Userland

Franklin Foer's World Without Mind bears an ominous sub-title: "The Existential Threat of Big Tech". Unfortunately, the book doesn't deliver on its broad promise. A more accurate title would have been, "How Amazon and the Free Web Are Destroying Journalism". That's the area Foer understands well,

James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds, published in 2004, has been influential in financial markets and corporate transformations. It also has plenty of ideas relevant to social networking's future. The book's leading concept is that that collective intelligence -- aggregating diverse opinions -- can out-perform judgments made by alleged experts

I've been reading The Long Tail, the 2006 blockbuster extolling the unlimited consumer choice made possible by the internet. The book was written by Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine. Its title is now part of the marketing lexicon, and aptly captures the author's thesis: there's a lot of money

Jaron Lanier’s recent book, You Are Not A Gadget, is a broad criticism of the internet. Lanier thinks cyberspace is full of unimaginative software. Web 2.0 is window dressing on a tired paradigm. Silicon Valley is funding trivial applications.not much better than than the hasty business plans

Rework is as much a manifesto as a business guide. The content is less bombastic than some of its advance publicity, but be prepared for a polemic. Authors Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson (the inventor of Ruby on Rails) argue why you should keep your company's size and products