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.

  • Microtrends:The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes by Mark Penn and E. Kinney Zalesne

    Microtrends is one of them must-read books if you want to recognise where your peers get some of their slideware and buzzwords from. Author Mark Penn has a rich pedigree with this, having been the political wonk who was partly responsible for popularising the ‘soccer mom‘ phrase during the late 1990s; this was to US politics what ‘white van man‘ was in the UK in terms of zeitgeist.

    So with a bit of reluctance I gave it a read. I was not looking forward to reading what I assumed would be a book that tries to do for market research what Stephen Levitt’s Freakonomics did for the dismal science and obsesses about US demographics, I mean part of my job is explaining to my colleagues eight time zones away in Portland and Seattle how different and diverse Europe is, rather than a homogenous mass like the congealed contents of a used fondue set.

    Penn to his credit make at least some of his observed groups relevant to an international audience by discussing implications for international audiences.

    The value of Penn’s book however is not in the segments it digs up, but in the way that it allows the reader (even for a short while) to see the world through different peoples eyes.  Having learned the lesson the hard way at Yahoo!, I try to see beyond my own early adopter web 2.0 otaku nerd world view and think about the man in the street. Penn’s book is a useful device to do this.

    Would I use it as a way to find niches to target in client campaigns? Probably not, as soon as the niches were committed to paper in Microtrends they were probably running out of date as the zeitgeist is a fickle and illusive beast.  If you want to read a copy, grab it whilst its hot or not at all. More book reviews here.

  • Open Sources

    In Open Sources: voices from the revolution – O’Reilly Publishing recorded the history to date and ethos of the open source community by having the main protagonists write essays on their parts in it. The essays are insightful about the development of the open source phenomena, the technology and the personalities of the protagonists.

    In Open Sources there is a noticeable comparison between the measured and modest essays of geek elder statesmen like Eric Raymond, Marshall McKusick and Richard Stallman with the precocious, arrogant and irritating style of Linus Torvalds.

    The book provides a good primer for non-technical readers on Perl, BSD and UNIX, Linux and the Mozilla browser. The open source community has moved on since the book was first published in 1999. Ubuntu has made Linux usable for the average person, ASUS launched a top-selling sub-notebook powered by Linux and Wal-Mart has sold a Linux PC and  recently dropped it.

    The reasons given for the apparent Linux being dropped from Wal-Mart’s shelves vary from increased support requirements to a lack of an Open Source eco-system to make applications used by non-geeks like Intuit’s personal finance and taxation applications, but that’s another post in of itself. More book reviews here.

  • Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

    Predictably Irrational struck me on first glance at the cover as just a trendy coffee table business book similar to the ones that Malcolm Gladwell cranks out every few years. That is a book that has a bit of buzz and is entertaining to read, but is much real-world use as The Beano annual.

    It has the same catchy title and a pleasingly designed but poker-faced sleeve that could have easily housed a contemporary novel or a ‘Men are from mars, women are from venus’-type books.

    Fortunately, Dan Ariely instead dissects some of the consumer behaviour factors that play a key role in areas such as decision-making and perceived value in an easy-to-understand format. He discusses a mix of experiments and real-world examples, such as online direct response adverts by The Economist to bring his ideas alive for the reader.

    Given my introduction, how much use is the book? Time will tell, but it has given me ideas about thinking about the way I present, pitch for new business and productise my current work in saleable chunks for existing and new clients. As a consumer I will evaluate retail and direct offers to me in a different way, it may not stop me being played, but at least I will be conscious of what exactly is going on and why I am responding to the retail stimuli. Ariely’s Predictably Irrational has been the first in a good number of works on behaviour change relevant to marketers. It now sits alongside Thinking Fast And Slow and the works of Caldini. More book reviews here.

  • The Future of Ideas

    I was curious to read Lawrence Lessig‘s The Future of Ideas because of Google’s recent intervention in the ongoing wireless spectrum auction being held in America. Google sought to get slivers of American wireless spectrum in the 90MHz space with a view to providing an alternative form of broadband access.

    This would be a challenge to the cable TV incumbents. It is unusual to see an online media property look to extend itself into network infrastructure. It indicates a broader desire to get into a rent seeking position. The Future of Ideas is the antithesis of this viewpoint with a view to make data and ideas more fluid in terms of adoption and consumption.

    The Future of Ideas builds on previous writing he has done around creative commons and guides readers through the complex relationship between connectivity supply, media platforms and intellectual property. The story moves from the start of the media and the telecoms industries through the current struggles of the media industry to come to terms with the internet as  a baseline platform of distribution and consumption.

    Lessig highlights some of the current challenges in intellectual property laws throughout old and new media in an articulate and highly readable manner. Some of his ideas make uncomfortable reading for established media / software players. His work as a definite agenda that is broadly in line with the libertarian stance taken by many technology and web pioneers, with regulation only considered warranted to keep platforms open. The move to keep platforms open comes at a critical time when platforms such as LinkedIn are becoming closed in nature and data portability is becoming much more difficult.

    Downsides to book

    My main criticism of the book would be that it does not take enough of an international viewpoint, but focuses almost exclusively on America. More book reviews here.

  • 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.