Expert Podcasting Practices For Dummies Review

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(More customer reviews)Many different topics are covered; this book gives a good flavor to what's needed to launch a podcast. The value of this book is increased by the audio, video, and information files provided on the DVD. Topics like "adding a blog to your podcast" included here have been skipped by most podcasting books.
Another big plus: the authors aren't afraid to make specific equipment recommendations, and they also recommend lower-end gear for beginners. On the topic of USB Microphones, the authors mentioned the Rode Podcaster microphone. They didn't mention the huge advantage of this mic: it has a headphone jack built-in to the microphone so you can hear yourself without any latency. As the authors note, this is a problem for all other USB microphones. I've picked up one of these wonderful microphones for my own podcasting.
With the bonus material on the DVD, you get a sense of the fun of podcasting.

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Ideas into Words: Mastering the Craft of Science Writing Review

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(More customer reviews)The author provides many examples of great scientific writing. Such writing involves translating difficult-to-understand abstractions into concepts easy to understand and related to our current knowledge.
Her writing was a delight to read.
"As the article proceeds, it is as if the selected facts are coated in honey, so that they slide down easy, one pill at a time. No reader will go away thinking, Boy was that turgid, I had to learn a new word just about every paragraph - even though she did."
The book is organized into the following chapters:
1 A Matter of Attitude
2 Finding Stories
3 Finding Out: Research and the Interview
4 Writing: Getting Started adn theSTructure
5 Writing: The Nitty Gritty
6 Refining Your Draft
7 When You're Feeling Stuck
What I particularly liked:
+ her ability to use extended similes, metaphors
+ things that make scientific writing different
+ watch out for scientific mavericks
+ how to find scientific story ideas (excellent)
+ don't confuse a topic with a story idea
+ all of her material on interviewing (excellent, particularly the questions to ask)
+ focusing on the most likely reader, but also the other ones
+ her method of writing was unique (lack of exploratory free-writing, don't spill the beans on your story before you write)
+ her recommended use of organic shapes for your writing (excellent)
+ "build the picture before you supply the name" (how to define technical terms)
+ some great tips on putting on a fresh set of eyes before you start to revise and then edit.
+ re-organizing the paragraphs using their "gists"
+ "... in a term paper you tell. In a professional writing, you show."
I highly recommend this book for anyone who writes, but particularly for anyone who wants to write for the scientific or technical markets.
John Dunbar

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The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (Borzoi Books) Review

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(More customer reviews)Warning: This is not light reading. The book is well-written but is not designed as entertainment. If, however, you are concerned about the Internet and potentially where it might go in the near future, or more specifically, how it might wind up controlled, this book will be an interesting and informative read. Important too because communication and information dissemination are vital to the freedom of us all.
Columbia University Professor Tim Wu takes us on an in-depth tour of the history of the communication empires of telephone, radio, television, and now the Internet. Wu's analyses and conclusions are both brilliant as well as at times somewhat surprising. Every page gives evidence of Wu's thorough research, careful thinking and insights that went into the writing of this fine work.
The internet has become part of the lives of almost everyone, with its freeing and empowering presence; in fact in important ways it has become indispensable. A not-too-surprising worry might be that the federal government may someday try to control it, not so overwhelmingly as does the government of China of course, but the possibility is there.
What Wu so sagatiously points out is that that threat of control could just as easily, or actually more easily, come from the private sector, because in fact the existence of the internet and its smooth functioning are dependent, not on the government, but private enterprise. A different kind of monopoly looms ahead of us as a distinct danger, and this present information age presents new policy and regulation challenges.
One hopes that the right government officials at the federal level take heed to this awesomely researched book.
If you would like to understand more accurately recent decades as well as the present time the huge corporations that have in the past but also could one of these days control the ways and means of communication, by all means give this worthy work a read.
Highly recommended.


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