Archives for Books

Great Collective Intelligence Book; Includes a Chapter I Wrote

I highly recommend this new book on Collective Intelligence. It features chapters by a Who’s Who of thinkers on Collective Intelligence, including a chapter by me about “Harnessing the Collective Intelligence of the World Wide Web.”

Here is the full-text of my chapter, minus illustrations (the rest of the book is great and I suggest you buy it to have on your shelf.… Read More “Great Collective Intelligence Book; Includes a Chapter I Wrote”

A Blog Novel

Rohit Gupta, a Bombay-based writer, who also reads this blog, is writing a blog-novel. He has come up with an innovative way to promote it — by letting readers choose quotes from his text to “own” — by choosing a quote and linking to his blog-novel from it, he will in return link back to your blog from that quote in his novel.… Read More “A Blog Novel”

Check out Maribeth's Reading Machines

My friend Maribeth Back builds reading machines — devices that provide new ways to read and experience written text. It’s part art, part technology. For example, she has one reading machine that lets you drive through texts, changing direction as you go — but only seeing one line at a time — at super high-speed.… Read More “Check out Maribeth's Reading Machines”

New Super-Thin Electronic-Ink E-Book Unveiled

Very nice looking electronic-ink based “book” unveiled by Sony and E-Ink. Looks cool — Like an iPod but for printed materials.

Erik T. Ray — A Genius You Should Know About

Erik T. Ray is a creative genius, in the classical sense of the word. I first heard about him when I was studying CS at Oberlin College. Many of my classmates were obsessed with something called The Lambda Expressway — an amazing and bizarre serial novel in the tradition of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and The Phantom Tollbooth.… Read More “Erik T. Ray — A Genius You Should Know About”

Some New Progress on the Voynich Manuscript

The Voynich Manuscript, which resides at Yale, is a famous historical coded text that remains uncracked even by our best crypto technologies. The text is written in a bizarre language and illustrated with all sorts of unsual images. Some theorists think it was created by Leonardo Da Vinci, others say it was Roger Bacon.… Read More “Some New Progress on the Voynich Manuscript”