2015 in review (from WordPress)

WordPress generated an automatic year end summary of traffic to this blog. See below.

As we start 2016, I’ve been blogging at least once per day for just under two years now, 730+ days straight.

It may not be good, but it keeps coming!

The traffic data is pretty spotty.  I know that it can’t accurately count anyone (such as me) blocking cookies and otherwise declining to be tracked.

Overall readership is up a bit, possibly in the tens of viewers.  I can see a very definite “long tail” effect: something like half the hits are dribs and drabs on old posts from the last three years.

The most visited category must surely be things tagged ‘book review’, which have also generated likes and followers, though some of these look like bots to me.

Anyway, if my love of reading in any way reaches other readers, I’m good with that.

So let me say “thanks” to any readers out there.  Feel free to ping me if you like something or have something you want to tell me.

Peace.

 

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The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 13,000 times in 2015. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 5 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Books Reviewed 2015

Here is  housekeeping post, collecting all the books reviewed here in 2015.

Looking back at this list, I see that this year saw Terry Pratchette’s last book (a wrenching experience), and new novels by old favorites Stross, Perry, Macguire, Holt, Gaiman, among others. I also read older but still good histories by Goodwin and Graeber. I read several books about banking, Papal and otherwise, and overlapping works about Italy, fictional and (supposedly) real.

Over the year, I reviewed a sampling of important books about contemporary digital life, including cryptocurrency, the “sharing economy”, social media, and “mind change”.   These works covered a spectrum from enthusiasm to dark worry, giving us much to think about. There are many more I did not have time or energy for. (I will say more on this topic in another post)

Throughout 2015 I continued my ongoing investigation of the question, “what is coworking?”, including reviews of two recent (self published) books about coworking by practitioners. (More on coworking in another post.)

Shall I name some “Best Books” out of my list? Why not?

Fiction:

There were so many to pick from. I mean, with Neil Gaiman in the list, how can I choose? But let me mention two that are especially memorable

Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente
Very imaginative and well written, and, for once, not so horribly dark. This book lodged in my memory more than others that are probably equally good.

Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon
Published a few years ago, but I didn’t read it until this year. A wonderful, intricate story. The flight of the parrot is still in my memory.

Nonfiction:

There were many important works about digital life, and I shall try to comment on them in another post. But three books that really hit me are:

Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber
From several years ago, but I didn’t read it until this year. Highly influential on the ‘occupy’ and other left-ish thinking. This is an astonishingly good book, and long form anthropology, to boot. Wow!

Reimagination Station: Creating a Game-Changing In-Home Coworking Space by Lori Kane
An exlectic little self-published book about “home coworking”, which I didn’t know was a thing. Kane walked the walk, and made me think in new ways about community and coworking.

Fangirl’s Guide to the Galaxy by Sam Maggs
Unexpected amounts of fun reading this short book. It does an old, graying nerd no end of good to see that at least some of the kids are OK. Really, really, OK.

List of books reviewed in 2015

Fiction

A Darkling Sea by James L. Cambias
After Alice by Gregory Maguire
Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson
Bats of the Republic by Zachary Thomas Dodson
Book of Numbers by Joshua Cohen
Chasing the Phoenix by Michael Swanwick
Candy Apple Red by Nancy Bush
Chicks and Balances edited by Esther Friesner and John Helfers
Corsair by James L. Cambias
Count to a Trillion by John C. Wright
Diaspora by Greg Egan
Distress by Greg Egan
Electric Blue by Nancy Bush
Forty Thieves by Thomas Perry
Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits by David Wong
Get In Trouble by Kelly Link
Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
Karen Memory by Elizabeth Bear
Koko the Mighty by Kieran Shea
Luna: New Moon by Ian McDonald
Mort(e) by Robert Repino
Numero Zero by Umberto Eco
Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente
Rebirths of Tao by Wesley Chu
Redeployment by Phil Klay
Satin Island by Tom McCarthy
Secondhand Souls by Christopher Moore
Seveneves by Neal Stephenson
Shark Skin Suite by Tim Dorsey
String of Beads by Thomas Perry
Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon
The Annihilation Score by Charles Stross
The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year Volume Nine ed. by Jonathan Strahan
The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Enchantment Emporium by Tanya Huff
The First Bad Man by Miranda July
The Fortress in Orion by Mike Resnick
The Future Falls by Tanya Huff
The Good, the Bad, and The Smug by Tom Holt
The Mark and the Void by Paul Murray
The Relic Master by Christopher Buckley
The Rook by Daniel O’Malley
The Shepherd’s Crown by Terry Pratchett
The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu
The Unfortunate Decisions of Dahlia Moss by Max Wirestone
The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi
The Wild Ways by Tanya Huff
Time Salvager by Wesley Chu
To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis
Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances by Neil Gaiman
Ultraviolet by Nancy Bush
We Are Pirates by Daniel Handler
Witches Be Crazy by Logan J. Hunder
Zer0es by Chuck Wendig

Non Fiction

Arrival of the Fittest by Andreas Wagner
Blue Mind by Wallace J. Nichols
Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber
Digital Gold by Nathaniel Popper
Fangirl’s Guide to the Galaxy by Sam Maggs
God’s Bankers by Gerald Posner
LaFayette in the Somewhat United States by Sarah Vowell
Let’s Be Less Stupid by Patricia Marx
Live Right and Find Happiness by Dave Barry
Merchants in the Temple by Gianluigi Nuzzi
Mind Change by Susan Greenfield
Mindsharing by Lior Zoref
Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari
No More Sink Full of Mugs by Tony Bacigalupo
Not Impossible by Mick Ebeling
Pax Technica by Phillip N. Howard
Peers, Inc by Robin Chase
Reimagination Station: Creating a Game-Changing In-Home Coworking Space by Lori Kane
Speculative Everything by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby
Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin
The Age of Cryptocurrency by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey
The Art of Forgery by Noah Charney
The Next Species by Michael Tennesen
The Reputation Economy by Michael Fertik and David C. Thompson
The Social Labs Revolution by Zaid Hassan
The Ugly Renaissance by Alexander Lee
Twentyfirst Century Robot by Brian David Johnson
Women of Will:  Following the Feminine in Shakespeare’s Plays by Tina Packer

 

Book Reviews

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“What is Coworking?” Working Draft Of New Paper

What is Coworking?

As the year winds up, I am pulling together themes that have appeared in this blgo over 2015. One frequent theme has been examination of the question, “What is Coworking?”

I pulled together some of the important ideas and research questions in a new “white paper”.  [PDF] This is sort of “Chapter 1” of what I’ve learned this year.

As I began to explore the question, I discovered that coworking is not only part of “the sharing economy” (also known as, “the Uber economy”), supporting what I call “the new way of work”, it is also a “movement”, with conferences, wikis, and all the trappings.

OK, this is getting interesting. There’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear.

But this wasn’t the whole story, not by a long shot. Not everyone agrees about or even cares about the “movement”, whatever it really is. In fact, coworking spaces are organized in many ways, offering many different services and “amenities”, and, everyone agrees, have substantially different “vibes” and ”cultures”.

How can these things all be “cowork spaces”? What is the essential feature they have in common?

The answer turns out to be “community”! Across all these cases, the space serves and is inhabited by a community of workers, a community that shares the space and values the connection to the community that happens there. This community resembles the “culture” of a company in many ways, but the workers are independent, and the space is not owned their employer.

In other words, coworking is a social or anthropological phenomenon. Cool!

Even better, these communities are scarcely chance developments. They are consciously created and maintained. In some cases, it is describes as “curating” the community membership. There is a growing body of knowledge and practice, and there are now professional “community managers”, and a training program to help promulgate “Cotivation”.

Cooler and cooler.

So this has my quest, to discover the many ways that people answer the question “What is coworking?” What kind of communities create and inhabit coworking spaces, what do they do there, and why? What does the space need to be? How do you create and operate a coworking space? How well do they work?

What is the “coworking movement”, and how does it fit with other “movements” such as open source, social enterprises, and so on?

Most fun of all, what kinds of spaces exist? How are they similar, how are they distinct?

Read the whole article here.

 

 

What is Coworking?