The Power Of Many: How The Living Web Is Transforming Politics, Business, And Everyday Life

Rating:
Summary: entering the blogosphere
Review: The blog phenomenon is notable for its technical simplicity but social complexity. Christian Crumlish's "The Power of Many" is a friendly but serious and substantive invitation to join the increasingly influential and entertaining world known as the "blogosphere".

I've known Christian for years, and I know he's been living a bloggy existence for longer than almost anybody else(his "Breathing Room" journal was basically a proto-blog before anybody else cared about this format).

His knowledge of online culture goes deep, and it is clear that he wants to take his readers by the hand and make them feel comfortable in this strange new social sphere, where you can get a page built in an hour but might then spend days or weeks or months trying to understand what to do with it, how to meet others, how to get others to blogroll you, and how not to feel like a complete outsider in this friendly but fast-moving world.

I like it that the book is that it is organized by subject matter. How is the online scene improving political dialogue? That's one chapter. The impact of cyber-culture on arts and literature is another chapter, and so on. The book is a broad sweep across all human disciplines that are touched by online interactivity (which is to say, all human disciplines).

As always with Crumlish's books, the style is warm, human and approachable, and he manages to slip in a few good music references. It's also functional -- he knows that you are writing this book because there is something you want to get out of it, and he works hard to deliver what he thinks the reader needs.

This is the kind of book that gets your wheels turning -- and by the time I finished the first chapter I already knew I was going to follow the author's advice and begin working harder to transform my own online community (LitKicks.com) so that it fits better into the "blogosphere". I am convinced, and if you read this book I think you will be too.

Rating:
Summary: One of the many
Review: The other day I received my copy of The Power of Many by Christian Crumlish. I don't recall exactly when I first met Christian online. The earliest emails that I can find have from him are from December 2003. During this time, I was working as a volunteer for Howard Dean's presidential campaign.

In particular, I was working with DeanSpace, an effort to help many small groups easily set up powerful interconnected websites. A lot has happened since then. DeanSpace has evolved into CivicSpace (www.civicspacelabs.org). Kerry is now the Democratic nominee. My wife is now a candidate for State Representative in Connecticut (kimhynes.smartcampaigns.com). Many of us have been using our experiences from the Dean campaign to help other campaigns, and many people are fishing around for a good book to try and understand how the internet is changing politics and all aspects of our lives.

The Power of Many is the book you should read if you want to get a real, on the ground, grassroots perspective of what happened during the Dean campaign and what it means for our country today. Christian has done a great job of speaking with many bloggers and grassroots activists. He explains the actions and technology in a way that many can understand and appreciate.

For people who want to understand what my involvement was like, and the involvement of many others, start with The Power of Many.


Rating:
Summary: The right place, the right time, the right questions
Review: This book has all the hallmarks of a classic. It's what happens when you drop a witty, cool, and curious observer into the maelstrom of a tsunami social change which is at and through its tipping point. Xian is like a great Sherlock Holmes who probes and interviews for facts and clues, for causes and effects. The decentralization of power, of information, of influence changes... everything. Pluralism is no longer just for politics. It's for the arts, and sciences, and community, and the workplace. Xian manages to find people who surf these waves of change, who're living it or making it happen, and gets you the inside view. And, like Holmes, he connects the dots. When you're done, you have a new way to think about your world, a context for connecting your own dots.

Rating:
Summary: Why the Democrats lost the 2004 election
Review: This is an odd little "how to organize" guide aimed at unrepentant flower-children. Each tip for 'using the Internet' is exemplified by a left wing political activity: the Howard Dean presidential campaign, Michael Moore, MoveOn, and various fringe groups.

Rating:
Summary: Xian's Principles of Online Productivity
Review: Xian is a charming and engaging writer, and patiently takes the reader through the history of online communication, with the help of an extensive glossary. Building on that base of understanding, he brings the reader up to speed on the state of the art of the many facets of web connectivity: blogs, social software and social networking, instant messaging, newsgroups and discussion groups, wikis, filesharing, chat, community, collaboration and scheduling tools, and people-finders. Although the book is designed for those that are not currently tapping into the online Power of Many, it's a fun read for us online residents as well, kind of reassuring to know you really sort of understand what the Internet is all about and where it's going.

But the real value of the book is a series of very important insights about relationships and the technology that attempts to facilitate them, scattered like diamonds throughout the book. I call them Xian's Principles of Online Connectivity, and they are:

1. The Internet is still too hard for most people to use.
2. Blogs are just the best current disintermediation tool, and other social networking tools will only succeed when they, too, cut out the middleman.
3. All communications and networking is moving to peer-to-peer.
4. Real communities are only formed when people meet face-to-face to work toward some specific common goal.
5. Tremendous advantage accrues to anyone who pioneers a new technology successfully.
6. Online networking is great for support groups, but dreadful for changing the system, and often detracts from actually getting things done.
7. Information, like ideas, is worth nothing; it's doing something with it that creates all the value.
8. Artificial Intelligence doesn't work in matters of taste.
9. There is no useful taxonomy of relationships.
10. Social networking tools are largely redundant for bloggers, but for others they're essential to establish online presence.

These important ideas alone, and the thoughtful discussion surrounding them, justify the price of this book.

Xian also implies that messaging, publishing and filing are all just moving bits from A to B, and that software should handle them all the same way, simply. He also touches on a point that the transition from online communication to face-to-face or even voice-to-voice communication is terribly jarring, and sometimes doesn't work despite the best efforts of the conversants. Each of these ideas could merit a whole book by themselves.

Good stuff. In the interest of full disclosure, I acknowledge I was a fan of Xian's work before I read the book, and he was kind enough to acknowledge me as an inspiration for the book.