Book Reviews in 140 Characters

Over the past couple of weeks I have been quiet and catching up on some reading. Most of the books are noted on my shelfari but no doubt few of you click on the shiny covers so I thought it only reasonable to give you less than 140 characters on each:

Reality Check by Guy Kawasaki: I loved his sections on the lies of entrepreneurs, VC's, and engineers. The start-up checklists are also worth buying the book for. Good buy.

Cultivating Communities of Practive by Wenger, McDermott, and Snyder: A helpful guide on managing knowledge that helps the reader understand the less obvious benefits derived from communities of practice.

The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki: A must read for those who still believe finding experts is more important than finding how to engage the masses. It will mess with your head.

The Social Life of Information by John Seely: A review of the shift from information to knowledge and a great backdrop for those of us building companies in an experience economy.

Iconoclast by Gregory Berns:  A neuroscientist perspective on how mentally insane and different true entrepreneurs are. If you are one you have to read it to discover you are mad. 

My reading list for the next few week:
Crowdsourcing by Jeff Howe
Entrepreneur Journeys by Sramana Mitra
The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder
The Warhol Economy by Elizabeth Currid

I will write a review on these sometime also. Why did I choose on 140 characters for each review? Well for one it fits into an SMS text. In addition one thing that Twitter and other micro-messaging systems are teaching me is that brevity is beautiful. We are all tempted to write novels and be verbose on a lot we talk about. Learning the discipline of being precise is an asset in this world of information. The shorter and more precise our communication becomes in these coming days will help our voice to be heard and hopefully at the same time reduce the amount of emails we have to wade through on an average day.

Comments

[Mark Dowds]

I was wondering why no-one seems to have launched something too. Mind you there are probably 100 people developing it as we speak based on the recent flurry. Do you own "twitterviews.com" It would be a fun one we could do

[Dallas]

That's funny.. I had an idea for 'twittereviews' a week or two ago... reviews that fit into a twitter. I don't know if it'd be a website or just a twitter search term or what, but it's a fun idea.