generation neXt reports that three new blogging books (auf deutsche) are coming out.

• BLOGS! Die Weblogs – Literatur und Journalismus im Internet by a Who's Who of the blogosphere (Weblogwelt, actually).
• Das Blog-Buch by Dirk Olbertz
• Generation Blogger by Markus Christian Koch and Astrid Haarland 

Still room for a manager's guide to blogging. Must get back to that...

I wonder if there's a readership for an annual best blog posts of 2003 book. I know they do it for poetry and short stories.

I'm reading a political thriller. Except William Shakespeare is the hero. And Spain occupies England. With the Inquisition and Irish mercenaries for enforcers. Ruled Britannia by Harry Turtledove. Haven't put it down all weekend.

My nominee for best named blog. By Rolf Potts, the author of Vagabonding. Not the high tech lifestyle.

Earlier this month, while traveling through France, I managed to get myself arrested at a casino in Normandy.

This is certainly not the best way to begin a day-trip to the French coast, but -- as I'd told my travel-writing students the previous week -- it is a good way to begin a travel story. Not getting arrested, necessarily, but setting the hook. Implying drama. Creating interest. Giving the reader something to come back to. And, most importantly, promising action.

Good advice for bloggers? I was reminded this week that the proper verb for creating a post is ... write.

I had lunch with Susan Mernit today. She found Kaimuki Grill in San Mateo, 104 S. El Camino, via Chowhound. Well prepared, unusual menu items, ambience comfortable, great service.

Some things I now know about Susan:

She's lived in New Jersey and New York. (I lived in New York)

She knows David Weinberger's brother. (I know David)

She's a foodie. (I'm a foodie newbie)

She's wise enough to value colleagues unlike herself.

She asks good questions well. And listens.

We share an interest in educational blogging. Question of the day: How do we design, package and sell blogging to teachers (not the early adopters)?

She's an alum of Scholastic Magazine, Netscape, and AOL. Keen interest in product strategy, marketing management.

And she's a born blogger. Only four months into it and she's on her second blog, written up by the New York Times, and comped to BloggerCon.

I brought some of my favorite examples of business cookbooks for show and tell (I'm such an entertainer).

• CIO Insight Magazine's Whiteboards. Comprehensive project plans.
• Optimize Magazine uses a real world case in each issue. The author drafts a 90-Day Plan. Lots of text charts and graphs suitable for PowerPoint.
• Web Redesign: Workflow That Works, a step by step project process expanded to book lenght 
• The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization
• The Company Culture Cookbook: How to Change the Way We Do Things Around Here

btw, some of the first and best foodie bloggers: Barb Wong and Roland Tanglao's VanEats.

I loved Susan's "if only subway cars could blog" idea.

[a klog apart]

Lies, by Al Franken

Anger is a great motivator. I'm waiting until after the California election to read this. btw, I trademarked the word "Lies".

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

I'm a few hundred pages into Phoenix but stopped to read Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West.

Designing with Web Standards, by Jeffrey Zeldman

I've been pulling this out a few times a week.

Treason, by Ann Coulter

Give me a break.

Smart Mobs

An inkling of a big thing. OK book. Excellent weblog.

What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and...

Take that, Coulter.

The Great Big Book of Tomorrow

Time to get this. Now. Not yesterday. Not tomorrow.

Fast Food Nation

I'm too scared to read it.

Why Girls Are Weird

Does it help dealing with it?

Stiff

Have you ever prepared a body for burial? I have. Nothing instills carpe diem faster or deeper.

Cryptonomicon

I had chills reading this. Scenes from my life. Right down to the sysadmins in trenchcoats with guns.

Hillary Clinton Memoir

I'll wait for the movie.

No Logo

Strident. Makes the case.

Pattern Recognition

If you liked "No Logo"...

Purple Cow

Selling the book was more creative than the book itself. But worth it just to grok deeply that your best marketing bang comes from a product, and not its promotion. 

Bobos in Paradise

I have it. I can't remember why.

The Weblog Handbook

Buy in volume. Give as stocking stuffers. Require as a classroom text.

Sleeping With the Devil

Was this a first lady's biography? If so, which one?  

Google Hacks

Yay, Rael!

The Chicago Manual of Style

It's red! What happened to the classic orange?

The Gunslinger

I'm waiting for the TV movie.

The Da Vinci Code

I'm waiting for the movie.

Traci Lords

I'm waiting for the movie. No, wait...

Neuromancer

To understand the times, the effect of technology, read this yarn.

Emergence

Huge idea. Pretty good explanation. Needs a fieldbook.

War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning

I'd rather get my meaning in a can, please.

The Best Democracy Money Can Buy

Is this a how to guide?

Atlas Shrugged

A reality distortion field. Read with care.

How to Be Good

Anything to do with Good to Great?

American Gods

I liked it, but not worth that much fuss. Try Icelandic sagas.

Snow Crash

If only for the pizza delivery!

Cascading Style Sheets

hmmm. Maybe there's more I could do.

Northern Lights

Find the hidden allegory.

Nickel and Dimed

Anguish. Struggle. Not getting by on minimum wage. 

Linked

I studied the math. This is the context. And the game play.

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

Only five?

Good to Great

Boils down to "You'd better pick lucky parents." 

Seabiscuit

Saw the movie.

Tivo Hacks

Just bought it.

I can't wait for Don Norman's new book to arrive. Emotional Design: Why We Love (Or Hate) Everyday Things. It's a skinny paperback. Norman posted drafts of the prologue (500k pdf), chapter 1: Attractive things work better (245k pdf), and Epilogue: We Are All Designers (200k pdf). Wouldn't it be cool to understand why people love me but hate my blog? Or vice versa? Perhaps a companion piece to Fogg's Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do?

Frank Patrick (one of the deepest thinkers on project management in our time) catches the new chapter on Critical Chain Scheduling in Ed Yourdan's new second edition of Death March. The book is mandatory reading for every project worker.

I like one of Yourdan's anecdotes:

My colleague Tom DeMarco likes to tell the story of consulting clients he visits, who ask him, "If we could do just one thing to improve our project-management situation, what would it be?" Tom's answer is often simple: "Stop assigning people to work on five or six unrelated projects simultaneously; give everyone one project to work on, and leave them alone until they finish that one project."  Invariably, says Tom, the response is, "Well, yeah, that sounds very rational.  But you don't understand, that just wouldn't work in our organization -- because in our organization we have constraints A, B, and C, and we have to deal with political problems X, Y, and Z, so give us another one thing that could make all of our project management problems go away."  Any suggestion that attacks the dysfunctional behaviors in the organization is almost certain to be rejected with the phrase, "Well, maybe that would work in a perfect world -- but in the 'real world' where we operate, it could never happen because of X, Y, and Z"  And the organization eventually finds a "pill" -- a new development tool, a new systems analysis methodology, a new buzzword -- that may bring short-term relief, but rarely attacks the underlying problems.

Changes, deep ones, important and worthwhile, shake us.

The chapter is about more than change. It is about applying Goldratt's Theory Of Constraints (TOC) to project scheduling. It requires a different set of values, behaviors, incentives, measures, and project controls. So this calls for extensive change.

Human Capital Constraints

How can we apply the Theory Of Constraints to workforce planning and recruiting?

Where are the bottlenecks to be overcome?

Can the system design be reconsidered in light of the TOC?

What assumptions and dogma are worth challenging?

What new values, behaviors, incentives, measures, and controls will lead to more of what we want?

How can we get more of the right people on our radar? Spend more time spent in meaningful conversation and less on paperwork? Shorten our cycle times while increasing our quality?

Along the way, can we take some of the strain out of the process?

Now on my reading list:

• Project Management in the Fast Lane: Applying the Theory of Constraints
• Critical Chain Project Management.
• It's Not Luck.

P.S. When I was a kid I wanted to grow up to be a systems engineer. In high school I wanted to be an operations research analyst, reading Naval Operations Analysis. By nineteen I was working for the Naval Supply Systems Command as a civilian operations research analyst. My favorite book in the whole world was Quick and Dirty OR. Just to explain the utter and complete geekiness of this post.

I had forgotten to post a review of Speed Up Your Site because I ended up in the hospital about the same time it was published. It's a must-have for every designer and webmaster's library. There isn't anything out there like it and it's important because our attention spans are short thanks to information overload. 

I agree enthusiastically. Imagine if all the blog hosting services doubled the speed at which blog pages load. What might this do to readership? To adoption and abandonment rates? To cost of operation? Support costs? Satisfaction? Word of mouth?

Speed is a reason many corporate career sites suck. The company may be zippy but the jobs@ site makes you look like slothful, sluggish, lazy beasts. Hey, it's your reputation. Buy a dozen of King's book and leave them as brazen hints on your CIO's desk. More people find jobs and complete applications accurately when pages load fast.

Speed rocks.