Reading Lists - March 12, 2008

Ryan has a really good habit of keeping track of all the books he's read and writing up little descriptions. It's something that I've thought about doing for a long time but never really got around to it. So I forced myself to join goodreads which is a social networking site (what today on the internet isn't a social networking site now?) based around books.

I'm primarily using it because it'll track my read, currently-reading, and to-read lists and I don't have to do any work, which I like. I'd thought about writing something similar for my blog which would let me do some fancy database magic and keep a record of all my books but why reinvent the wheel? So, if you're interested in what I'm reading you can follow me Corman @ Goodreads.

I wish I could get more excited about this because I read a lot and I absolutely love books but I'm suffering social networking site burnout. Between this site, and my profiles on myspace, del.icio.us, stumbleupon, facebook, twitter and now goodreads, I'm starting to find all the different ways to connect and talk to people overwhelming and redundant. Some people only message me on myspace, some only on facebook, some through email or by comments here. It's not that I don't want to hear from you out there, I do. It's that "checking my email" isn't just checking my email, it's now logging into at least six different sites, dealing with six different interfaces managing six different sets of saved / archives messages. Exhausting, or maybe I just haven't had enough coffee. But don't stop writing in, I like hearing from you all. I just need to figure out a better way to manage it.

Posted by Ben Corman at 2:46 PM

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Funny, I just started "The Wisdom of Crowds" 2 days ago.

Posted by: Rob4Broncos at March 12, 2008 04:31 PM

What do you think so far? I'm about half way through it and it's alright, but it's pretty dry.

Posted by: Ben Corman at March 12, 2008 04:43 PM

Take a look at mahalo social for a one-stop shop for social networking.

Posted by: Andrew at March 12, 2008 05:15 PM

Tim Ferriss of fourhourworkweek.com outsources all his email-checking chores to Canada and India.

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2008/03/10/24-hours-with-tim-ferriss-a-sample-schedule/

Posted by: Vincent at March 12, 2008 06:14 PM

Hey Andrew,

I've seen what they're doing over there at mahalo and I'm not sure why I haven't checked it out yet. Probably for some of the same reasons I listed above, fatigue of new services. But you're right, I should check it out.

And Vincent,

It's not that I get too much email, it's that I want to get all my communication in one place. It's analogous to when AIM, ICQ, MSN, etc, all had proprietary clients and there wasn't any one program that would handle logging into each service. If I had friends on each network, I had to run four or five programs to talk to them all.

Even if I had someone else filter my messages and I just dealt with the important ones, I'd still have to log into each different service if I want to talk to different people.

Posted by: Ben Corman at March 12, 2008 06:30 PM

I'm only a quarter of the way through it, and yeah I agree it's dry. Just a lot of speculation on "here's why the majority rules," but maybe I'll be convinced.

It's still pretty interesting, though. I like the examples he uses to illustrate his points. Still, so far I really don't buy it.

Posted by: Rob4Broncos at March 12, 2008 06:42 PM