Making Books With The Kids

Coming off of the hits with our world famous YouTube channel, my kids and I decided to try our hands at making books over the weekend. First off, they a really easy to do. Second, it get's kids thinking more creatively about what they want to write about. My daughter wrote a wonderful story about a magic flower (which of course she is shopping for a publisher now) and my son created a great picture book about a ninja warrior. The project is super simple, costs close to nothing (or maybe nothing if you have books laying around you don't mind destroying) and can be done on a rainy weekend afternoon. See for yourself.
Book Making for Kids! - More DIY How To Projects PS - it also gave me a chance to build another Instructable and play with some of their new social tools. Winner all around!
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Tagged Children Do it yourself Picture book Projects Publications Publishing Shopping books youtube

Starfish and the Spider - Book Review

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I recently finished reading The Starfish and The Spider, an excellent read focused on the idea of building decentralized organizations. A decentralized organization is one that gets started by a founder who lays out a rough framework of the ideals and goals of the group and then gets out of the way in order to let it prosper.  Specific examples of these decentralized organizations include AA, Wikipedia, eBay and Toyota.  The message is simple, be a catalyst for an idea and get out of the way. The premise of the title is that if you cut off the head of a spider, it dies.  If you cut off the leg of a starfish, it regenerates.  The classic ‘hit by a bus’ scenario.  The goal is to make your company, group, organization, team whatever, more like the starfish so that if the leader leaves (or hit by a bus) the group doesn’t fall apart, but can still thrive. Starfish and the Spider offers a fascinating walk through history highlighting examples of centralized groups that, eventually fell (GM, the Aztecs) and those that were decentralized that have thrived (Apaches, eMule, suffragette movement).  All of which were started with a basic idea led by a catalyst, who drove the point at any opportunity, and eventually thrived in the face of not having a leader in the traditional sense. Of course, there are tradeoffs associated with being decentralized, the primary being revenue.  Emule, for example, is a P2P file sharing service that was a result of the music industry putting, first Napster, then Kazaa, out of business or in bad shape.  Emule has no defined owner, manger or leader, yet the service prospers based on the idea of the drive of being open sourced so that anyone can add to it.  As a result, emule has no revenue. The book recommends building hybrid organizations such as eBay, which have a leader providing guidance to the company, but also has a decentralized community that helps the company thrive.  Without the buyer / seller rating system, eBay would simply be another commerce site, however, by letting the users police themselves, eBay has built a business that has one of the strongest communities out there and has become the de facto standard for online auctions. The book itself is a really simple read, especially if you are interested in social media and open organizations.  Check it out.
Tagged Aztecs Books & Blogs GM Movies Music Television books craigslist decentralization ebay emule kazaa p2p starfish and the spider
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