The Shifted Librarian picks up on Weblog Bookwatch and the way Amazon are finding new ways to make the Web work for them and their customers. The blog at onfocus.com is also worth a look – some interesting stuff going on there with scripts (Paul Bausch is one of the original co-developers of Blogger)
Jon Udell picks up on Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone“ _“If he’s right, the flowering of online community that we see all around us may be part of a very large historical pattern. As a culture, we may be sensing a deficiency of social capital, and creating new institutions — appropriate to our time and our technology — to remedy the problem. Putnam’s thesis may be read as a requirements specification for online communities
Ken Rawlings How To Bathe A Cat tasteless but funny item from The Wendy Cooper Weblog Research on Learning and Performance The Shifted Librarian DJ’s Weblog extending Peerkat. Also DJ’s Jabber Stuff Jon’s Radio (Jon Udell’s experiments with Radio Userland)
SomeTHiNG – worth a look for some of the longer pieces… AtariGirl – “I know what was wrong with me. I know what I did to myself. Walking off the job today felt like a step in the right direction. Anxiety, guilt, and an overshadowing of apathy have kept me from doing so much for myself. And I’m so ****ing tired of coloring myself invisible.” A Bridge to Nowhere – Mountainbiking in Long Island…
The Journey of the Hero by Fridemann Wieland. This book is about applying Joseph Campbell’s mythological idea of “The Hero’s Journey” to personal development, using the Grail myth as the guiding metaphor. Review to follow. This book is currently out of print, I picked up a copy for £1 in a remainders bookshop.
Measuring the Software Process by Florac & Carleton This is about applying statistical process control to software development, and I’m reading it for work. Review to follow
The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook by Peter Senge et. al. I bought this book several years ago, but it remains a valuable reference to practical applications of the concepts in The Fifth Discipline. I pulled it off the shelf to refresh my memory about Systems Archetypes for a longer follow-up article to “Paying to Learn”.
the sea, the sea is the first Iris Murdoch novel I have read – seeing the film “Iris” encouraged me to try some of her writing. Review to follow.
Gert at mad musings of me(uk) has just defined this sport as checking your site stats and then hitting on the site of anybody who has come to you from their stats…in the hope that they will check their stats again and come back to your site in the hope that you will check your stats and return to their site
In wiring my mind Swerdloff gives a great description of a practical application of the NLP Anchoring technique to associate a particular song with the moment of perfect beauty as he kisses his girl… I have a strange question I told her. Yeah? Can I kiss you? For the duration of this song. Of course. It was only a strange question because of the song…