This entry is part of the erelevant Virtual Reading Group.

I am a passionate, sometimes brash, and always opinionated person, which a cursory glance over the archives will probably show you. I tend to get emotionally invested in what I’m doing, which can sometimes have disastrous effects in the workplace. As a result of my demeanor and the way that I often approach conflicts full of piss and vinegar, I have had several people recommend to me that I read The Art of War with an eye towards how I can use it to achieve collaborative goals and settle disputes peacefully within the workplace. The Art of War has long been a popular corporate-culture handbook, and it has even been applied to marketing. For all these reasons, I thought it would be an interesting book to kick-off the virtual reading group.

Here is a tentative reading schedule that I may need to tweak once or twice, depending on how fast or slow the reading goes (it’s hard to tell with books like this where a chapter is only a few words, but each word caries great gravitas). I chose Thomas Cleary’s translation both because it is widely available and also because it came highly recommended by a friend who has studied Taoism and Tai Chi.

If you believe Steve Jobs, then reading good, old-fashioned paper books is becoming a dead practice. I, for one, love books. I love how they feel, how they smell, and I love the process of taking long periods of time to explore and absorb ideas. That’s why, as a regular feature here at erelevant, I’d like to invite you to read some interesting books with us as part of a virtual reading group!

The idea is simple: I’ll feature two or three books at a time (pictured in the sidebar) and post a schedule for reading them chapter by chapter. As I read them, I will post a synopsis of the chapter and then everyone is invited to discuss the chapter with me in the comments. The advantage of doing this online is that you need not read the chapters on time or even in the right order—just post your commentary when you get around to it.

Please reply to this message with suggestions for interesting books to read in the future. Books should be nonfiction and should have something to do with the loose themes that erelevant addresses (electronic culture, marketing, youth, etc).

Give your eyes a break from the screen and put some paper in your hands! Of course, I guess you can use your Kindle …

Books I have featured or am currently featuring:
Solove , Daniel J., The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet
Sun Tzu (Thomas Cleary trans.), The Art of War
Zittrain, Jonathan, The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It

[…] The best way for me to innovate and enjoy what I do is to go native. Time to slip into the digital tribe and move among its peoples—virtual, 3D hands brushing in the darkness of social networked second lives, a million onymous youth dancing hyper-textualy into the night, the thrumming of drum and bass shared via mapped music genomes, and the twinkling glow of liquid-crystal-pixels offering up the entire geo-positioned world like an altar to a social, multi-cultural, semantic, hive-minded, Mercurial GOD.

http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/ - Blog of Danah Boyd. A PhD student studying privacy and the internet.
http://greenteaicecream.co.uk/ - “Social Value and the Social Web”
http://www.fastcompany.com/ - Interesting blog associated with Fast Company magazine.

I am taking a hiatus for the remainder of the summer to finish some hulking, be-fanged programming projects. Once those are complete, I am going to “take off the training wheels” on erelevant–redesign and revision it around a broader central theme. It will be less personal, less inflammatory and more topical and content-oriented. […]

When Time magazine named “You” as its person of the year in 2006, it was a ham-handed attempt to salute “user-generated content” as the driving force behind Web 2.0. Last year MySpace and YouTube commanded $580 million and $1.6 billion, respectively, because regular folks participate in the grand techno-democratic experiment, baring their souls to the […]