Exciting, Original, Superb Overall, Could be Expanded, July 5, 2008
Colin Ware
I found this book provocative at multiple levels.
At the strategic level, although I have known about and followed Elsevier for decades, I am beginning to perceive a more coherent publishing strategy, and was pleased to see notice of their collaboration with BookAid and the Sabre Foundation to create libraries in developing countries.
At the operational level, I found this book to be a fascinating easy to read and understand integration of cognitive science (what is the brain doing to “see” different forms of visual cues (colors, shapes, groups, etcetera), psychology, art, design, and ultimately engineering of both larger than human structures, and computer graphics.
At the tactical level, the book is clearly a superior collection of critical information and easily a required text for those who would design for the human eye. At this level I would have liked to see more depictions of both buildings and environments, and more depictions of computer screens.
The absence of Library of Congress cataloging data was also a disappointment. The Library of Congress is becoming archaic, I believe publishers are amply competent to provide their own cataloging data, and this is especially important when a book crosses disciplines, e.g. cognitive science, visual intelligence, art, design, computer graphics, etcetera. Indeed, in the process of assigning cataloguing data, the publisher might discover areas where the book is weaker than intended, and send it back for enhancement.
I recommend this book be expanded to add a chapter on “decision support” and an appendix on great practitioners of the visualization of information. Although Tuft is the best known, in part because of his ceasecell promotion of his books and classes, there are at least 25 if not 50 other great visualizers, and a page on each with their photo, short bio, list of publications, and a couple of examples of their work would be a mind-enhancing “walk about” in the field of visual design.
As a textbook, this is a clear five. As adult education is falls to a four, or needs a second book that properly introduces the collective intelligence and semantic web and geospatially and time-based visualizations that are emergent.
Web 1.0 Mindset Waving Web 2.0 Methods, June 29, 2008
Ted Hart
I've given this book four stars because if you want to leverage Web 2.0 methods to garner more money for your Web 1.0 “what we think best” programs, then this is the book for you.
In terms of actually creating empowered social networks where the non-profit is a facilitatator, connecting real people with micro-cash to real people with micro-needs, this book is so far back in time as to be next to useless.
Argh! This is the last gasp of the United Way/Red Cross “rip off as many as possible” so we can have our first class tickets and lifestyle and practice trickle down tax-free programs that “we the elite” decide.
There are web sites devoted to micro-connecting and micro-giving, I recommend that individuals avoid giving to any organization that does not offer open books and a complete menu of opportunities to earmark your gift for a specific need from a specific person or household. The animal and child chartities are a bit ahead of the game here, but even this can be disintermediated eventually.
I am reminded of two famous views:
“Criticize by Creating” from Machiavelo, adopted by the Flow Project.
Instead of trying to fix old systems, create new ones that displace them (paraphrase) from Buckminster Fuller.
I must disclose that recently Earth Intelligence Network sent 65 copies of its first book (the last one listed below, also free online) along with a letter of inquiry to the top foundations puporting to be addressing the ten high-level threats to humanity. We received back exactly two serious responses, six postcards blowing us off, and nothing at all from all the others. This has persuaded me that most so-called national foundations are nothing more than tax dodges and golden parachutes for a select few, and it is time we subject them to the same “open books” scrutiny that we plan for corporations and for government at all levels.
I've given this book four stars because it represents the very best thinking among those who believe it is possible to create integrative comprehensive relational databases in advance of receiving the data.
I served on the Information Handling Committee of the US Intelligence Community, and was a founding member of the Advanced Information Processing and Analysis Steering Group. I have spent the last twenty years thinking about all information in all languages all the time.
I have this book in my library (but just acquired it despite its 2006 publication date) and I have flipped through this book methodically, but cannot claim to have read it. I read the entire index word for word. It is excellent on terms and does not recognize humans.
Although XML is in the index, OWL and SOAP are not. Doug Englebart's Open Hypertextdocument system (OHS) and Pierre Levy's Information Economy Meta Language (IEML) do not appear in this book.
Following are the semantic entries in the index:
+ Semantic Class, 99, 100
+ Semantic Community, 40, 41, 45, 47, 210
+ semantic web, 47
+ semantics, 10, 38
Geospatial and Map (anything) do not appear in the index.
Neither foreign language variations nor multi-media geospatially-related data (the author is correct early on, data is the plural of datum) nor early warning of unanticipated data forms appear to be in this book.
Social networks, collaborative meaning determination, and human in the loop do not appear to be in this book.
I put it down with two thoughts:
1. This is a great book for anyone devoted to Oracle who wants to see Oracle at its very best in a bounded environment, and the author should be consulted by those going beyond such environments; and
2. This book has little to offer to those of us who want to create massive scale and infinitely scalable systems of systems that can cope with all information in all languages all the time, none of it defined in advance.
In the comment, I provide a URL for the best concise definition of the Zachman Framework, the equivalent of the ultra-accurate near-distance arrow just before gunpowder was invented.
Up above I provide my own four quadrants of the knowledge environment–the difference between Nova Spivak, whom I admire immensely, and myself, is that I place much more emphasis on the human factor as well as the sociology and psychology of cultures, tribes, organizations, and nations.
My own books are not technical, but since I have noticed a first negative vote, I will go ahead and link to them for grins. Technology is NOT a substitute for thinking humans. I cannot compare to the author of this book, he is at the top of his relational database game, but I do believe that metadata ultimately boils down to human concepts communicated P2P.
5 for Content and Relevance, Zero for Greed Pricing, June 3, 2008
Peter Mika
I am an author and publisher and I would have bought this book today had it been priced more honestly. It costs a penny a page to produce a book, and this book should not be sold for more than $29.95 (which is ten times cost, and also accounts for Amazon only paying 45% of retail to each publisher).
I hope the author reads this and posts the book online as a Creative Commons PDF. I advise all authors to retain original rights to everything they produce, and to always post a searchable savable PDF for the common good. Earth Intelligence publishes hard-copy books on Amazon as a marker, but the real value to all who wich to create a prosperous world at peace lies in our free PDFs that can also be translated into any language at no cost.
Search the web for the title and author of this book and find interesting free stuff. I am adding this book to my list of grotesquely expensive books I would have bought but will not because of the price.
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.
Best in Class, Very Technical, Saluting and Moving On, May 31, 2008
John H. Miller
Sometime I encounter books that are extremely important, that give me an appreciation for a knowledge domain I do not know enough about, and that I simply cannot read and review.
Howard Bloom, in Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century teaches us that the only way to create a sustainable peace in the Palestine region is to provide absolute security for an entire generation, and raise two whole generations, one on each side, from kindergarten on us, generations that do not consider “the other” to be “pigs and monkeys” by the age of five.
Similarly, the literature on wealth of networks and the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid is growing, and I am convinced that public intelligence (decision support, full disclosure, end of information asymmetries) is going to accomplish two things in the next twenty years:
1) Eradicate corruption and enforce the triple-bottom line
2) Elevate five billion poor by teaching them one cell call at a time so that they can create infinite stabilizing wealth.
So the very best thing I can say about this book is that I am glad I bought it, I am very glad to have a sense, however weak, of this important exploratory area, and now I know that I need a team of generative social scientists that can do complex modeling for peace and prosperity solutions.
I urge one and all to become familiar with World Index of Social and Environmental Responsibility (WISER), as best I can tell that is the center of gravity for empowering individuals with deep knowledge of the true costs and many human rights abuses and other crimes that we support today for lack of knowledge. I also recommend the pioneering EarthGame work of Medard Gabel, at BigPictureSmallWorld.
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.
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.
Exciting, Original, Superb Overall, Could be Expanded, July 5, 2008
