Antonino Neri Neri itibaren Novosadkovskiy, Rostovskaya oblast', Rusland, 346682 itibaren Novosadkovskiy, Rostovskaya oblast', Rusland, 346682

I am, I admit, more than a little embarrassed to have read this book. Am I a snob or not? Even though the cheddar is sharp in this one, it's not too obnoxious. I liked it well enough.

When an author is all gung-ho over a single idea and promotes it as the answer to everything, my spidey sense tingles and says, “Take this guy with a grain of salt.” That happened on the very first page of this book, and I almost gave up after one chapter, but I pressed on, hoping to learn marketing secrets for the firm I work for. I didn’t. The thesis of the book is that in this data-flooded Internet age, even more valuable than the Google algorithm are human curators who can tell the difference between signal and noise. Goodreads is a perfect example of a curation site. While we’re all rating and reviewing everything we read, we’ve collectively built what I’ve described as a human card catalogue. But just because I agree with the book’s thesis doesn’t mean that I think it merited 250 pages of repetition. With a book I like, I can whip through 250 pages in a couple of days. This book took me three weeks. The business origin stories kept me going: the beginnings of Huffington Post, Twitter’s big splash at South by Southwest, even how cable television got started in a mountainous Pennsylvania mining town. I love origin stories. But as for the book itself, I’d say skip it and read something by Clay Shirky.

One of the best stories that I've read in a long while.

I loved reading the background stories to Ender's Parents, but was sad when their story stopped so abruptly. They barely have one good day together, and it's like Paul Harvey steps in with his famous tag line, "and now you know the rest of the story". I wanted more, and felt robbed. Then the story quickly jumps (no transition) to a portion that seemed to have come straight out of Ender's Game, only there were discrepancies. There's a discrepancy with Graff's character and his age(within this book, not even considering the other stories), and also with who was in his "jeesh" for the final battle. The next story that's told is of Jane's existence. I enjoyed readying the background story for her and Ender, but when finished I simply wanted more. The stories were well written, but had I not been familiar with the Ender Universe, I wouldn't have had the slightest idea what was going on at the start of the short story Ender's Game in the book. I expected First Meetings to be a fun stand alone story about Ender's parents, somehow fitting in an introduction to Jane. Instead, I read about 70 really fun pages of the parents, then was jumped into Ender's Game for a bit, and then brought into Jane's world for the last part. This book should've been focused on Ender's brilliant parents and their journey to love and parenthood. I would've loved reading about them as young parents of overly bright kids. Jane's story should've been another seperate tale. There's so much depth to that character, 70 or so pages couldn't do her justice.