How We the People can change the world
How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, Updated Edition
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

See also the images above under the book cover. Peace–and prosperity–in our time.

Elaborative Comment:

For those that send me emails asking for my usual summary, the bottom line on this book is that I cannot do it, do not want to do it, within the Amazon 1000 work limit. However, am adding a short edit to offer a bit more detail. This book cannot receive justice with a summary. It is literally an operating manual for the intersection of legacy industries and Web 3.0.

Re Steve Ballmer, am just blown away that they are willing to spend $40 billion and up for Yahoo, and evidently have no clue how to build Web 3.0 for under $10 billion, faster, better, cheaper than Google (see my review of Stephen E. Arnold's “Google 2.0: The Calculating Predator” not sold on Amazon, online from Infonortics UK. Here is the URL on how he is now at Plan C and evidently has no idea how to build on all that this book suggests:

http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?sto

ry_id=59703

There are no fewer than 10 cash-starved companies that are priceless and can be picked up for pennies. For the rest, see my review of “Bloomberg on Bloomberg” where he makes the case for building from the inside instead of buying. He says “Outsiders give you what you ask for, insiders give you waht you need.” Ballmer is assuredly a smart and talented individual, but in many ways he now strikes me as the Henry Kissinger of the private sector: he's become like a moron, unable to LISTEN (see my review of Daniel Ellsberg for a recounting of the converation Ellsberg has with Kissinger, “SECRETS: A Memoire.”) Ben Gilad says much the same thing in Blindspots: CEO's information is invariably filtered (incomplete), biased, late, and by my own experience: less than 20% of what should be presented to them.

Fascinated by three negatives on what would normally be considered a tipping point book. The point is that the “best and the brightest” very often get trapped in their own delusions–the Microsoft business development process DOES NOT WORK. Their process for screening vendors and consultants relies on lower common denominator minds, and cannot handle break-out visions, especially those that call for abandoning the legacy stuff that is not only untenable of on laptop, but not even marginally viable on a hand-held.

Very sorry to have offended several of you, eager to engage. I can change or add to the review, but only if you use the comments section as intended.

With best wishes,
Robert

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