Over the past month I’ve been reading these books — and enjoying them all:
Informal Learning, by Jay Cross. I met Jay — who coined the term eLearning — a few weeks ago, and he just had his book release party in Berkeley. Informal Learning is a breezy read, chronicling what we all intuitively know: that the most deep-seated learning takes place outside of structured, formal education settings. For the techie crowd I run with, the chapters on unconferences, unworkshops and Web communities are both enlightening and fun, with lots of familiar names. This is a book that start-up executives and managers will find useful in helping to enhance the productivity of knowledge workers.
Hacking the Cable Modem, by the pseudonymous hacker DerEngel. Here’s a techie tome that looks at how cable modems work — and how to hack and modify your cable modem. (Yes, I have a Comcast cable modem. No, I’m not a particularly happy customer.) The author is a certified geek (a good thing), and he makes accessible some of the industry’s dirty secrets, like this:
In the early days of cable modems, only the upstream speed was capped; the downstream speed was usually left unrestricted. I believe this was because, for an Internet Service Provider (ISP), the cost of uploads is far greater than the cost of downloads. Providers such as @Home (which later went bankrupt), Road Runner (a division of Time Warner), Opt Online, and so on, didn’t originally cap the downstream connection, but they did impose a downstream cap later. My guess is that these later caps were imposed so that the ISP could sell the withheld bandwidth back to you as a tiered service.
The Only Sustainable Edge, by John Hagel III and John Seely Brown.
(Disclosure: JSB is a member of Ourmedia’s Board of Directors.) The authors of this 2005 book write that argue that marketplace advantage comes from outperforming business rivals, chiefly through dynamic specialisation and productive
friction that are coming to reshape the competitive landscape. The authors map out hard-headed approaches to developing business strategies and taking advantage of new technologies.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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