Sometimes, I'd rather not have a choice. This is especially true when it comes to two of the nominees for Forbes best Medical blog. Having spent the past six months watching fellow Corantean's Derek Lowe and Richard Gayle co-evolve their blogs, I've decided to do what I won't be able to do in today's recall election -- vote for 2 people, twice.
Richard put it perfectly, " I think Derek and I make a useful pair. I tend to gravitate towards early stage, biological, small biotech work while he brings a pre-development/development, chemical, pharmaceutical viewpoint to what he writes."
Their current proteomics discussion is just one of many great examples. I can't wait for them to discuss audioceuticals.
In this case 1+1 clearly equals 3.
Six months after starting it, he stopped. Blogging broke William's train of thought.
"I find I can't do ANYTHING else and write a book."
Like other authors, I have found it relatively difficult to write an interesting daily blog while simultaneously write a engaging, well researched book.
Why is it so hard to write a book and blog at the same time? Here are a few thoughts:
At a high level, blogs (definition of weblog):
Book writing, at least in my case, requires:
For these reasons, I'll be taking a six week break from blogging Brain Waves to focus on writing my forthcoming book, tentatively titled -- Brain Wave: Our Emerging Neurosociety. But instead of taking a "blog holiday" I decided to put together a group of exceptional guest bloggers to keep you informed, entertained and the Brain Waves momentum rolling.
The Brain Waves guest blogging network will include a week of blogging by the following individuals: Pat Kane, Steven Johnson, Paul Zak, Wrye Sententia and Richard Glen Boire, as well as a few others. More on each of them and the interesting topics they will cover tomorrow. (Thank you team!)
The publishing industry is like a poker game -- never bet your house until you know you have learned from the best. Today I placed a $200 bet and won big.
In a little less than seven hours, Fern Reiss shared her insights on self-publishing to agent selection and everything in between. Even better, she transferred her knowledge in an inspirational and witty manner that would have left Ellen Degeneres smiling. I just wish I had a cogniceutical handy so I could remember it all.
If you are playing the publishing game, I highly recommend her live performance.
Blogging is a real-time social sport. Real-time writing, real-time reading. On the writing side, I, like Doc Searls, have tested positive for AKMA. On reading side, there is a whole other set of categorizations to describe the different way people read blogs:
I am sure there are many more, but you get my point. I fall mostly into D, but enjoy commenting.
Because blogging is a social sport, it always takes two to tango (i.e. my AKMA writing style interacts with various reading styles to create different results). Here is why I am writing this:
Corante brother Kling seems to be a T. Why? Well, when he countered my blog yesterday, The Future is Emotional Economics with Emotional Noneconomics it wasn't entirely his fault that he missed my point. As a real-time sport, quick decisions are made and published. Sometimes word choice might not be perfect, especially when putting a title on a blog. Right before I published, I changed my original title, The Future of Emotional Economics, for reasons of impact/emphasis. And the rest in real-time history.
Because he is a T, with respect to my AKMA, he followed the link to the economist article, and thought he understood my point, and then decided to comment, when in fact he missed it completely, commenting:
The last attempt to overthrow mainstream economics--Marxism--led to a totalitarian disaster. To repeat that mistake would be the most irrational move of all.
That was not my point....
If he read down to the bottom, followed through all/most of the links and thought about the questions I was attempting to raise (not qualities of a T), he would have realized that my point was that behavioral economics has an interesting/bright future, not that I was suggesting it was going to replace conventional economics.
This is not the first time my AKMA has got me in trouble. Just last week Virginia Postrel nailed me in her "Not Brave" post for calling Bill McKibbens new book brave. My intent was to make a slight reference to Huxley's Brave New World (a book I highly admire but think has some bass-ackwards assumptions), thus putting McKibben in the same category of, great topic, nice writing, wrong assumptions.
But because Virginia is a D, she, in her third paragraph, stated that my blog on "Neurotechnology before Genetic Engineering" was in fact a good read. She followed the story to the conclusion.
So the moral of the story for me is, choose my words more carefully. But I won't, because that would ruin the real-time fun we are all having. However, maybe Ross should consider choosing his words more carefully, see Shirky in a World of Hurt. But he won't.
Only money can eradicate spam. The Internet is a globally distributed ecosystem complete with evolving organism/organizations that continuously adapt to change. The current spam epidemic is proof. Moreover, no legislative or technical solution (i.e. filters) will be able to stop it. Why? Because spam is fundamentally an economic problem.
Ross Mayfield and I attempted to get an anti-spam company off the ground two years ago based on this fact. Yet the noise of emerging technical solutions and lack of insight by "leading" venture capitalists reminded us that it takes more than being right to build a company. The current spam explosion is proof that technical solutions are only making the problem worse.
So here I go, I'm giving the world the answer. It's simple in theory, but incredibly complex to pull off in reality.
Put a price on your inbox. No email gets into your email inbox unless it has a dime attached. I pay you a dime the first time I want to communicate with you, and from there until infinity you and I can share that same dime back and forth. No money, no entry. This fundamentally shifts the economic cost of sending email back to original senders. Think a spammer would spend $100,000 to reach 1 million people now?
So there it is. Go build it, so we can all get on with our lives...oh and by the way, you need to be able to scale globally and have multi-currency functionality in 90 days or the system won't get adopted. Want more? The business plan is done. Just need $5m. Any takers?
Back to neurotechnology tomorrow.
Humans are social creatures. If you feed a newborn but don't provide it social interaction it will grow up with severe mental illnesses. This conclusion was determined by studying monkeys, not humans.
Social interaction is the hallmark of the human species. On this note, the emergence of social software will inevitably foster, in its own way, more effective human interaction on a global scale.
To keep you abreast of the latest developments in social software, Corante has launched a new blog today, many-to-many which will have contributions from leading thinkers across the social software space.
A brief introduction to what I'll be covering here (as well as in a forthcoming book):
The field of neurotechnology, the focus of this blog, encompasses numerous emerging technologies that will improve quality of life, cure disease and alleviate suffering. Neurotechnology also has the potential to redefine competitive advantage, restructure patterns of global production and make possible new modes of artistic expression.
Groundbreaking advances in brain science (neurons), information technology (bits) and bioengineering (genes) have major implications for those researching the central nervous system and have us poised on the cusp of a thrilling new wave of innovation that I'll be chronicling and commenting on here.
Up for discussion and analysis: the political, economic, ethical, and social forces that will shape the future of what will be one of the most important and fascinating stories of the coming decades.
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