mip's scan

To Google or Not To Google?

"To Google or Not to Google?"

That's not really the question :-)
Of course we all Google.  I was just being funny to introduce a great mini-site that Google has launched.  Explore Shakespeare with Google.

I love books.  Love to read them and love to write them.  I also really like, as I mentioned recently in another post, when my other interests intersect with technology.

So what exactly is it?

Now Shakespeare's oeuvre is even more accessible. Search within HamletGoogle Book Search, many of which are available for purchase. for "to be or not to be" to read the rest of his famous soliloquy. Find out who called the world his "oyster" and why. Browse through a familiar play – or follow your curiosity to discover a new one. And if you decide you want to buy a copy, "All editions" will show you every version in

This is really great.  You can see the real strength of Google isn't going to be just in being able to search effectively through billions of web pages of information.  They are going to be able to re-package, re-present, and re-think the way information can be made available to us.

Get Your Hands on Free eBooks

I did a show today over at Leading Edge Technology that I thought I'd blog about as well.  It's about a great site for getting your hands on free eBooks.  Manybooks.net provides thousands of titles that are available for download.  A little about Manybooks:

Hi, my name is Matthew McClintock, and I maintain manybooks.net as a service to the internet community at large. If you would like to contact me please use this form.

All of the eBooks from manybooks.net are free, however donations toward the maintenance of the site are welcome.

Many of the etexts are from the November, 2003 Project Gutenberg DVD, which contains the entire Project Gutenberg archives except for the Human Genome Project and audio eBooks, due to size limitations, and the Project Gutenberg of Australia eBooks, due to copyright. As of July 2004 most current PG texts are available here, usuallly within the week of release.

What I really like are the multiple formats available for download - PDF, eReader, Palm, iPod Notes and many more.  Check it out and get reading!  Would love to hear from you on other sources you may have found/used for getting eBooks as well.

Blogging for Business

Usually I just place a book review in my Amazon sidebar 'thing' (to the left and down on this page).  But occassionally, I like to create an actual post for a book I thought was particularly good and/or relevant to stuff I'm working on.  Blogging for Business by Shel Holtz & Ted Demopoulos is one of those books.  In my opinion it's a good read for those people inside an organization who are responsible for setting a strategy for blogging.  I particularily like how the book doesn't get lost in the hype of blogging.  There's no "blog because it's cool" aspect to this book.  It sticks to an important first principle that I apply to all the IT work I do - let the business lead.  Blogging is no different and Blogging for Business captures.  If I may, a quote from early on is:

"The best business blogs were implemented in support of some business goal. Determining the kind of blogs you might consider begins with a review of your goals and issues in order to identify where your opportunities may lie. One kind of blog you should never launch is the "let's launch a blog" blog. Any company blog should be viewed as a part of the company's communication strategy."

To me that is an important starting point and I was glad to see the book go from there.  I think if you are getting into blogging as a small, medium or large sized business, this book should be on your list to read.  You'll appreciate the content and I liked the tone of the book itself.  How to get it?  Well, I'm not much of a physical-bookstore-kind-of-guy anymore, so for folks in Canada click here, for US readers click here. 

New Podcast Coming: write on

Well here is the post for my second new blog and podcast show that I announced earlier today.  The blog is called write on and the weekly show I'll do is going to be called the writeCast. 

This is a blog & show that are completely non-technical in nature and might not appeal to the readers of mip's scan but since I mentioned it in my podcast this morning I thought a delayed post was in order.  You can get details on this new experimental site and show by clicking here.

Ajax in Action

I've been very interested in AJAX and what it seems capable of delivering to the end-user over the web.  I picked up a book last week and finished it last night and it was really excellent so I thought I'd share it here for those of your also interested in this emerging technology framework.  The book is called Ajax in Action and it does a great job of covering this topic with lots of detail.  I liked that it wasn't just some overview of what AJAX was but offered content of interest to developers.  There is a clear presentation on how to get all the components that make up AJAX to fit together (JavaScript, server-side components, HTML, CSS, and XML.)  I particularly liked the step-by-step how to items that introduce you to creating things like dynamic double combo boxes, typeahead select boxes, and Web portals with selectable, draggable portlets.

If you're a web developer who's been looking to understand and begin developing AJAX enabled sites, this book is really a good read.  If you're and IT manager or systems integration consultant, I still think this book is worth reading as it'll give you a good sense of what this technology is and lay a good foundation to understanding how to leverage it.

Get Yourself Published

If you've listened to today's show that I did over at Podcaster News feel free to discuss it here!  I'm an aspiring writer and often write things that have nothing to do with technology!  If you are a budding author then today's show is for you!

Sometimes technology let's you do something that has nothing to do with technology! Huh? What are you talking about mip? Well. I'm talking about self-publishing a book. The web has allowed us disintermediate business value chains, which really means, eliminate the middleman. Join me in today's show where I talk about two services that let you do just that.

If you have any thoughts on the services I discuss today I would welcome your feedback.

Turning Your Blog Into A Book

Let me tell you about Blurb, a service I'm really looking forward to trying. I spoke about it in this past week's podcast and thought I'd flush some thoughts out on this as well.  Quite simply Blurb allows you to create a book from your blog.  Using a tool / application they call BookSmart you import content from your blog (i.e., pictures, blog post, etc.) and then you can create a real hardcover book from that.  You end up creating a BlogBook.  I'm still waiting for an invite to this service so I can't tell you how effectively it works, but I do have some thoughts on why I find this very interesting. 

To me its twofold.  First, it allows you to extend the intellectual capital you've created by bringing it into the offline world.  I see it as a nice compliment to what gets created online.  Secondly, I think it's a powerful and effective way to to extend the conversation so to speak.  Yeah I know...I'm talking a lot about conversations...Scoble and Israel got it totally right.

Naked Conversations

I'd podcasted previously about how much I enjoyed the book by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel called Naked Conversations (and for my many Canadian readers you can find the book here).  I recently lent it to a co-worker as well and told him "You're interested in corporate blogging, you need to read this book."  I enjoyed the way it was written, but more importantly I liked the message for businessesan ,mely that blogging will become (or perhaps has already become) a necessary way of reaching out to  your customers.  To begin a real conversation with them.

I'm going to be writing a piece on blogging and the corporation, sparked by an interesting experiment that someone has started here (can't say much about it yet).  In the meantime, go out and read Naked Conversations.  Don't just take my word on it though, the Harvard School of Business also found the book to be a good one.

The authors show how blogs are now changing organizations and explains how readers can use blogs for a variety of business purposes, especially marketing and public relations.

To read the entire review from HBS just click here. 

Great job Scoble and Shel!

Publishers Confused?

I had found it amusing and slightly confusing that book publishers wanted to sue Google in order to halt the scanning of books and making them available online via searches.  I'm of mindset that if they allowed for this, it'd actually drive increased book sales.  It's like the argument for mp3 versions of music - the wider the distribution is, good content will always be appreciated and bought.  But ok, I was willing to acknowledge that the publishers were just trying to protect their content.

Then I read that HarperCollins is going to kick off their own initiative to scan their own books and make them available to the major search engines to crawl/index.  So now I really don't get it?  They are opposed to it and yet they are going ahead and doing it themselves?  To make the whole scenario just a little more perplexing is this...

"This is going to be a costly initiative," she said, adding that a budget had not yet been set but the cost was expected to run into millions of dollars. The publisher has invited proposals from vendors to carry out the contract to digitize some 20,000 or more books in the global back-catalogue as well as the 3,500 to 5,000 new books it publishes each year.

...so you didn't want Google to do it for you, for free, but your willing to spend millions of dollars to have some vendor do it for you? 

In all honesty, what I think this is really pointing to is that Google is suffering from what most companies who become successful suffer from: people start to hate you for that success.  People love the underdog right?  So when it was Google-the-little-guy battling Microsoft-the-big-guy, well everyone cheered for Google (go Google go).  But Google isn't the little-guy anymore and so we can expect people to want to oppose ideas from them, even when they make sense.  It's either that or the publishing industry really doesn't understand what they are doing - I'm not sure which state is the more comical.

If you'd like to read the whole article, just click here.

How Things Have Changed

I came across this an thought I'd post something here as a light technology topic.  Its a site that has the scans of an old book called How It Works...The Computer.  They show a number of pages from the original printing in 1971 and the second printing in 1979. 

The second printing from 1979 came out just when I was first writing my first computer program on an old CPM machine my uncle lent me from where he worked which was NCR.  I was nine at the time. God I feel old.

I loved the pics of the old punchcards.

For you old time programmers, enjoy this little trip down memory lane.

The textbook pages can be found here.