WebMink
Simon Phipps's personal commentary

New Booklist for a New Year

I decided that my old book-list page on Webmink was looking a bit freyed around the edges, so I have been meaning to rework it for some time. The problem is that editing HTML takes a repeated investment in time. That's the reason I use an aggregator to build my home page - it simply gathers the work I've already done elsewhere automatically rather than requiring an additional process step.

This, by the way, is the reason most club, small business and church web sites fail - because people don't factor in the effort involved in working regularly to keep things fresh. All they look at is the up-front effort and cost, cover that and then fail to budget for upkeep. It's also the reason gathering metrics for driving quality improvement in an organisation fails if the data-gathering is an additional process step. If you need a metric, measure something people have to do in order to achieve the goal, don't ask them to fill in an extra form or visit an extra web site because when the going gets tough they just won't.

This is all by way of saying that I may have found the perfect tool in Amazon AStore. You'll remember I have been using it to document my camera system - well, I think it may be the perfect mechanism for creating an attractive and useful book list as well. Take a look and let me know what you think of that and the new music list, both with comments of the length I use on del.icio.us for links.

Labels: Amazon, book, Music

posted at 7:42 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

New Book For The New Year

When I was in Half Moon Bay just before Christmas, I went to my favourite bookshop (Coastside Books, who as far as I can tell have no web site - they are a few blocks down on the west side of Main Street) and as ever left with a new book. It's one I would recommend to every American progressive (and it's pretty helpful for the rest of us too).

Written by a group of people at the Rockridge Institute, including George Lakoff, it's called Thinking Points: A Progressive's Handbook [US|UK] and at $10 it is an absolute must-buy. It is clear, easy to read, persuasive and riddled with useful, transferrable concepts that actually help clarify political outlooks across the spectrum. I almost unreservedly recommend it - my (small) reservations include use of examples with a short shelf-life.

Especially useful are the thinking tools that clarify the way people can use the same words ("freedom", "equality" and so on) yet mean opposite things without any failure of integrity. I would very much like to see some thinking about open source done from this perspective - is anyone aware of such work? Superficially it seems to me that the Free Software and Open Source movements are the "contested variants" of the root "software freedom" concept and that some decent linguistic analysis would really help us gain unity.

Labels: book, Lakoff, politics, progressive, USA

posted at 3:23 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |