WordPress 24-Hour Trainer

Unlike the title suggests, I read WordPress 24-Hour Trainer through a course of many sittings. It took me a little less than a week to finish this book. So don’t plan to learn this all in a day, unless of course you have a photographic memory and prior experience with all the functions of the WordPress interface. Then again, it might just be me. While I don’t speed read, I also don’t read terribly slow.

While I feel the title is a bit misleading, this resource is worth it.  Debateable book premise aside, George Plumley explains everything clearly from major concepts to tedious procedures.  Having used WordPress for a while now, I thought I knew most of the features of this rather intuitive platform. Nonetheless, Plumley’s work presents many insights into optimizing content and planning posts.

WordPress 24-Hour Trainer begins by explaining how WordPress “thinks” from search engine standpoints.  Not only is this important for sharing work, in my opinion it’s really interesting. Sometimes, blogging books bombard readers with info while displaying confusing graphic figures. Not so with this one. It is incredibly easy to follow this teaching tool.

Overall, Plumley’s work is a great resource; especially for beginning bloggers. Also, this book comes with a great supplemental DVD, which enhances many of the advanced printed lessons and proves very helpful when configuring files and customizing.

Twitterville (Book Review)

Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods

Twitter may be the most effective social media tool for promoting grassroots causes. Irrespective of whether one’s initiative qualifies as political, business, or artistic; this micro blogging platform integrates extremely well with blogging and other social media sites. In fact, Twitter continues to prove effective to the point where major corporations like Dell, Comcast, Jet Blue, Southwest Airlines, Proctor & Gamble, Virgin America, U-Haul, Geek Squad, Best Buy, Pepsi, Ford, Zappos, H&R Block, Rubbermaid, Molson, Tyson Foods, etc… all utilize Twitter in various ways. Shel Israel explains how these companies connect, promote, and run damage control in a 32 million member global community known as “Twitterville.”

To my surprise, after presenting the ways many businesses use Twitter to connect directly with customers (especially in handling customer service) Twitterville opened my eyes to “a large cult of generosity.” The book also considers our drastic societal change from the invention of the telephone to the phenomenon known as micro blogging.

I found reading Twitterville to be a refreshing experience because Shel Israel devotes the end of the book to how Twitter can be used to help people in need, as well as to promote world peace. The concluding messages in Twitterville place hope in an international community building ties through social media and technologically enhanced citizen communication.

Seldom do books inspire me to want to contribute to this world in whatever way I can. That being said, I never expected Shel Israel’s Twitterville to motivate me to search some of the sources he mentions. In particular, I was interested in blog widgets that allow bloggers to accept donations on behalf of a charity in a transparent manner. So if you’re a blogger and would like to collect for a worthy charity, check out the ChipIn site. You can customize blog widgets there (available for Facebook as well).

My recommendation = Twitterville is an insightful book—definitely worth reading
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Shel Israel is also the author of How Businesses can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods [Portfolio, Sept. 2009]; co-author, of Naked Conversations–how blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers [Wiley, 2006], and The Conversational Corporation, a Dow Jones eBook [May 2009]. He’s contributed editorially to BusinessWeek and FastCompanyTV.

Googled by Ken Auletta

Googled: The End Of The World As We Know It… (and I feel fine). I spend a great deal of time each day conducting Google searches. In fact, I consider Google to be one of the most useful tools in my life. Something tells me I am not the only one who feels this way.

While the Internet makes information available to everyone, Google provides users with lightening quick results to search queries. However, as Googled author Ken Auletta points out, that is certainly not all Google does. More than threatening traditional media outlets with targeted advertising and the organization of Web content, Google’s ambitions with book scanning; in addition to their acquisitions of smaller organizations, stirred tensions with companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, the publishing industry, etc… Auletta provides a long list.

Throughout Googled, Auletta also questions the supposed struggle of an engineering ethos claiming “Don’t be evil” in the face of corporate demands for continual growth. I get the sense from reading this book that despite all their accomplishments, Google may operate as a rather “unfocused” business entity. In providing a corporate conceptual framework for his assertion, Auletta draws from interviews he conducted with Google officers to make the case that Google could be generating unprecedented income even beyond what they have already amassed and redistributed.

Ken Auletta also explains how and why Google has earned the reputation for being one of the best brands in the world. In addition, he presents future challenges Google faces through foreseeable competitive struggles, including those that involve legal proceedings. Questions of disorganization and hubris are raised—perhaps unfairly. Judge for yourself.

While I am not a fan of reading about corporate structures and business histories, for the most part I did like this book. What I enjoyed most was reading about the respective backgrounds of Google founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the inspiration they found in Richard Feynman and Nikola Tesla, their intellectual upbringings, and their advanced studies at Stanford. I wish Googled was more about the founders and their intellectual pursuits rather than business deals. Still it was an eye-opening read.
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Ken Auletta has written Annals of Communication columns and profiles for The New Yorker magazine since 1992. He is the author of eleven books, including five national bestsellers… (read more)