In his prescient 2006 article in Wired, Jeff Howe coined the term crowdsourcing to describe how the Internet has enabled large, distributed teams of amateurs to do work that was previously the domain of isolated experts or corporations. Linux and Wikipedia are only two of hundreds of examples of this phenomenon. Howe's article in Wired focused on two innovative companies who had successfully harnessed the power of crowdsourcing: iStockphoto, a community-driven source for stock photography, and InnoCentive, where corporations offer cash prizes for solving their thorniest research and development problems. Two years later, Howe has expanded his article into a 300-page book: Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business.

I'm a fan of Wired, and this is exactly the kind of book that I would normally love, but in this case I found myself disappointed. If you've already read Howe's article in Wired, and indeed if you are the kind of person who reads Wired, you won't find much that is new or surprising here. Howe fills up his 300 pages by repeating the same examples over and over. For example, we learn that iStockphoto is so cool that Getty Images finally bought them out. It's a nice story, but Howe can't resist telling it in what seems like every chapter. If you sometimes feel like you're reading the same sentence twice, that's because you are. Here's Howe on page 134 describing idea jams:

People have pointed out that this is little more than an Internet-enabled suggestion box. Just so. The Internet didn't make crowdsourcing possible--it just made it vastly more effective.

A nice observation, but then the identical sentences appear again on page 159. This kind of editorial sloppiness abounds. On page 51, Howe mangles the the recursive acronym of the GNU project. On page 237, he repeats the widely believed but false claim that Xerox PARC invented the computer mouse (it was SRI).

Howe proudly announces that this book itself was crowdsourced--he put drafts on his website for the crowd to critique and edit. He probably should have hired a professional editor instead, who would have cut it in half and made it a great book.

Website Optimization by Andrew King is a comprehensive guide to improving the performance of websites from both a technical and a commercial perspective. It is packed with detailed, practical advice on how to professionalize your site's content and presentation, how to speed up the site and improve its search engine rankings, how to measure and improve the visitor's experience, and how to measure and increase conversion rates and ROI. The emphasis throughout the book is on quantifiable, evidence-based analysis of all aspects of your site.

The only problem I have with the book is that some chapters are written by different authors, making for an uneven, discordant reading experience. The charts and graphs, for example, vary greatly in style from one chapter to the next. Some chapters are intended for engineers, some for managers. In one chapter you're learning how to tweak HTTP headers and Apache mod files, and in the next chapter you're rolling your eyes at business-book bromides like "appeal to the value hierarchies of your customers". Nevertheless, there is so much useful information crammed into this book that I would venture to declare it essential reading for any serious web developer.

Economist Tim Harford's engaging and thought-provoking new book is The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World. It is Harford's second contribution to that lucrative contemporary genre of pop-economics inaugurated by Levitt and Dubner's megabestseller Freakonomics and by Harford's excellent debut, The Undercover Economist.

The goal of this book, like its predecessors, is to apply rational choice theory and evidence-based economic analysis to all kinds of conundrums and social forces that are familiar from everyday life. This time, the topics tackled include divorce, teenage sex, gambling, racism, and workplace politics. The point is that even seemingly irrational phenomena like racism, poverty, and exuberant executive "compensation" can be explained (though not justified, Harford emphasizes) in rational terms if we analyze them in the harsh light of economic incentives.

While I'm sympathetic to this view in general, I think that Harford, Levitt, et al. sometimes give short shrift to alternative hypotheses in their rush to explain everything in terms of the rationalizations of Homo economicus. For example, many "irrational" behaviors like drug abuse, teen suicide, antisemitism, and religious awakenings are cyclical in nature, like hemlines or musical fads. They spread like social viruses (memes). Cocaine was popular in the 1880s and the 1980s, but not in the 1950s. Understanding why requires understanding the workings of social networks and trends, not just plans and incentives.

My bookshelf had been overstuffed for a while so I decided to start selling my old Computer Science and Linguistics books on Amazon. I was skeptical that anyone would be interested in my used books so I set the prices on the low side. Boy was I surprised when the orders came pouring in. Who would have thought that there's still a big market for 20-year old Prolog textbooks in Europe. I've sold 15 books in the past couple weeks and pocketed a couple hundred bucks in profit.

If I had to do it again, however, I think I would not offer overseas shipping, which is very expensive now that the post office no longer offers an overseas media rate. Amazon compensates you at a fixed rate for your shipping expenses, but it's never enough to cover the full amount, especially to overseas locations.

The other day my neighbor saw me walking up to the post office with a bag full of books, and we had a chat about how the Amazon program works. He said he had noticed that some people were selling used products on Amazon and eBay for ridiculously low prices like 25 cents. He looked into it, and found out that these people still profit because they ship the products from work, at no cost to themselves, and then collect the shipping subsidy themselves. Sneaky!

Steven Pinker's fascinating new book, The Stuff of Thought, is about conceptual semantics and what modern linguistics reveals about how human beings think. The book is in some sense an integration of his previous books The Language Instinct, Words and Rules, and How the Mind Works.

Human thought, Pinker argues, is built around certain primitive concepts, including space, force, dominance, agency, animacy, sex, and contamination. In the most interesting chapters he shows how our human conceptions of space, time, and matter are reflected in linguistic features like tense, aspect, and the count/mass distinction. The relatively recent research results of Beth Levin and her colleagues in the area of lexical semantics, summarized in Chapter 2, are particularly illuminating, as they reveal how seemingly random variations in verb subcategorization patterns actually reflect deep, underlying conceptual schemas in the mind.

In the final chapters Pinker offers the optimistic conclusion that we need not be permanently shackled by our limited primate brains; scientific progress relies on our remarkable ability to extend our knowledge to new domains through the use of metaphor, analogy, and linguistic combinatorics. The goal of education, Pinker concludes, is to make up for the shortcomings in our instinctive ways of thinking about the physical and social world.