DavePress

It’s my birthday today, I am now in my 30th year. 29 years old! Hopefully this won’t mean lots of pontificating over the next 12 months about what I have achieved, and what I am going to do with myself in the future.

Anyway, I had some lovely gifts, including a top selection of dead tree web 2.0 reading material:

The Future of the Internet Johnathan Zittrain	Everything is Miscellaneous David Weinberger	Groundswell Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff

Plenty to get my teeth into there.

I also got lots of lovely birthday well-wishes via Twitter and Facebook - so thanks to everyone for that. Best of all though was this from Paul Caplan via Flickr:

There are a number of books out there which are covering a lot of the stuff I am interested in with regard to the web and collaboration. It might be worth coming up with a reading list - how about a challenge to read them all by the end of the year?!

These aren’t necessarily all web 2.0 specific books: some cover background and the history of the technology too.

1. Here Comes Everybody - Clay Shirky

2. We-think: The Power of Mass Creativity - Charles Leadbeater

3. A Brief History of the Future: Origins of the Internet - John Naughton

4. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything - Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams

5. Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder - David Weinberger

6. The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual - Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, and Doc Searls

7. The Long Tail: How Endless Choice Is Creating Unlimited Demand - Chris Anderson

8. Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition and Still Can’t Get a Date - Robert X Cringely

9. Naked Conversations : How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers - Robert Scoble and Shel Israel

10. The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy - Andrew Keen

Are there any classics that I have managed to miss? Or are some of my picks utter dross that shouldn’t be touched with a bargepole?

Disclosure: the links to Amazon are associate links, which provide a bit of money towards Palimpsest, the arts and politics discussion forum I run.

Am currently reading Pat Barker’s Regeneration, all about Siegdried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and other fictional soldiers recovering at Craiglockhart War Hospital during WW1. I must admit to, shamefully, not knowing an awful lot about the ‘great’ war before reading Oxford University Press’ World War One: A Very Short Introduction. It so interested me that I immediately spent a Christmas book token on David Stevenson’s 1914-1918, which looks a beast of a read.

Here are some of the links I have been looking at, hunting down background information:

• Regeneration
• Pat Barker
• Wilfred Owen
• Siegfried Sassoon
• Craiglockhart War Hospital
• W. H. R. Rivers
• Robert Graves