Saturday, February 08, 2003

The New Post-Amazon Bookstore - Andrew Sullivan's Book Club This link will take you to Andrew Sullivan's Book Club. I wonder if this is the new post Amazon bookstore? Here is why I think this. Andrew enables us book nuts to have a club to talk about the books we like. He therefore extends the powerful reader review part of the Amazon site and creates a deeper community. If you buy the book from him linked to Amazon, he gets 15% but you don't pay any more. So Andrew becomes a power store for Amazon. Good for Andrew good for Jeff Bezos and good for me the reader who wants to participate in an informed forum. Andrew and Amazon make the book purchase very easy thus he and the reader piggy back on Amazon's system and logistics. He is a book store that has all the power of Amazon behind it and they pay him! Remember how long it took to get that copy and how much it cost from you friendly local bookseller? Let's go a bit deeper. Andrew's site is also like a book club. General Book clubs are OK for their owners but specialty book clubs - Military, Cooking etc - are exceptionally attractive. Lower overall volume but much more per member. Military buffs buy all the good books. This takes George Dafermos's ideas of the power of collaborative filtering to the next level as well. Maybe if Amazon is then a general book club - we can all then set up our own or join specialty clubs. Andrews is maybe too general right now. Anyone going to open a military club? Maybe I should? 5:35:27 PM    comment []

Boyd - The Man and His Ideas by Grant Hammond "Boyd begins with the premise that the business of life is life" "For Boyd, the concept of moral leverage is critical to one’s strategy of conflict. Without an understanding of how to minimize our friction and increase that of our adversary in a moral-mental-physical sense, we are not likely to be victorious and hence, survive and prosper. People must believe in the cause that they fight for, must affirm what it is they stand and die for, must seek to live for some higher good or goal than merely themselves. Knowing merely what they are against, the negative motivation of hate, revenge or retribution is insufficient to galvanize a society to win a compelling victory and institute a lasting peace. Such notions may be far removed from the considerations of many, but Boyd is philosopher as well as a tactician, a strategist with a conscience, whose view of conflict and war makes room for, indeed could not exist without, concern for moral leverage as well as physical force." Boyd has so many disciples who write well about him - here is Grant Hammond's introduction to his life and to his ideas - a good starting point if you want to know more 3:57:32 PM    comment []