Today we took a trip to Erie, Pennsylvania. It’s about a ninety-minute ride from our home. My wife loves shopping. She reminds me of the Sioux practice of counting coup. I think she gets more joy out of touching clothes racks than the actual purchase. Luckily for me there were a couple of bookstores nearby and I visited both of them. Bookstores are near religious experiences for me. I love to wander the aisles, look at new books and in Borders and Barnes & Noble there are places to sit with cup of coffee or hot chocolate and read a book before you buy it. Today I got a couple of books. One of them is Wikinomics-How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything and the other is The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success by Deepak Chopra. I’ve already nearly fifty pages of Wikinomics. I’ve been reading Wikinomics feed for a couple of months. The book is similar, but there is information in the book that I hadn’t read in the RSS feeds from the site.
As I walked around the bookstores I spotted a whole section devoted to getting published. That’s really information for the pre-wiki and blogger era. I’m published already. I don’t know how many people would pay to read what I have to say or write, but the fact is in this era of push button publishing on the web I’ve already achieved some of what is in those books. That section of the bookstore is really dated information. Thanks to WordPress, Typepad, Blogger and others we who blog are published already.
Critics of the blogosphere claim the vast new wilderness of voices adds more noise to an overly saturated media environment. With over 50 million blogs, 1.5 million blog posts daily, and a new blog created every second, you’d think they might have a point. But ultimately their critique is trite–Wikinomics-How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, p. 40