Cap’n Billy “The Butcher” McDougall’s Guide to Pirate Parenting by veteran writer Tim Bete is a short but sweet parody of parenting books. Within its pages is sage wisdom such as this:
What should my pirate know about fire safety?
There is only one thing your pirate needs to know: Never fire until the captain gives the order. Firing without orders is punishable by 16 lashes.
But even as a parody, it contains some solid advice:
Discipline isn’t punishment.
Remember, there’s a difference between discipline and punishment. The role of discipline is to teach your pirate the appropriate way to act. The role of punishment is to get prisoners to tell you where their booty is hidden.
There’s also solid advice about common kid ailments like cuts and bruises, viruses and what to do with picky eaters. The book covers the range from newborn to the end of the teenage years. It’s amusing and clever and keeps the pirate gag going throughout. I can see this book as a great shower gift for dads (who are usually ignored in the pre-baby process and parties). Just tell your friends to skip the (bit tedious) intro and get right into studying the nitty gritty of Pirate Parenting.
Get a paper book copy today via ThinkGeek’s website or download the free e-book.
Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxietyby Dalton Conley [Pantheon Books, New York 2008]
Hear ye, you wordsmiths of the web, you purveyors of pages, you iterators of information: Welcome to Elsewhere, U.S.A., a state of mind in which you are constantly moving; You are slinging nothing but ideas and giving up your leisure time to do it; You are working from home but are always available to the company via your Blackberry (which you are using to schedule your babysitters and manage your children); You hold the fear of the layoff or of lost earnings if you dare close your laptop long enough to have a McMeal with your family; You love your loft space or your recently-converted suburban bedroom/home office, until, of course, you get a look at your neighbors’, after which you shall work more feverishly than ever to stave off the envy and hopefully get that promotion or new account that will allow you, too, to put in the latest in soundproofing technology and remote-control window shades. Your very personality is being pulled apart by millions of messages. Welcome to Elsewhere, that constant state of motion and distraction that takes you anywhere and everywhere but here.
Dalton Conley, NYU sociologist, sounds the welcoming bell to you and me, the Weberati. We can do our jobs from anywhere with a decent internet connection. We work in information and produce ideas for a living. If we work for a manufacturer of actual physical products, we work far from the production line, most likely never experiencing a factory even on a training tour. We are today’s middle-class, white-collar worker. We work from home, we take our laptop on vacation, and we answer emails on our iPhones during the time-outs of our kid’s basketball game. We have this idea that if we just “get one more thing done” before bed, that our hours are well-spent, that our everlasting souls will be cleaned by hard work and that God will shower us with prosperity.
This latest book from prolific writer and academic researcher Conley traces the history behind the combination of work and leisure (“weisure”). Conley starts out the book unflinchingly nostalgic for the good ol’ days, when loyal IBM-ers were admired for their willingness to sing company songs and wear ties, as long as they had their nights and weekends free to play bridge and golf. Conley waxes on a bit about how leisure time was actually once meant for relaxation, instead of the multi-tasking work space it is today (I personally found this nostalgia to be a bit contrite, as Conley and I are both members of Generation X and only experienced those so-called halcyon days via our parents’ memories.)
Leisure and work are becoming mixed, says Conley, as companies like Google increasingly become one-stop shops for their employees. There is on-site laundry, showers, meals (which are free at Google, something Conley was amazed by), doctors, nurses, tax accountants and sometimes daycare. Practically any service the company can help you outsource will be available to you so you can spend more time working. You can “work from home” to spend more time with your kids, but your kids say you won’t look up from the laptop, and your co-workers can hear Rock Band II in the background of your conference call. Meanwhile, you notice your neighbor that holds the same job you do but for another company, has a new Mercedes in her driveway and you wonder how she earns twice your salary. You work harder and longer, ticking away any hours you aren’t working as lost income. You get so used to this state of always looking at the next thing you must do/have/say/be, you never look inward. You get splintered into many different roles, shattering your one individual into what Conley calls an “intravidual.” Nostalgia aside, Dalton has a point.
Still, even though I know Conley was addressing me and my fellow techie folk, I couldn’t help but be a bit offended by the characterization. The term “Blackberry Mom,” [cover/title, pg 1] is as offensive and marginalizing as “Soccer Mom,” and it should’ve tipped me off on the tone of the book. If you are in my Weberati crowd, you will probably be offended on page 56 when Conley calls open-source software “communism” without noting how open-source actually spurred innovation in the private sector. You’ll also probably (well, hopefully) be offended on page 73 when he treats the modern norm of working women and their influence on the workplace with this line: “You can take the woman out of the kitchen but you can’t take the kitchen out of the woman.” That’s really the only media bait in the book, though.
The book reads like a textbook, but the it deserves the effort just on the amount of information it contains. The Appendix alone, with its collection of intriguingly titled articles, is a fair exchange for the purchase price. Unfortunately, Dalton takes a while to get to his main point. The long introduction lays down loads of social history to set up the story. The first 62 pages lay thick groundwork for his theory of what is happening with the state of the working person today. He goes through American social history, namely the social changes brought on by the industrial revolution, and emphasizes the occasional example to demonstrate how our work/life balance and our politics have changed, like the dwindling participation in unions over the last 50 years.
The author’s purpose of the book isn’t found until page 63:
“WHERE WE ARE AT
So, we have gone from a country with high ceilings and fans to low ceilings and air-conditioning; we have gone from an economy where many workers serviced one machine to one in which each American has dozens of machines working for them over the course of a given day; we have gone from being a nation of wandering renters to ever more tooted homeowners; we have gone from a country that experienced race riots in the 1960s–during a period of economic growth spread relatively equally across income deciles–to a country of almost Third World levels of economic inequality, where solid majorities vote to repeal the estate tax. We used to enjoy our free time and left the Europeans to work more than us; now we have more kids to take care of than they do, even as we work significantly more hours.*
No one single factor–not air-conditioning or computers; not female labor force participation; not tax policy alone or immigration–has caused these dramatic shifts. In fact, it is probably a futile exercise to ask how much tax policy drove the development of computers, how much computers drive income inequality, and how much income inequality drives commuting distances. Better to take a deep breath and unfocus the eyes to try to take in the entire mosaic that makes up the social landscape of today.
*Americans work an average of 25.1 hours per week (averaged across all working-age persons) in contrast to Germans, for instance, who average 18.6 hours, We work over 6 more weeks than the French per year. See Alberto ALessina, Edward L. Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote, ‘Work and Leisure in the U.S. And Europe: Why So Different?’ Working Paper no 11278, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Mass., 2005.”
I wish those two paragraphs and the citation were on page 1; they would’ve helped me parse out Conley’s academic prose. Although I appreciate the book being chock-full of information, as I read I kept wondering when he’d reveal his point.
Conley does get to his point, eventually, but at times his logic seemed a bit dubious. I was taken aback on page 56 when Conley cited a 2005 study, using the results as a base for his claim that most people still work for the same company for over 20 years. This may be true for the Baby Boomers, but not for any of us under 40 right now. I’m in my 30’s and I don’t know anyone who has worked for any 1 company in their careers, not even my friends who are medical doctors. We are consistently told by career advisors that after 5 years we should be looking for another opportunity, lest we appear habitual, lazy, and unwilling to learn. We believe that the retirement age will be raised to 75, there will be no social security pensions, and we will have worked at so many different companies and had so many varied careers that we will have lost count. Looking at Conley’s one-company-for-20-years claim in detail, the facts become clear. The study, cited from Working Paper #11878 from the National Bureau of Economic Research (where Conley holds a Research Associate position), looked at retirement age workers (ages 58-62) in 1969, and found that they had worked, on average, for one company for 21.9 years. The study then compared their 58-62 years old counterparts in 2002, and found that they had worked, on average, for one company for 21.4 years. Conley claims that despite our hectic schedules and our 24/7 mobile offices, we’re still all working for the same company, just like the IBM Man in 1950. When we, the GenXers, get to be 58-62, my guess is that number will drop from 21.4 to about 10.6. I’d like to see a similar study of people who are 42 years of age right now and see how many different places they’ve worked. Then I’d like to see the same data on people aged 32 today. 21.4 years at one company is a pipe dream for the average Generation Xer. Conley’s choice to cite this study to support his everything-old-is-new-again-but-we-work-more-than-the-IBMer-of-1950 was misleading at best. This slight massaging of statistics is common practice for academics, economists and media members alike, so it’s difficult to make a case against Conley for doing it. There are infinite ways of massaging statistics and relegating the details of data to footnotes in order to support your point, so when numbers are involved, caveat emptor.
Despite the nostalgia and the numbers games, Elsewhere U.S.A. and Professor Conley earn respect. Conley’s points about materialism and the ever-increasing gap between the classes are a sharp slap upside our credit-busting heads. Conley is, plain and simple, one of us, and he keeps us well informed of the changes in our lives that we are too busy to notice. Although Conley avoids Twitter, he knows the scene. He references some books that are well-known in the social media circles I run in (e.g., Anderson’s The Long Tail) and knows the pressures we face in an outsourcing, all-consuming workplace. He’s just as guilty as the rest of us, but he’s a sane voice in the fog of our all-too-modern, fast-motion lives.
That’s quite a title, I know. The fact that the Twilight Series is a fantasy series about vampires doesn’t distract from the heavy religiosity throughout the entire 4-book story. The series serves only one purpose: to inculcate teens into a christian morality, preferably Mormon. Let’s not pretend otherwise.
Plus, the repetitive and overly simple writing and transparent plot don’t hold a candle (or a fang) to Harry Potter. Not even close. But that’s plain to anyone who reads the first page. I’ll talk about what must be the appeal at the end of the post. Right now let’s look at the morality messages that pelt you at every turn of the page.
[SPOILER ALERT: Plot is revealed.]
First, we repeatedly see Bella’s and Edward’s “struggle” with staying virgins until they marry. Read the rest of this entry »
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Book 1 of 3, called “The Millenium Trilogy,” written by Stieg Larsson (deceased).
You can find a story synopsis at the wikipedia entry. Please see it for a synopsis. This post concentrates on my experience with the book and its themes.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson was translated from its original Swedish into English by Reg Keeland. Before I get into the review of the book, I feel I must mention the controversy that surrounds the English translation of the novel. The translator Reg Keeland was apparently so aghast with the English editor’s after work that he insisted that the credit of translation be given to a pen name; he was so disgusted with the final output that he wanted no part of it. He especially seemed annoyed with the change in title. The original Swedish was either “The Man Who Hated Women” or “Men Who Hated Women.”
I consider myself a pretty typical American reader, and I have to say, I’d have never, ever picked up a book with that kind of title. “The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo” plays to our American sense of intrigue, and it does refer to a trait of one of the main characters. I have more issue with one version of the cover image.
The hair should be black and spiky and the skin should be pale.
The hair and skin color of the woman in the photograph don’t remotely match the description of said “girl” (a woman of about 25 years old). [I have a whole other issue with calling women over age 18 “girl” but I’ll mention that in a bit.]
I haven’t found any interviews with Mr. Keeland to know exactly what his complaints are, but I found the book to flow well regardless. I was never stopped abruptly by unfamiliar cultural nuances or odd dialogue. Knowing that Mr. Keeland was severely disappointed with the final English translation makes me curious what I missed. I’d love to know how this excellent book could be better.
Finding out the original title whilst in the throes of the plot was a strange experience. Before knowing the original title, I really had no idea where the plot was going. Once I had “Men Who Hated Women” in my head, I had different suspicions on where the events were leading. I almost wish I didn’t know, because the shock of the final battles would be even more startling. Then again, I’m too sure I could’ve stomached it without the forewarning.
If it weren’t for the buzz and the interesting title, I’d have avoided this book. I’m not much of a crime thriller reader. I read all 4 Dan Brown books and enjoyed them, but I don’t search out crime novelists. When I heard rumblings about Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, I didn’t catch that the book was in the crime thriller genre. It sounded interesting, so I picked it up from the library.
The book is massive: 465 pages. I knew I wouldn’t be able to finish it in the small amount of time I had it on loan from the library; it’s a new book and it had limited release time. I turned to the audio version. By listening to the book on CD, I could fit in some “reading” time while I was running, cooking or cleaning. When I could, I’d pick up the story in the print version right where the audio book left off.
It took weeks and a few different tries to finally get a hold of the UNabridged version of the audio performance of the book. For some reason, the library records have the abridged version and unabridged version under identical records. Other people had requested the print book, so I had to let it go for a while before I could get it back. I’d returned and then signed out the print version again while I waited for the unabridged copy of the audio book to show up.
When I did get the print book back, I was even more eager to continue on with the story. The first few chapters set up the characters so beautifully that I was haunted. Like an “earworm,” an incomplete song that repeats in your head, the characters and scenes would come back to haunt me. The only way to solve an earworm, psychologists say, is to look up the lyrics of the song and sing them through, from beginning to end. It’s thought that earworms occur because your brain is trying to resolve the discrepancy in the lyrics. Solve the discrepancy and the lingering haunt of a refrain disappears. That’s the theory, anyway.
Book Review: The Power of Less by Leo Babauta (Hyperion 2009)
Book Cover
True to its name, the Power of Less is short. 170 pages. The non-fiction work follows the traditional how-to book formula to employ numbered lists of steps. That’s where the commonalities with traditional how-to books end. In an amongst the tried-and-true lists are the author’s musings about his website and its members, his own struggles, and how to use the internet to keep your life simple. Did that last bit sound counter-intuitive? It isn’t. Mr. Babauta doesn’t pull punches about internet addiction and distraction, but as he is directing you toward websites, he is telling you how to rein in your unproductive internet use. He uses the concept of Haiku to demonstrate this in the very early pages of the book. (Too bad he didn’t use Twitter’s 140 character limit! Same idea, though, and one that Mr. Babauta is taking seriously.)
This tiny tome definitely isn’t for back-to-nature types. Although the Buddhist concept of mindfulness pervades the theme of the book, Mr. Babauta promotes the beauty of internet tools on almost every page. For the most part, it works. After reading the book, I can see how “teh.interwebz” can add some Zen to your life. A few times, though, I felt a little over-pitched on the author’s own website. He is obviously very proud of his online community, but multiple mentions of a website went against the single-tasking posits of the book: Why keep mentioning a website at the same time you are telling me to stay off the internet and concentrate on one thing at a time? Also, he never mentions the beauty of hiring a personal organizer. I hired a professional a few years ago to prepare a room for my soon-to-be-born son and I’ll never try to tackle a big clean out/organizing project on my own again. Professional organizers are THAT worth it.
Those have to be my only complaints about The Power of Less.* All in all, this is a good little book with some great logic in it, as well as links and suggestions on how to use today’s tools to make your life better. A short book that combines technology advancements with wisdom of the ages is just the kind of focus that we muti-taskers need to help us calm the chaos that surrounds us online and off.
Take a look through it next time you are at the library or the bookstore. If you take away one helpful hint (which you are very likely to do), it’ll be worth it.
*I linked to half.com because as many of you know, my husband worked for them in the very early startup days. I know a lot of people but suprisingly, I actually don’t know the author Leo Babauta and hadn’t heard of him until I ran across The Power of Less. I wasn’t paid or compensated in any way for anything in this post. I am never paid in any way for any post on PurpleCar.net. PurpleCar is purely my work and my opinions. I’ll always be honest with you — well, as much as I’m honest with myself, anyway. I know I’m usually rougher in my book reviews, but I actually did like this book. Go figure.
A “meme” is a little chain-letter-like game that people send around the internet. You may have heard of Facebook’s latest meme “25 Things” (that was started by users, not the Facebook staff).
Ever wonder how these memes begin?
Let’s use the 100 Book meme that is hitting Facebook this week. It’s a good study on how memes get started, how they change over time, and how they grow.
I just caught this from FriendFeed user Mark Dykeman:
“This is one of those Facebook memes that keeps circling around the universe. I answered it on Facebook, but since some of you might not have access to my Facebook account, I thought I’d post the results here.
‘The BBC believes the majority of people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.
Go to your profile, choose notes, post a new note – copy and edit.
Instructions: Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read.’”
Mark goes ahead and checks off the books he’s read on the list. It’s more than 6. The list is below, but hang here with me for a second.
Before you get your feathers ruffled about the audacity and snobbery of the BBC, let’s take a better look at this.
I looked for the origin of the meme by checking urban-myth-busting site Snopes and the BBC website. Snopes had nothing about how the BBC supposedly claimed that most people will have read only 6 books on the entire list. Snopes usually catches rumors quickly, but they don’t necessarily investigate every silly Facebook meme. Personally, I doubt the BBC would have said that, but let’s be honest: They’ve said worse.
On the BBC site I found no quotes, articles, or any mention whatsoever about the 6 book number; I did find the BBC’s BIG READ list where they list 100 books and they ask UK’ers to vote on their favorites. Both the list from the Facebook meme and the BBC’s Big Read list look similar. Could they be the same list?
So I stuck them in a spreadsheet and compared. 63 of the books are shared; 37 of the books are not.
Here is the shared list (click to embiggen):
63 FB List titles on left, 63 BBC List titles on right. This list contains exactly the same books, with titles edited.
You’ll notice some of the book titles are written slightly differently, which implies more editing by the clever meme maker (who’ll we’ll refer to as the Facebook Meme Maker -FMM) that adjusted the original BBC list. (With the Facebook Meme’s “Harry Potter Series” entry, I just used the first Harry Potter book. Same with “The Faraway Tree Collection.” In a list of 100 books, it’s confusing to reference a series.)
So this table (click on it then zoom in to see better) contains the 63 shared titles. That means 37 titles were deleted and new ones added by the Facebook Meme Maker.
Here are the remaining 37 titles from the Facebook meme next to the original 37 from BBC list (click to embiggen):
37 FB List titles on left, 37 BBC List titles on right. The lists don't share titles.
Seems like FMM preferred more American authors and books that were later adapted into successful movies. Maybe FMM heard some rumor that the BBC was dissing American authors and readers and felt like putting some of her/his own favorites on the list. Who knows?
But this meme has some of the great signs of a viral commodity:
1. The meme’s subject is elitist in that it says something about the user’s level of intelligence. (“What? You haven’t read War and Peace?!) This fosters (usually friendly) competition amongst friends.
2. The meme has a whiff of injustice that stirs up indignance. (“How DARE the BBC say that?! GIMME THAT LIST!”)
3. Filling out / answering the meme doesn’t take much time. “Put an X by the books you’ve read.”
4. 100 books is perfect. A nice, big milestone number. “16 Things” (which I filled out) didn’t take off on Facebook but “25 Things” did. People gravitate toward milestone, lucky, and zero-ending numbers in this culture. No-one will look at an “82 Books You Need to Read” list. “100″ grabs everyone’s attention.
The FMM probably saw the BBC list and wondered how many of the books she/he had actually read. Out of curiosity, the FMM checked off which book titles were familiar. Perhaps when the number of recognized titles were low, the FMM decided to add the ones she/he did in fact read. What followed was an email or two, with bragging evidence attached, of course, to a few dozen friends on Facebook. Voila! A meme is born.
People who successfully ignore memes will be sucked into this one for the false academic quality of it. It’s about traditional literacy; We all take the “How Well Read Are You?” measurement quite seriously.
I myself am trying to work on being better read. With all the hype about how the internet and tv are melting our brains, this meme is a zinger. It feeds all the fear surrounding the changes in our culture. It will most likely take off and get so big that Snopes will have to post on it.
Now you know how memes like this start. And you also know why I’m not going to be sucked in. It’s a hoax created by a smart FMM who blended some pop culture news story from half-way across the world into a pride-ruffling insult that must be disproven immediately by the educated American masses. Have fun with it if you like, but please don’t spread the indignant attitude. Reading itself should be a positive and inclusive activity.
I’ve been in a lot of book clubs. Unlike the movie versions of staid, gentile discussions, book clubs can have a lot of drama. Odd things can happen, like the police being called to break up a fight over whether or not the main character is a closet knitter. Perhaps one member is abrasive or overbearing, or another member being too shy to speak, yet other members refuse to read any of the books. At times the discussion gets boring or always ends up coming back around to the Nazis. Here are my tips on how to avoid these and other common pitfalls when starting a book club. Implement these steps into your existing book club to liven it up or get it back on track.
1. Look outside your circle. Gather a group of about different 5 friends. Have each friend bring an acquaintance to enhance the discussion with original viewpoints. Don’t start a book club with your immediate circle, or you run the risk of never talking about the book. I’m the odd man out in one of my book clubs. I’ll probably quit it soon because the other members are a tight clique. They spend more time gossiping than they do discussing the book. If I hear one more “this is how COOL I was in high school” story I’m going to denounce Jane Austen in public. Gossip and Glory Days stories are fine, but don’t let chat take over the night until you are finished the book discussion. And give the unwilling witnesses some time to high tail it out of there before the chorus of Auld Lang Syne begins.
2. Have a common thread. It helps if members all have at least one thing in common: you all work for the same employer, you all live in the same town, you are all past presidents of the I-love-bratwurst club, etc. This gives acquaintances something to chat about during breaks and after the discussion is over, while you are piling onions over your sausage links.
3. Decide on a theme. Decide each year if you are going to read fiction only, a combination of fiction and non-fiction, one author’s books, prize winners, a specific genre, etc. Stick to the genre or theme strictly, or resentment will pop up over rejected book selections. And when I say ‘resentment’ I mean that your tires will be slashed and your driver’s door keyed.
4. Recruit enough members. Having 9-10 members ensures that you will have enough members for a lively discussion. 10-15 people is the absolute maximum number for a book club. Some groups do very well with just 5 or 6 committed members but it is good to have a few more members in case some can’t make the meeting. Plus, 10 people is a posse. You never know when you might need one of those.
5. Rotate hosting. The general rule is that if you suggest the book, then you run the meeting. This means you host at your house and you come up with the discussion questions. You also act as discussion leader, keeping topics on track. Sometimes the hosting rotates between the same 3 or 4 people in the group because everyone else has young kids or other barriers to hosting, like radon gas leaks. Another book club of stay-at-home moms I know meets during the day while the little ones play (this is insane, don’t do this). If you can find a meeting place like a church, then that takes the onus away from members, but one person must co-ordinate with the meeting space owner. This duty should be rotated every year or so also. Rotating duties helps avoid hosting burnout. Also for our book clubs, no one shows up empty handed. We all bring a snack or a drink. I usually bring a drink. With no less than 20% alcohol in it.
6. Rotate meeting days. We toggle between Wednesday nights and Thursday nights, every other month. Our schedules are varied, as we all are parents of school age children. If we toggle the meeting nights, everyone can make at least one night. Nights also give us the excuse to drink. Although I do hear that they break out the mimosas at the daytime group…
7. Keep the book length manageable. If you choose a longer book, add a few weeks on the reading schedule. You can do the math. My groups can read about 6 pages a day. That’s 6 weeks for a 264 page book. Gauge your group. You may have to stick with Junie B. Jones. Whatever works.
8. Have a NO MENTION list. The old adage is to never discuss religion or politics, and it is advice best heeded for a book club. If you have varied political or cultural backgrounds amongst your members, you want to ensure proper etiquette is followed. Some other suggestions for the NO MENTION list: School happenings, kids’ relationships, the past, personal finances, anal welts, etc. Decide which subjects would derail your polite company, and announce a reminder at the beginning of each meeting until everyone follows the policy. If they don’t follow the policy, engage the posse.
9. Distribute the books en masse. “En Masse” doesn’t mean in church (but hey, whatever works). Our library has “Book Club Kits” which include multiple copies of the same title that can be checked out for longer periods than the normal two or three weeks. One person can check it out and distribute the books to the members. That one person is responsible for collecting and returning the books. Sometimes we pass these Book Club kit copies amongst each other if there aren’t enough copies to go around. We blame the coffee rings on page 34 on the person we borrowed the book from. It’s convenient.
10. Have an open-door policy for members. Members are invited to every meeting whether or not they’ve read the book. YES, BOOK CLUB POLICE, this means YOU. Have a heart. It may have been a busy month for your member, but that shouldn’t exclude him from coming to the meeting and joining in the “bigger issues” discussions. He can also listen and socialize. This policy is important. The main reason for a book club isn’t the books. It’s the discussions and socializing. All members need to be flexible and inclusive. Get off your high horse; go get yourself a sausage and some wine and enjoy.
If anyone has any more suggestions, by all means, peep up!
The term “crowdsourcing“ is widening in definition. It used to mean sending one particular problem out to the universe. The amorphous crowd, that undefinable pack of listeners floating around in space, would come up with a solution, either individually or working together and send it in.
Find your crowd.
Small businesses aren’t going to be hiring big corporate crowdsourcing services like Innocentive, but they can use Web 2.0 technologies to gather data and have conversations with their customers or potential customer base. Gathering data and ideas is now considered to be under the umbrella term “crowdsourcing.” Here are 5 FREE ways you can crowdsource for your small business.
1. Start with your immediate, real life crowd. This means ask your own employees, friends or contacts, maybe even your child’s kindergarten class to help you come up with a solution or new ideas.
A particular anecdotal example of this type of private crowdsourcing came from NASA (it was told to me at my former employer, Mars, Inc. when I was a server administrator):
The space shuttle Atlantis was 600 pounds too heavy. In space flights, even the slightest pounds make a difference. The NASA engineers had to get rid of exactly 600 pounds or the mission would fail. The engineers could not figure out where to trim this weight. They had planned every last detail down to its maximum efficiency. These highly trained, world-class engineers mulled over the problem for weeks. Finally someone suggested that they get every single NASA employee in one room and present the problem. Every employee from the night janitors to the mechanics to the secretaries to the astronauts were called into one big assembly with the engineers in the front on stage. They explained the problem. The crowd sat, thinking.
My small parochial school did its best to educate me. My university put me through a class where I read a bunch of short stories all semester, but unleashed me on the Psychology department after that.
It turns out, that even though I’d like to be a regular novelist, I’m not very well read. I’ve worked on this in my adult life, so I have many, many books under my belt by now. But I have to say, many have been by foreign authors. The reason for this is because I went through curricula from better high schools and read the books on their syllabi. Many of the “classics” are British novels from the previous two centuries. Prejudice kept me from filling in the gaps with varied American writers, poverty kept me from being exposed to anything more than the Bronte ladies, Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
I had a little daydream today, like all budding novelists do, of winning a Pulitzer one day. Wouldn’t that be grand? It is the American novelist’s pinnacle, a lottery of bounty and a trophy of respect. I’m probably being totally naive with that image. Still seems cool though.
I don’t allow myself to laze away in the haze of a dream. I realized quickly I truly know nothing about the Pulitzer. Zero. Zip. Nada. I’m about as far away from winning a Pulitzer as a chihuahua is from being named prima ballerina at the Bolshoi. But I can learn what MAKES a Pulitzer. Not that there is a formula, but I’d like to experience what the Pulitzer committee thinks is worthy of this nation’s top literary prize. I decided, a few minutes ago, that I should read every single book on that list.
Right now I’m sitting in a cloud of old-book smell. I checked “Critic’s Choice” out of the library today. (No ISBN. Library of Congress Catalogue Card #55-10113)
This book contains the full texts of all the New York Critic’s Circle Prize winners for the years 1935 through 1955. There were no prizes granted for the seasons of 1938-39, 1941-42, 1943-44, and 1945-46. The Great Depression and World War II dominated those years, so I’m sure there is some interesting story behind those absences.
I checked the book out for its possession of The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams. I am researching character for my own novel and I wanted to also study the dialog in this play (plays, for obvious reasons, are wonderful for examples of effective dialog).
Here are the plays and years that are in the book:
1935-36: Winterset by Maxwell Anderson
1936-37 High Tor by Maxwell Anderson
1937-38 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
1939-40 The Time of Your Life by William Saroyan
1940-41 Watch on the Rhine by Lillian Hellman
1942-43 The Patriots by Sidney Kingsley
1944-45 The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
1946-47 All My Sons by Arthur Miller
1947-48 A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
1948-49 Death of Salesman by Arthur Miller
1949-50 The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers
1950-51 Darkness at Noon by Sidney Kingsley
1951-52 I Am a Camera by John van Druten
1952-53 Picnic by William Inge
1953-54 The Teahouse of the August Moon by John Patrick
1954-55 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams
The book also contains a lengthy Introduction, titled “Twenty Years in the American Theatre” and an Appendix with the guilty parties, a.k.a. Roster of the New York Drama Critic’s Circle from 1954-55, Presidents of the Circle and the list of Pulitzer Prize plays from 1935-55. I won’t be reading through any of that because I’m not a historian or fan of the upper crust of NYC, and please don’t try to engage me in debate about any controversies that may have surrounded this seemingly incestuous prize awarding. I’m just here to pick up some tips from the dead white men who dominate the list. Next I’ll move on to some modern literature, because I feel quite disconnected from any authors in this book. Unfortunately or fortunately American literature classes are still dominated by these dusty classics, and I only know how/what to study the way I’ve been taught.
If you have any great modern examples (let’s say, after 1980) then I’d appreciate the suggestions greatly. Thanks.
Cap’n Billy “The Butcher” McDougall’s Guide to Pirate Parenting by veteran writer Tim Bete is a short but sweet parody of parenting books. Within its pages is sage wisdom such as this:
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