I just read a book about blogging called Naked Conversations, by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel. It focuses primarily on business-related blogging and how it is changing the way businesses communicate with their customers and other stakeholders. They predict big shifts away from "spinning" messages at audiences toward more genuine conversations where real human beings talk to each other. Let's hope they are right....
Now I turn to a book called Stumbling on Happiness, by Daniel Gilbert, who is a professor of Psychology at Harvard. His thesis is that humans are very poor at predicting things that will make them happy. They buy things that they are obsessed with, only to find that the pleasure fades fast. I heard the author interviewed by Madeleine Brand on NPR recently, and he had a great sense of humor, which I appreciated. Seth Godin says that Gilbert writes like a cross between Malcom Gladwell (author of Tipping Point and Blink) and David Sedaris (author of Me Talk Pretty One Day and other books).
Daniel Gilbert
