Using Social Networking Tools to Write a Book

WikiTiki writes "Safari Books Online has a new interview with Barry Libert, one of the authors of 'We are Smarter Than Me: How to Unleash the Power of Crowds in Your Business.' Barry and his coauthors decided to create a wiki and invite the community to help build this book which aims to give advice on using social networking tools like blogs and wikis to businesses. Barry has some interesting comments about both the challenges and payoffs in using social networking tools to create a book about social networking tools."

Using social networking to whitewash a fence

Tom gave up the brush with reluctance in his face, but alacrity in his heart. And while the late steamer Big Missouri worked and sweated in the sun, the retired artist sat on a barrel in the shade close by, dangled his legs, munched his apple, and planned the slaughter of more innocents. There was no lack of material; boys happened along every little while; they came to jeer, but remained to whitewash. By the time Ben was fagged out, Tom had traded the next chance to Billy Fisher for a kite, in good repair; and when he played out, Johnny Miller bought in for a dead rat and a string to swing it with - and so on, and so on, hour after hour. And when the middle of the afternoon came, from being a poor poverty-stricken boy in the morning, Tom was literally rolling in wealth. He had besides the things before mentioned, twelve marbles,part of a jews-harp, a piece of blue bottle-glass to look through, a spool cannon, a key that wouldn't unlock anything, a fragment of chalk, a glass stopper of a decanter, a tin soldier, a couple of tadpoles, six fire-crackers, a kitten with only one eye, a brass door-knob, a dog-collar - but no dog - the handle of a knife, four pieces of orange-peel, and a dilapidated old window sash.

He had had a nice, good, idle time all the while - plenty of company - and the fence had three coats of whitewash on it! If he hadn't run out of whitewash he would have bankrupted every boy in the village.

Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it - namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why constructing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill is work, while rolling ten-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work and then they would resign.

The boy mused awhile over the substantial change which had taken place in his worldly circumstances, and then wended toward headquarters to report.

-- Mark Twain [pbs.org]

read it

Barry and his coauthors decided to create a wiki and invite the community to help build this book

I think I've seen his book. There's a 600 page chapter that consists solely of links to online pharmacies.

Skeptical about mob rule

I have to admit that I'm a bit skeptical about the premise that bringing more people into a problem will somehow make it better. Usually, the biggest disasters that have befallen mankind have had a committee in it somewhere, and a lot of this collaboration stuff really just is a way of even forming bigger committees. At some point, anything genuinely great happens because an individual groks the whole thing and jumps to the center of the stage with an answer. Sure, Linux has a bunch of contributors, and that's cool, but if you look in a bit more closely, it's really a federation of projects driven by a bunch of maniacal owners and visionaries.

Did you know...

...that the amount of social networking elephants has tripled in the past six months?

Actually, he's wrong

"We" is only smarter than "me" if "I" am below average intelligence or "we" are very small in number. A chess grandmaster would easily beat the whole of /. if we were voting for our moves. In fact the only way to make "we" smart enough to win such a game would be to have another grandmaster vetoing the choices. In which case, what does he need us for?

TWW

surely...

...you can use blogs and social networking sites to improve your bussiness...

...especially if you're into selling private data.

But??

What exactly is the point of a social networking site? I've used slashdot for about 5 years regularly, read the articles etc, but I've never really made use of the friend/foe tagging.. I've never bothered to message others, or see their journals... So, what's the point of a site that takes all the crap that I don't want to know about and make that it's sole purpose?

This marketers selling other marketers...

Remember the whole "smart mobs" fad? The word would go out through a "social network" to show up on some street corner at some appointed time. And a few hundred people did it a couple of times, "proving the theory." How many of those happen any more? None. You can convince a mob of people do anything, once. The only reason why these phenomena work is that people love to do what other people are doing. But once they try it and find out it's the same stuff, in a new wrapper, game's up. Now, if you're a marketer, trying to sell the latest version of soap or crackers, this is great stuff. You just convince the people selling the soap or crackers that you know how to control the mob. Even better, convince other marketers that you know how to control marketers. Because that really impresses the people who sell soap and crackers.

Brilliant!

1. Announce book topic showing the power of crowds, invite others to write your book for you to prove the thesis
2. Sit back, sip iced tea.
3. Profit.

Underpants gnomes ain't got shit on this guy.

This guy is a genious!

1) Open a social network / wiki
2) Get the social network to write a book about social networks for you
3) Profit!

(oddly, there's no ??? in there!)

Mass Authoring is a steaming pile

Sorry for the inflammatory subject line, but I am the author of a best selling travel guidebook to Nicaragua http://www.gotonicaragua.com/ [gotonicaragua.com]. Travel guidebooks are one area that are the frequent subject of ill-fated "let's do a travel wiki" ideas that immediately turn into steaming piles of horse crap. Here's why: the crowds are stupid; many can't write, and everyone's pushing an agenda.

The reason why travel guidebooks continue to sell in the Internet age is because the Internet is a huge, unfettered mixing bowl of ignorance. People are still willing to turn to professional writers and editors to sort through all the horse crap and turn it into something concise, concrete, and helpful. I too would prefer to pay $17 for a book for my next trip to Morocco than trawl through the Internet forums trying to separate fact from fiction from propaganda.

These travel wikis come and go, but they all bear the same characteristics: huge number of Google ads, a couple of lame wiki posts that two or more prolific authors debate back and forth without conclusion, and huge chunks of background material, insight, or commentary. The masses can't produce that, and anyone who's ever participated in a corporate meeting where 7 people need to come to a conclusion about something they differ in opinion about, knows why.

There's a place for this kind of approach, but mass authoring as I've seen it done, only works if one person is the lead author and has near dictatorial privileges and the diplomacy and savvy to use that power wisely. If you let the madhouse run the party, you get a madhouse. And that's why people like me can still earn the big bucks selling travel information to a place like Nicaragua in the Internet age.

By the way, I helped introduce Linux to Nicaragua. That ought to be worth something on Slashdot! http://therandymon.com/content/view/68/98/ [therandymon.com].

No go

This was tried on the C2 wiki (the first web wiki, actually), at least as a "story", and it was a disaster. Part of the problem was that everybody had a different idea of the kind and style of book it would be. It was hurky jurky, going from one style to another.

In one paragraph it may go into detail about the beauty of the main love interest of the story, and then in the next paragraph a meteor smashes into her, killing her.

The next few chaptures talk about how the detective tries to prove that the meteor was a man-made conspiracy. Then somebody made the detective part of the conspiracy, which triggered a fight over whether it should really be a nested house-of-mirrors novel or not. The sci-fi nuts and the mystery nuts got into a fat holy war.

Then somebody changed the meteor into a plane-crash to make it more "normal", but didn't bother to change all the references to the meteor and astronomer consultants.

It is kind of like improv Jazz: fun to play, but not always fun to listen to.

Must be a slow intellectual day...

No one modded above "3".

(Oh, there must be a voting mob clobbering down the scores...)

Lawsuit waiting to happen.

Someone call me when their contributors sue for royalties.

"Naked came the Stranger" - 24 writers

"Naked Came the Stranger" [wikipedia.org], by "Penelope Ashe" was published in 1969. It was actually written by 24 writers, five women and nineteen men, mostly newspaper reporters. It was an effort "to collaborate on a sexually explicit novel with no literary or social value whatsoever."

Huge commercial success. Made the New York Times best seller list.

but...

...is it backward compatible with web 1.0?