I finished Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web [amazon], [allconsuming], [official site] tonight. I don’t know how to review the book, the quality wasn’t at all like Emergence or The Future of Ideas, I guess it’s a different kind of book though, not as academic. Emergence reads like a well researched, factual, essay as evidenced by the small print and lengthy bibiolography. Small Pieces Loosely Joined reads like marketing prose, commenting on philosophy, society, and even sometimes religion, using larger print and pointing mainly at websites, rather than other books. Give it a glance at a local bookstore sometime before you buy it, you might find that reading the dustcover is all you need to read. Interestingly, this book was number 2 on the list of Top 100 Most Frequently Mentioned Books of 2002.

Finished a couple books in the last couple weeks. First, this last Wednesday I read “The Clustered World : How We Live, What We Buy, and What It All Means About Who We Are”, which seems to be a popular book amongst the blogosphere. The information in this book should be required reading for anyone launching a major consumer product as it explains and outlines the PRIZM cluster makeup, which is a tool to help marketers create detailed lifestyle pictures, including the food you eat, what you drink, the magazines you read, what TV shows you watch, your leisure activities and what worries you. (find out what cluster you belong by going http://cluster2.claritas.com/YAWYL/Default.wjsp?System=WL).

From the appendix, page 305, The Universal Principles of Clustering:

“1. People and Birds of a Feather Flock Together…

10. Every Community Has a Historian.“