Three recent articles with online product reviews at their center:

1. Alice Twemlow’s Design Observer post on the “Poetics of Amateur Product Reviews,” which includes an introduction to writer Geoff Dyer’s concept of “imaginative criticism,” found in his wonderful jazz book But Beautiful (and used in my own article, “Pärt Notes”).

2. Nick Bilton’s data visualizations of Kindle user reviews, which he used to draw his own conclusions on Amazon’s consumer responsiveness for the New York Times’s Bits blog.

3. Virginia Heffernan’s article “The Reviewing Stand” for her column The Medium in the New York Times Magazine, which cites a review of the self-help best-seller The Secret that is simply too kooky to miss. See also: Harriet Klausner, and Justin Ouelette’s opinionated-but-hyperminimalist The Shit to Get.

The original self-help book was by a Scot named Samuel Smiles and was called—what else?—Self-Help. Predictably, it was a massive hit:

[Self-Help] sold 20,000 copies within one year of its publication. By the time of Smiles’ death in 1904 it had sold over a quarter of a million. [The book] “elevated [Smiles] to celebrity status: almost overnight, he became a leading pundit and much-consulted guru.”

Self-Help was published 150 years ago this year. Thanks to the good ol’ public domain, you can read the bestseller in its entirety on Project Gutenberg, but Naomi Alderman, writing for London’s School of Life, pretty much sums it up:

For the modern reader, Self-Help is frankly pretty dull. […] There’s no real line of argument. Instead it’s a compendium of hundreds of stories, all on the same pattern:

1) A young man (and they are almost all men) grows up poor or disadvantaged;
2) He conceives an ambition but is repeatedly thwarted;
3) Nonetheless, he perseveres, and works extremely hard;
4) Finally, success! Self-Help certainly isn’t part of our modern ‘quick-fix’ culture.

Phase 3 of this process often lasts for decades.

The endlessly brilliant Umberto Eco on infiniteness, order, and lists:

We have always been fascinated by infinite space, by the endless stars and by galaxies upon galaxies. How does a person feel when looking at the sky? He thinks that he doesn’t have enough tongues to describe what he sees. Nevertheless, people have never stopping describing the sky, simply listing what they see. Lovers are in the same position. They experience a deficiency of language, a lack of words to express their feelings. But do lovers ever stop trying to do so? They create lists: Your eyes are so beautiful, and so is your mouth, and your collarbone… One could go into great detail.

Oh and there’s a whole book? Wishlisted! (via Bobulate)

I tweeted this awhile back, but best to repeat it: go out and pick up a copy of the new Task Newsletter. It’s fantastic and well worth your time. It includes, among other things, a chat between David Reinfurt and I about the collaboratively-written and unusually-priced sci-fi novel Philip. (The title, “Out of Phase and High On Fruice: Another Day In Philipville,” pretty much says it all.)

Reference Library posted Task’s “Publish Local” list the other day, but I think it’s well worth reposting:

1) Find what’s missing.
2) Work in the gaps.
3) Figure it out together.
4) Make it visible.
5) Make it viable.
6) Research and plan.
7) Expand existing systems.
8) Plan transparently.
9) Start small.
10) Commit to it.
11) Learn about your local flora.
12) Don’t get permission.
13) Print what you’ve got.
14) Make positive spaces.
15) Find funding.

The project was part of the Forms of Inquiry show and inspired by Christopher Alexander’s seminal book A Pattern Language. Photos of the project here. Project brief and background here.

At the DelveNYC conference a few weeks ago, I saw Joshua Porter give a great presentation called Designing for Social Traction, the slides for which are now available on Slideshare. (I was also lucky enough to win a copy of Josh’s book.)

A few fun things from Josh’s talk:

1) The article Eager Sellers Stony Buyers by John T. Gourville, which explains that buyers tend to overvalue the products they currently use by a factor of three and sellers tend to overvalue the things they make by a factor of three, leading to a 9x differential between the two.

2) The case of Harriet Klausner, Amazon’s #1 ranked reviewer until 24 October 2008, when she dropped to #445 because Amazon shifted its algorithm to rank reviewers by helpfulness (quality) not proflicacy (quantity). There’s also some question as to whether Klausner was even writing her own reviews. Josh explains.

3) The teaching of Peter Kollock, particularly his famous Stanford lecture, which says that people contribute online for four reasons: reputation, reciprocity, doing good work, and for attachment/need of a group.

4) The book Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. According to Csikszentmihalyi, there are nine conditions for flow, which starts with having clear goals and concludes with finding a balance between skills and challenges. If something’s too easy we get bored. If it’s too difficult, we feel anxious. Flow happens when the skills of a user and the challenges of a task meet in an ever-evolving middle ground.

Discover Magazine’s 10+1 rules for time travelers:

0) There are no paradoxes.
1) Traveling into the future is easy.
2) Traveling into the past is hard — but maybe not impossible.
3) Traveling through time is like traveling through space.
4) Things that travel together, age together.
5) Black holes are not time machines.
6) If something happened, it happened.
7) There is no meta-time.
8) You can’t travel back to before the time machine was built.
9) Unless you go to a parallel universe.
10) And even then, your old universe is still there.

(via Buzzfeed).

I’ve been a fan of the Oulipo—a literary group founded by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais—since high school, so I was thrilled when Prem alerted me to the group’s reading at the New School a few weeks ago. Yale French Professor Jean-Jacques Poucel’s introduction stressed that the Oulipian model depended not only on constraints but on their verifiability:

Like any formal rule, a constraint must be verifiable, tested against the work’s “user’s manual,” while also evoking some notion of beauty, perhaps related to shape, economy or force — or, potentially, a surprising mixture of yet other features. As such, writing under constraint is not a virtual or imaginary game, but a set of concrete methods playfully developed in a real forum that values proven and intellectually satisfying results.

Readings included Ian Monk’s lipogrammatical bit of exotica, “Iris”; Anne F. Garréta’s lengthy but nonetheless fulfilling exegesis “On Bookshelves”; Hervé Le Tellier’s lovely, cryptic, “All our thoughts,”; Jacques Roubaud’s hilarious “Correspondence” from McSweeney’s 22; Harry Mathews’s hilarious “35 Variations On A Theme From Shakespeare”; and more. (For those new to the Oulipo, the works of Georges Perec and the Oulipo Compendium are both highly recommended.)

Update: Michael Silverblatt’s Bookworm podcast has a nearly identical program. Listen here.

Just a few of the fantastic references I scribbled down while listening to this talk by Alex Wright for the Long Now Foundation’s Seminars about Long-Term Thinking series [MP3]:

1. Memory Palace (or Method of Loci); Memory Theater.

2. The idea of a Professor of Books, which is traceable to this essay by Emerson.

3. Charles Cutter, whose library classification system is used in the Library of Congress today (and which Wright argues is superior to Melville Dewey’s).

4. The Belgian librarian Paul Otlet, a fascinating figure whose Treaties on Documentation is detailed in this YouTube clip.

5. Vannevar Bush’s seminal “As We May Think” essay, published in July 1945 by The Atlantic, which includes Bush’s description of something called the “memory extender,” or memex: “A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.”

6. Ted Nelson’s pioneering idea of transclusion, which allows one document to be embedded entirely within another without duplicating the document via another concept Nelson coined in 1965, hypertext.

I decided to start posting a bit more this week after I realized over the weekend that I now have more items saved to recommend to you in the future than all the total items I have previously recommended to you in the past. This is an attempt to balance things out a bit. Realizing I’ve done 20 posts in four days, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Lydia Davis’s fantastic story “20 Sculptures in One Hour” from her collection Varieties of Disturbance (mentioned on L&UL here), which I cannot seem to find online but, believe me, is well worth a read.

Here’s a good snapshot of the super-short story from an interview with Davis:

Lydia: An hour is a long time, but if there are 20 sculptures that you have to look at within an hour, that’s 3 minutes per sculpture, which isn’t a long time at all. And yet, three minutes can end up feeling like a long time…
Interviewer: Sounds like Zeno’s Paradox.
Lydia: I love Zeno’s Paradox!

Now reminded of paradoxes, I’m resolving to make my first post tomorrow (#21, if you’re counting) a long-overdue list of all paradoxes mentioned by Peter Cave on this episode of Philosophy Bites dedicated to the subject. Stay tuned.

Following the nine categories of magical effects comes the seven basic principles of slight-of-hand magic from the wonderful Penn and Teller: “1) Palm: to hold an object in an apparently empty hand. 2) Ditch: to secretly dispose of an unneeded object. 3) Steal: to secretly obtain a needed object. 4) Load: to secretly move the needed object to where it’s needed. 5) Simulation: to give the impression that something that hasn’t happened has [happened]. 6) Misdirection: to lead attention away from a secret move. 7) Switch: to exchange one object for another.” (via Daring Fireball)