Books
Book Reviews, etc.
Review: Facebook Fairytales
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 03/12/2010 - 10:51We didn’t have a lot of money growing up, so the only reading material around the house was either books we checked out of the local library or copies of Reader’s Digest. When my parents got divorced my mother headed off to college as part of her effort to build a new life for herself. She took a creative writing class and received a comment on her first paper that it read like a story from Reader’s Digest. My mother, not realizing this was intended as a put down, was very pleased.
Since those days, I’ve gone on to enjoy reading James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, and others that are a long way from my early literary explorations. Yet I still enjoy, from time to time, picking up a story that reads like it is from Reader’s Digest.
I read a lot of books about the nature of online social networking. Tara Hunt’s book The Whuffie Factor is one of the best books I’ve read about online social networking, especially for young sophisticated geeks living in silicon valley, silicon alley, or other places such people gather. Shel Israel’s book, Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods seems the best for older business people. Shiv Singh’s Social Media Marketing For Dummies is one of the best for marketers, and the best for the general population seems to be Leslie Poston’s Twitter for Dummies.
But if you want to find a book that truly captures the power of social media in a way that your beloved Reader’s Digest reading aunt who plays the church organ out in Kansas can understand, there is no better book than Emily Liebert’s Facebook Fairytales: Modern-Day Miracles to Inspire the Human Spirit. The stories read like Reader’s Digest stories, in a good way. They are simple, touching, well written stories about how people have used Facebook to connect with one another in special ways. They have stories about strangers becoming friends and helping one another through major life events. There are stories of adoption, organ donation and more.
So, if you are a young sophisticated geek living in a silicon region of our country and want to find a book which will communicate what is really important about what you do to your beloved aunt who is skeptical of all this online stuff, get her a copy of Facebook Fairytales. For that matter, if you are just an average reader who would like something simple and uplifting to balance out some of the bad news of the day, Facebook Fairytales might bring you a little joy as well.
As a final note, especially in terms of the latest government regulations about product endorsements: I have received copies of each of the books mentioned in this blog post by publicists looking for a good review. I actually receive many requests to review books, but I don’t like writing negative reviews, so I turn down many of the book review requests and only do occasional reviews of books that sound like I’m going to like them. That’s how I came to review Facebook Fairytales, and like the other books I’ve received to review, I’m pleased that it did not disappoint me.
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Addicted to Energy: A Venture Capitalist's Perspective on How to Save Our Economy and Our Climate
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 12/09/2009 - 12:43It was over a decade ago, when I lived in Stamford that I used to visit the house of Elton Sherwin. He was a friend from church who shared some of my fascination with using technology to address social issues of the day. Climate change wasn’t as hot a topic back in those days, but we were both interested in how technology could be used to help us more efficiently use energy and he had a fascinating thermostat.
The typical thermostat checks to see if the temperature in a room is less than the desired temperature. If it is, the heat comes on. When the temperature goes above the desired temperature, the heat goes off. It is a very simple device. However, it is not the most efficient way of maintaining the desired temperature of a room. Different heat sources behave different ways. Forced hot air heats pretty quickly once it is turned on and stops heating pretty quickly when it is turned off. Electric heating has a little bit of a lag. It takes a little while for the elements to heat up when it gets turned on, and it takes a little while for them to cool off when they get turned off. Steam radiators can be even worse. It can take quite a while for them to get hot. Then, they stay hot long after the furnace has shut down.
Elton had a thermostat that would learn the behavior of the heating system and more efficiently control when to turn on and off the heat. Add to this the ability to have multiple zones and the ability to set different temperatures at different times, and you could have a much more efficient heating system that would keep all the rooms at much more desirable temperatures.
Elton moved out to California where he has been working as a venture capitalist for many years. So, it was little surprise when I learned about his new book, Addicted to Energy: A Venture Capitalist's Perspective on How to Save Our Economy and Our Climate
I have not had the opportunity to read it yet, but I took a quick look at some sections of it. For example, using the ‘Look Inside!’ functionality of Amazon, I randomly turned to page 85 with suggestion 25: “Post All Utility Bills on the Internet”. This is aimed at State Governments, and Elton observes that “without real data, your state will flounder and waste billions”. He poses questions like how much electricity, oil, and natural gas does each state building use? Who were the architects and HVAC contractors for the building? What is the cost per square foot to heat, cool, and light each building? He doesn’t ask how much each architect or HVAC contractor has contributed to the campaigns of various elected officials, but this is information a good researcher should be able to ferret out to get additional information.
What I like about this idea is that there is something for everyone. For the climate change activist, there is the desire to help governments reduce their carbon footprints. Yet even for the skeptic or denier, there is the aspect of reducing government waste and inefficiency and for the open government activist there is more data being made available for traditional journalists, bloggers, and anyone else who is interested in getting a better understanding of how the government is being run.
It seems like this is a great book to get for friends for the holidays, especially if you have friends running for Governor or involved in Gubernatorial campaigns.
Social Influence and Coffee
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 10/30/2009 - 18:16Today, I received a review copy of Social Media Marketing For Dummies
I’m only part way into the book right now, so I will save my review for later. Instead, I’ll reflect a little bit on what he writes about and apply it to an event in my own life today. Several years ago, we got a Senseo Single-Serve Coffee Machine 
The problems we’ve had with the Senseo is that it is out of stock, and the pods, which are sort of like coffee filled teabags are also sometimes hard to get. So, Kim wondered about getting a Bosch Tassimo Single-Serve Coffee Brewer 
However, the coffee for those machines comes in little plastic cups that get thrown out; not very eco-friendly. We talked back and forth and decided that the Keurig Single-Cup Home-Brewing System
I read through some of the reviews on Amazon and they all sounded pretty good. However, I found that this is usually the case on Amazon. They only people who review are people that really like the product and a few that really hate the product. It is probably fair to consider these online referent influencers. However, I asked Kim to check some of the foodie sites she goes to and she reported a thumbs up from these sites. Referring back to Mr. Singh’s book, these would probably be considered by us the expert influencers, although, in my mind, the line between referent and expert influencers is a bit fuzzy online.
In his book, Mr. Singh references John R. P. French and Bertram Raven’s work on social power. People interested in Social Media Marketing for Academics, might want to start there.
All of this begs the question, how do you get a cadre of social influencers online to support your brand? I look forward to getting more of Mr. Singh’s views on this as I read more of his book.
Californinger's Sage: Total Recall of Things Past
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 09/27/2009 - 06:05“There was a king named Fornjot, he ruled over those lands which are called Finland and Kvenland; that is to the east of that bight of the sea which goes northward to meet Gandvik; that we call the Helsingbight.”
“I had gone on thinking, while I was asleep, about what I had just been reading, but these thoughts had taken a rather peculiar turn”.
It wasn’t particularly The Orkneyingers’ Saga that was on my mind as I fell asleep, nor was it Remembrance of Things Past. Yet both of them related back to a single theme. Instead, I was thinking about the book Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything
I had heard a discussion of the book on an NPR radio segment a couple weeks ago, and have been trying to get a chance to write about it ever since. It is a fascinating project to record ever increasing details of our personal lives. All kinds of concerns were raised about this. If we keep all our memories online, will we lose our ability to memorize things? There were discussions about how memorizing things actually makes one’s ability to memorize additional things easier. If everything is recorded for us, does our mind atrophy? What about the privacy issues, if every detail of our lives is recorded will we change the way we behave? Will people tap that information for marketing purposes or as part of criminal investigations? Will it move us closer to a world of thought crime?
How does blogging fit into this, and do we run the risk of becoming simply diarists spending too much time looking at what was as opposed to what could be?
It seems to me that the real issue isn’t how much of your life you’ve recorded, but what you can do with it. The simplest part is, can you easily find and retrieve the information that you’ve recorded?
In Remembrance of Things Past, Proust starts out, “For a long time I used to go to bed early”. There isn’t a specific date on this. He doesn’t start, “On July 17, 1876 I went to bed at 6:47 PM”. He continues with “I had gone on thinking, while I was asleep, about what I had just been reading, but these thoughts had taken a rather peculiar turn”. He does not state that they took a particular turn at 7:13 PM, although scholars might be very interested in when he really did go to bed and exactly how long it took for these thoughts to take a peculiar turn. Instead, it is all generalized, a collection of rather
imprecise memories.
The Orkneyingers’ Saga is even less precise. ““There was a king named Fornjot”. While we know that Proust was born on July 10, 1871, the day or year of Fornjot’s birth is not easy to find anywhere. Yet The Orkneyingers’ Saga was an important part of early collective memory.
All of this comes back to a few different themes for me. First, is how do we organize, search, retrieve, and make sense of information? I’ve not read Total Recall, but it seems as if this is the interesting part that is overlooked. How do we make random associations? I suspect that not many of my readers have associated The Orkneyingers’ Saga with Proust and Gordon Bell before.
Beyond that, when we make our random associations in our efforts to make sense of information, how do we tell the story? This is one of my gripes about all these “future of news” discussions. Whatever the media, video, print or online and whatever the label, be it journalist, blogger or some combination of the two, we need to make sense of information and tell it in a compelling story. The Orkneyingers’ Saga did that. Proust did that. Yet so much of the minutiae of modern news is just that, minutiae that has not been fit into a bigger picture, a more compelling story.
There are many more places I could go with this, but while Proust went to bed early, I’ve woken up early. It is still dark outside. The rain is falling and sleep beckons me back to another opportunity for my thoughts to take peculiar turns.
Confronting the Blank Page
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 09/11/2009 - 09:25Thursday evening. The digital display on the front of the dust covered cable box reads 9:11. The house is empty and quiet. Kim had to work late and Fiona, my youngest daughter, the only one that has not headed off to college yet, is out at a concert with a friend.
There are still thousands of unread emails in my inbox beckoning to me, but I have done enough on the computer today. I read emails, visited various blogs, wrote a few replies, comments on blogs and a post for my own blog. I also did a little programming for a project that is winding down with a frustrating denouement and did some investigating for some future projects and blog posts.
The hum of the computers adds to the empty feeling of the house. After I prepared my one person dinner; a steak I was supposed to eat with Kim last night, but worked too late to be home for dinner, along with some tomatoes from our weekly community supported agriculture delivery, I fled the house in search of something; something to foretell the next great adventure.
In less than two months, I will start on my next attempt at writing a novel. November is National Novel Writing month. I wrote a novel in 2007 which sits on my hard drive. 2008 saw false starts which ended up without a novel being completed. This year, I have my story in mind and the characters are fighting for recognition and definition.
One thing I did not like about my 2007 novel is that the characters were not as complicated as I would have liked. They did not grow or change as much as I wanted. I’ve been reading Irvin Yalom’s “Everyday gets a little closer”. It isn’t fiction. It is the recounting of a person in therapy with Dr. Yalom and provides lots of depth and growth of the main character.
A friend of mine is fighting leukemia. In a recent journal entry, she spoke about “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society”. I checked online to find that it is not currently available at the public library. Yet I headed over there to see if a librarian might suggest a book somehow like that.
After a brief discussion, where we found most of the suggestions where also all checked out, the librarian suggested “The Reader” by Bernard Schlink. She mentioned that it was much better than the movie, which I hadn’t seen. Yet as I stood at the shelves, I decided to check out both, “The Reader” as well as “Flights of Love” by the same author.
I headed up to bed to quietly read while I waited for Kim and Fiona to get home. I was struck by the detailed descriptions in the beginning of “Flights of Love”. This is another area where I am weak in my writing and I’m thinking of trying to work on this as well.
I have been writing every day for my blog. I believe that the discipline has helped my writing, however, I still need to work extensively on describing setting and exploring the evolving characters in my stories. This is not something I really work on in my blog posts, but I may try doing more of that as writing exercises.
As I thought about this, my thoughts returned to Wednesday evening’s open house at my daughter’s school. Her teacher talked about how everyone claims to read with their children, but writing is also important and who talks about writing with their children? He will be sending home writing prompts for Fiona. I may get Fiona to put her writings in a blog. We’ll see. I wondered, should I write my own responses to the writing prompts? I don’t think that would be good. She needs to write her way and not have me writing about the same things. So, I will look for things to write about to expand my descriptive writing abilities.
The little display in the lower right hand corner of my laptop tells me it is now 9:40 as my wife walks in the door. The house is no longer empty the way it had been. I have confronted the blank page and written a long blog post. I will reread it and edit it in the morning.
Friday morning. I have completed my edits and will post the blog post. I pause to wonder about my audience. Many different people approach my blog from many different perspectives. What will they, what will you, get out of this blog post?
