A good collection of stories from Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker articles.  You can see the genesis of some of the ideas that would appear a books by Gladwell such as Blink and Outliers.

Godin does it again.  Another insightful book that will get you thinking about how you market.   Tribes are a primal force in all of us.  We long to be part of a tribe whether we know it or not.  Technology has enabled us to be members of many tribes.

Being born at the right time has something to do with how successful you will become.   That and the fact that you need at least 10,000 hours of practice to get good at anything.

I’ve read a number of books on the rise of Google.  This book was interesting in that it discusses not just the rise of Google but the Google Way.  Much like HP was known for the HP Way, Google will become known, or is known, for how they do business.

Google loves free.  They love to give the user stuff for free.  Free applications, free data, free services, lots of stuff for free.  But why?  Google makes money from ads.  The more ads they display the more money they make.   The more services we consume the more ads Google can show us.

This was a good read.  A must read for anyone in publishing.  Use the Google examples presented in the book to change your business.

Split second judgement aren’t always a bad thing.

Once again Seth Godin captures a point of view and presents it in a clear way that just about anyone can understand. In fact the points made in this book are articulated in such a way that I will be forwarding the book to some people I know that could benefit from understanding the 14 trends that are changing advertising.

A big part of this new book – Meatball Sundae – discusses the impact the Internet has had on Advertising and Marketing. As Godin’s describes it however it’s not the Internet per se that has changed advertising it’s more about how people use the Internet to communicate.

It is all kind of Web 2.0 but his point is that new communications have to be engaging. It’s about stories, not messages. So what is your story?

The Long Tail took form over nearly two years as an “open-source research project” on Chris Anderson’s blog at www.longtail.com. This experiment in book development, where he shared data and ideas in progress and many smart readers helped improve them, fleshed out the theory and stress-tested the analysis, which made the book far better than it would have been if he had worked on it in isolation. It also suggested applications in industries he never expected, from beer to fashion, which has hugely expanded the scope the research.