sacha chua :: living an awesome life

Dan Pink

Posted on September 30th, 2008 by Sacha Chua

Dan Pink gave a presentation on Johnny Bunko: The Medium and The Message. There’s plenty to write about, but let me jot down a few notes before I go to bed. Here are some snippets:

“If it didn’t exist today, would you invent it?”

That’s the question he asked himself before he started working on the Johnny Bunko book. He realized that tactical, ever-changing information was much better on the Internet than in books. If books didn’t exist and you wanted to invent them today, it would be difficult to get investors interested.

That made me think of the Emacs book I’m working on. The natural home for this information isn’t a printed book, because the Emacs modules I’m writing about are a fast-moving target. (Talk about fast-moving: the parts about Org are already obsolete because Carsten’s merged my ideas into the main code, and I haven’t even finished technical review yet!) The natural home for this information is in a wiki where everyone can read and contribute for free. The Emacs Wiki (http://www.emacswiki.org), to be precise. Hmm. Worth thinking about.

“This book is meant to start a conversation.”

He told us about Bunko Breakfasts and how other people get together to talk about the ideas in the book. What would be a good way to do that? I could bring it up over lunch, or have a lunch and learn session for our new hire network. I could blog about my thoughts here, comment on Dan Pink’s blog, and link to other people blogging about the same topic. I’ll tag my posts as “career”, so they’ll be easy to find again.

More tomorrow: “There is no plan.”

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