Search results matching tag 'books'

When Was The Last Time You Read A Book?

980070 — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 08:58:00 GMT

I was watching The One Show on the BBC yesterday and there was a piece about reading and what a feat it was for one of the presenters to have read 160 books in 3 months.

Now that’s a tall order but how many books do you get through in a year if any?

I try and read alternative fiction and business/self-help. So one month it might be a John Grisham and the next Blink by Malcolm Gladwell.

With being online so much, wading through hard drive TV recordings, and now possessing a Microsoft Zune and watching short videos and podcasts on the train in the morning, I find time to read difficult to....erm....find.

Even if I try and read before turning the light out at night, if I’ve had a glass or three of wine it’s the last thing on my mind.

Will books as we know them ever die out? Or will we force ourselves to keep the tradition alive?

Viral books

2228399 — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 21:11:00 GMT

Every once in a while we do something nice for our industry friends - we send them books. And we don't just send them any old books - they're usually books our team are reading and being influenced by. And we don't just "send" books to our friends - we "share" them.

This difference is an important difference for a couple of reasons:

Reason no. 1 is because sharing is at the heart of who we are as a viral agency. Our underlying ethos is based around sharing stuff - content, ideas and even books - not broadcasting.

Reason no. 2 is because we're keen encourage other people to do the same. Sharing as a basic tenet has benefits for both sides of the contract (or un-contract) with the sharer gaining social capital, and the sharee gaining whatever capitals being shared - in this case a book, or at it's core the currency of knowledge.

So sharing is at the heart of the Rubber Bookclub - and it seems to be working. One of the first people to publicly espouse the joy of book-sharing is blogger Amelia Torode @ Life Moves Pretty Fast - who's asking for takers for our latest book club book "Cluetrain Manifesto" once she's finished with it

Anyone up for it??? . . . Bueller . . . anyone anyone . . .

150

980070 — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 08:46:42 GMT

Finally got around to reading Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, and what a fascinating read it is, especially if you apply the theories and models to this "advanced" internet age (it was written in 2000.)

One passage really stood out in this era of furious online social networking...

Gladwell quotes Robin Dunbar, a British anthropologist, when talking about the optimal amount of people us homo sapiens can realistically and meaningfully interact with:

"The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us. Putting it another way, it's the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar."

I think I might have about 50 odd friends on Facebook, all of which I'd happily share a bottle of claret, but how many people really have over 150 genuine acquaintances?

Even with the technology and immediacy provided by the web I think Dunbar's saying if you have more on FB or MySpace, you're either fibbing, showing off or have an abnormally large neocortex!