Look, mistakes!

I’m struck by the honesty of this account of theory versus practice or rather ‘how we thought we should do things’ and ‘what happened when we tried to do it the right way’. It is quite rare to encounter such frankness and I hope that makes the lessons imparted – ‘what you should do instead’ – go in deeper. The text is a section from Social By Social, a collaboratively-authored book/site intended to help relatively responsible and technologically conservative people to understand how to make effective use of online collaboration tools and social media.

I have worked on projects with two of the authors; on that basis, and having skimmed through this section, and brushed against some others, I’d say the whole work is likely to be valuable for its audience.

But, perhaps because being thought of as a book, it also appears to be about five times longer than the market will bear: without irony, I hope there is a ‘Dummies’ version out soon.