From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg
by John Naughton, 2011

This book gives nine rules for understanding the role of the internet in creating and spreading disruptive innovations:
1. Take the Long View
2. The Web Is Not the Net
3. For the Net, Disruption Is a Feature, Not a Bug
4. Think Ecology, Not Just Economics
5. Complexity Is the New Reality
6. The Network Is Now the Computer
7. The Web Is Evolving
8. Copyrights and “Copywrongs”: Or, Why Our Intellectual Property Regime No Longer Makes Sense
9. Orwell vs. Huxley: The Bookends of Our Networked Future?

It is a fairly quick read, and much of the material will be familiar to the internet-savvy. However, I think it does have some good insights. One thing that interested me was the evolution of market share in new technological innovations. When the telephone was introduced, many small phone networks were created until Bell/AT&T offered better service and took over the market. When radio was introduced, there were many broadcasters all seeking to share information. After some years, a handful (or less) of advertisers and broadcasters came to dominate the popular soap opera radio programs. Three network providers quickly came to dominate television in the second half of the twentieth century. When computers started to become useful, many hardware providers vied for market share. But the market was dominated by Microsoft and Apple by the 1990’s. And the internet? Are we moving from an era of many content providers to an era dominated by a few companies? Google, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo!, Baidu (Chinese search engine), Wikipedia, QQ (Asian internet portal), LinkedIn, Bing, and Twitter get the most traffic. Do they get a majority of the traffic? A significant majority? It seems these companies get more and more traffic each day as more and more people accept their service or join their network. While I understand that networks increase in value as more and more people join them, it does seem troubling that a small number of companies/networks hold the key to the future evolution of the internet.

How to Write a Lot
By Paul Silvia, 2007

How to Write a Lot discusses the not-so-secret secrets of academic writing. The main argument of the book can be distilled into this sentence: Schedule your writing time, and stick to the schedule so that writing becomes a habit. Prolific writers write according a schedule. Binge writers, never finding time for writing and always facing deadlines, don’t end up writing much.

This book was a quick read and funny in places. The introductory chapters and the chapter about style were the most useful for me. The rest of the book delved a little too deeply into the specifics of writing in the psychology field. The details about how to write journal articles and books focused upon psychology articles/books, but some insights can be gleaned for any field.

One of my goals is to begin to structure my time more wisely this summer. Here’s hoping that I begin to write a lot.