Ged Carroll

Category: oprah time | 書評 | 서평 : 文芸批評

Welcome! I guess the first question that you have is why oprah time? Well in my last year of college I used to sit in the house that I shared with my landlord and write my essays whilst watching cable TV.

There I would be sipping tea, writing away and referencing from text books spread around me on the couch and coffee table. One of the programmes on the in the background was Oprah Winfrey. A lot of the show was just background noise. But I was fascinated by Oprah’s book club.

She’d give her take on a book, maybe interview the author. And then it would be blasted up the New York Times bestsellers list. This list appears weekly in the New York Times Book Review. Oprah’s book club was later emulated by other talk show hosts, notably the UK’s Richard Madeley and Judy Finegan.

On the high end you had Melvyn Bragg‘s South Bank Show when they profiled an author of the moment.

When I came to writing my own review of books that I’d read, I was was brought back to that time working on a sofa. Apple laptop in hand. It made sense to go with Oprah time.

You might also notice a link called bookshelf. This is a list of non-fiction books that I have kept. And the reasons why I have kept them.

If you’ve gone through my reviews and think that you’d like to send me a book to review. Feel free to contact me. Click this link, prove that you’re human and you will have my email address.

  • Crypto by Steven Levy

    Reading Crypto followed after I had read Steven Levy’s previous works Hackers, Insanely Great and Artificial Life earlier on in my PR career. Along with Fire In The Valley and Accidental Empires, Levy’s books had provided a great insight into the technology industry and the cultural forces behind it.

    Crypto is more of the same as the counter-cultural belief systems that begat the Whole Earth Catalog and the Homebrew Computer Club. This viewpoint clashed head on with the security apparatus of the US government. Some of the descriptions around public cryptographic usage like PGP and MailSafe were analogous to what we now call the social graph in terms of issues of personal trust, privacy and differing types of relationships and interactions. The book also makes interesting reading because it takes you back to a time when technology moved forwards in leaps and bounds of public perception.

    Its hard now to feel the same excitement about the internet now that we’ve lived with it for the past decade and a half, when I moved into my present house I considered my broadband connection as important as getting the utilities sorted for my move. ADSL was as important as electricity for me. And with that ubiquity, the magic has disappeared.

    Levy communicates the principles of modern cryptography well and leads the reader through the myriad events that let to modern cryptography and why it is so important. (Hint: how do you think it is so hard for criminals not to buy things on your credit card once you’ve shopped at Amazon, YesAsia, the iTunes Music Store or Pizza Hut?). More book reviews here.

  • Harnessing the Power of Social Applications by Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li

    Before I delve in to Harnessing the Power of Social Applications I need to get something out of the way. Normally I don’t highlight articles in the same way I will review a book, they would normally appear in links of the day, but I really liked Bernoff and Li’s article in the latest edition of MIT Sloan Management Review. I know that it is designed to help build up a head of steam before their book launch ‘Groundswell’ however it is a great article to put in front of the noses of business people about the value of social media and taking online marketing beyond search engine marketing (SEM).

    Their simple guide on how different business functions can be impacted and how success can be measured is something that social media types should have as a laminated card on their cubicle wall.

    Groundswell diagram by Li and Bernoff

    Click here to read the article.

    Some of the data points that Li and Bernoff used in the article additional items of interest that weren’t covered by article. Whilst in the UK we think that social networks like Facebook are having real take up and impact that is nothing compared to the level of online engagement by Japanese and Korean web users. Much of this engagement is likely to driven using mobile devices. Overall PC penetration was lower than the US, mobile device adoption was higher in Asia. The handsets were more sophisticated in terms of networks and access to online services.

    Social media participation internationally

    It is also interesting to see how low the level of adoption of social media is in Germany.  The bulk of activity being focused on consumption and anonymous participation in traditional forums. This is down to the experience of privacy invasion that happened during the Nazi era and in East Germany with the Stasi’s network of informants.

    All the images are owned by Forrester Research. More on marketing here.

  • Bill and Dave by Michael Malone

    Bill and Dave were better known now by their surnames: Hewlett-Packard. It is familiar to consumers as a brand of printer, laptops and digital cameras sold in supermarkets up and down the country. Some may remember that they had a Watergate-type moment recently and a woman CEO who made a dogs dinner of things.

    I visited Boeblingen (near Stuttgart) – the European headquarters of Hewlett-Packard in the late 90s and left deeply unimpressed by a large but seemingly directionless technology behemoth. We were on the cusp of the internet, while they were talking about printing brochures on demand. While this was happening the best internet search engine at the time, Alta Vista, had been built by their long time rival Digital Equipment Corporation.

    Malone in his book Bill and Dave gave me a better appreciation of Hewlett-Packard. He brings into perspective how important Bill Hewlett and David Packard were to the technology sector and modern business practices.

    From a PR perspective, I found facinating the way Bill and David self-consciously built their own personal legends which helped support and extend the HP Way. The company’s culture was built, extended and modified in a deliberate, planned manner unparalleled in any other company. Their culture was what PR people would now call thought leadership – which feels very now given the start of interest around brand purpose.

    Bill and Dave wrote the book on corporate reputation without the help of big name agencies and invented the elements as they went along, combined with a wisdom worthy of Solomon. More book reviews here.

  • The Dream Machine by M Mitchel Waldrop

    Why did I read The Dream Machine? History is important. It inspires us and it informs us about the present and we can learn about it to shape the future. I was inspired to work in PR for the technology sector by Robert X Cringely’s book Accidential Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date.

    Cringely inspired me with a tale of extraordinary people, strong personalities and a bit of youth rebellion. Cringely touched on the contribution of early pioneers like Doug Engelbert and Bob Metcalfe, but placed most of his emphasis on Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

    John Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry covered the earlier generation of innovators in more depth, particularly Engelbart.

    The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal tells the story from the point-of-view of J C R Linklder, a polymath who was instrumental in putting in place a lot of the projects and infrastructure that was needed to make the necessary developments. Linklider was a psychologist by training who realised the power and potential of technology way before it was possible.

    Waldrop tells the story well, painting Licklider as a human being: a wonderful polymath, parent, researcher and a useless manager. He also paints the broader historical picture taking in ARPA, DEC, Xerox PARC, Al Gore and the Information Superhighway. More technology related posts here.

  • Nokia Smartphone Hacks

    O’Reilly are known for their technical books and they publish some of my favourite reference books: Flickr Hacks, Mac OS X – The Missing Manual and Learning Unix for Mac OS X Panther.

    At first I was skeptical, a book about hacking Nokia phones, what’s the point they’re so transitory as devices? I go through a new phone every 12 months or so.

    Nokia has released a plethora of OS’s for their phones: Series 40, Series 60 (of which we now have the 3rd edition), Series 90: which is what powered the 9X00 series communicators.

    To be fair most of the focus is on Series 60, the book provides advice on what hack doesn’t work with older Series 60 phones and highlights model exceptions.

    Nokia Smartphone Hacks at first seemed similar to other O’Reilly technical books, but as I worked through it over the past eight weeks in between work and travel I started to realise that Nokia Smartphone Hacks was different.

    The style and content of Nokia Smartphone Hacks has lots of useful content for the non-technically orientated users, this realisation slowly morphed into a realisation that Nokia Smartphone Hacks was in fact the manual that Nokia should ship with all their phones. It has a raft of helpful tips and links to really useful applications; many of them freeware and tips on how to get your phone to work with your Windows/Mac OS X/Linux box (delete as appropriate).

    Now some of the downsides:

    • The performance of a phone relies on a symbiotic relationship with the carriers network services (like port access), most the data in book usually relates to US carriers like Cingular / AT&T Wireless and T-Mobile USA
    • Size- its quite a weighty read but the content is really good

    More wireless related posts here.