Jaron Lanier, a Silicon Valley visionary since the 1980s, was among the first to predict the revolutionary changes the World Wide Web would bring to commerce and culture. Now, in his first book, written more than two decades after the web was created, Lanier offers this provocative and cautionary look at the way it is transforming our lives for better and for worse.
The current design and function of the web have become so familiar that it is easy to forget that they grew out of programming decisions made decades ago. The web’s first designers made crucial choices (such as making one’s presence anonymous) that have had enormous—and often unintended—consequences. What’s more, these designs quickly became “locked in,” a permanent part of the web’s very structure.
Lanier discusses the technical and cultural problems that can grow out of poorly considered digital design and warns that our financial markets and sites like Wikipedia, Facebook, and Twitter are elevating the “wisdom” of mobs and computer algorithms over the intelligence and judgment of individuals.
Lanier also shows:
How 1960s antigovernment paranoia influenced the design of the online world and enabled trolling and trivialization in online discourse
How file sharing is killing the artistic middle class;
How a belief in a technological “rapture” motivates some of the most influential technologists
Why a new humanistic technology is necessary.

Controversial and fascinating, You Are Not a Gadget is a deeply felt defense of the individual from an author uniquely qualified to comment on the way technology interacts with our culture.

Want to tap the power behind search rankings, product recommendations, social bookmarking, and online matchmaking? This fascinating book demonstrates how you can build Web 2.0 applications to mine the enormous amount of data created by people on the Internet. With the sophisticated algorithms in this book, you can write smart programs to access interesting datasets from other web sites, collect data from users of your own applications, and analyze and understand the data once you've found it. Programming Collective Intelligence takes you into the world of machine learning and statistics, and explains how to draw conclusions about user experience, marketing, personal tastes, and human behavior in general -- all from information that you and others collect every day. Each algorithm is described clearly and concisely with code that can immediately be used on your web site, blog, Wiki, or specialized application. This book explains: * Collaborative filtering techniques that enable online retailers to recommend products or media * Methods of clustering to detect groups of similar items in a large dataset * Search engine features -- crawlers, indexers, query engines, and the PageRank algorithm * Optimization algorithms that search millions of possible solutions to a problem and choose the best one * Bayesian filtering, used in spam filters for classifying documents based on word types and other features * Using decision trees not only to make predictions, but to model the way decisions are made * Predicting numerical values rather than classifications to build price models * Support vector machines to match people in online dating sites * Non-negative matrix factorization to find the independent features in a dataset * Evolving intelligence for problem solving -- how a computer develops its skill by improving its own code the more it plays a game Each chapter includes exercises for extending the algorithms to make them more powerful. Go beyond simple database-backed applications and put the wealth of Internet data to work for you. "Bravo! I cannot think of a better way for a developer to first learn these algorithms and methods, nor can I think of a better way for me (an old AI dog) to reinvigorate my knowledge of the details." -- Dan Russell, Google "Toby's book does a great job of breaking down the complex subject matter of machine-learning algorithms into practical, easy-to-understand examples that can be directly applied to analysis of social interaction across the Web today. If I had this book two years ago, it would have saved precious time going down some fruitless paths." -- Tim Wolters, CTO, Collective Intellect

对于普遍缺乏编程经验的Web设计师来说，语义标记和CSS无疑是实现自由设计的障碍。如果没有高效工作流的支持，快节奏的工作环境和较高的客户要求都将意味着巨大的压力和挑战。
国际著名Web设计师Andy Clarke对这种情况有着切身的体会。在本书中，Andy将与您分享他的“超越CSS”方法，引导读者从设计的角度来使用CSS，来创建富有艺术性并且可用、易用的站点。
在这本开创性的著作中，作者通过可视化的范例来展示标记和CSS的创造性，带领您掌握实现创意的设计方法。您将学会：
如何使用新的工作流来创建对所有团队成员——特别是，包括设计师在内——都非常好用的原型；
有效地使用网格；
设计标记的视觉效果；
如何把握优秀设计过程的每一个阶段——从使用最新的浏览器到在团队协作中高效地运用CSS3，等等。
本书系统、深入地阐释了网站的设计与实现，帮助读者从设计的角度来使用CSS以达到完美的效果。作者通过使用标记和CSS的形象的创造性示例，帮助读者掌握实现创意设计的方法。读者将学会如何使用新的设计流程，创建对包括设计师在内的所有团队成员都很好用的原型，有效地使用网格，设计标记的视觉效果，并了解优秀设计过程的每一个阶段——从使用最新的浏览器到在团队协作中高效地应用CSS3。.
本书适合Web设计师和开发人员研读，对那些客户要求高、工作节奏快的设计师有着尤其重要的指导作用。本书也适合有一定基础的Web设计爱好者阅读。

马尔科姆·格拉德威尔以社会上突如其来的流行风潮研究为切入点，从一个全新的角度探索了控制科学和营销模式。他认为，思想、行为、信息以及产品常常会像传染病爆发一样，迅速传播蔓延。正如一个病人就能引起一场全城流感；如果个别工作人员对顾客大打出手，或几位涂鸦爱好者管不住自己，也能在地铁里掀起一场犯罪浪潮；一位满意而归的顾客还能让新开张的餐馆座无虚席。这些现象均属“社会流行潮”，它爆发的那一刻，即达到临界水平的那一刻，就是一个引爆点。
格拉德威尔走访了宗教团体、成功的高科技公司以及全球最优秀的推销员，他在书中分析了几种有利于开创流行风潮的性格特征，剖析了种种极具感染力的事件，如各种风尚、吸烟现象、儿童电视、商业邮寄广告等，并阐明其背后的导火索。通过大量深具说明力的研究，揭示出发起流行潮并保持其势头的原则和方法。

Amateur hour has arrived, and the audience is running the show
In a hard-hitting and provocative polemic, Silicon Valley insider and pundit Andrew Keen exposes the grave consequences of today’s new participatory Web 2.0 and reveals how it threatens our values, economy, and ultimately the very innovation and creativity that forms the fabric of American achievement.
Our most valued cultural institutions, Keen warns—our professional newspapers, magazines, music, and movies—are being overtaken by an avalanche of amateur, user-generated free content. Advertising revenue is being siphoned off by free classified ads on sites like Craigslist; television networks are under attack from free user-generated programming on YouTube and the like; file-sharing and digital piracy have devastated the multibillion-dollar music business and threaten to undermine our movie industry. Worse, Keen claims, our “cut-and-paste” online culture—in which intellectual property is freely swapped, downloaded, remashed, and aggregated—threatens over 200 years of copyright protection and intellectual property rights, robbing artists, authors, journalists, musicians, editors, and producers of the fruits of their creative labors.
In today’s self-broadcasting culture, where amateurism is celebrated and anyone with an opinion, however ill-informed, can publish a blog, post a video on YouTube, or change an entry on Wikipedia, the distinction between trained expert and uninformed amateur becomes dangerously blurred. When anonymous bloggers and videographers, unconstrained by professional standards or editorial filters, can alter the public debate and manipulate public opinion, truth becomes a commodity to be bought, sold, packaged, and reinvented.
The very anonymity that the Web 2.0 offers calls into question the reliability of the information we receive and creates an environment in which sexual predators and identity thieves can roam free. While no Luddite—Keen pioneered several Internet startups himself—he urges us to consider the consequences of blindly supporting a culture that endorses plagiarism and piracy and that fundamentally weakens traditional media and creative institutions.
Offering concrete solutions on how we can reign in the free-wheeling, narcissistic atmosphere that pervades the Web, THE CULT OF THE AMATEUR is a wake-up call to each and every one of us.</p>

《网民的狂欢:关于互联网弊端的反思》内容简介：在Web2.0的世界中，我们的世界观、我们的文化正在遭遇大批“业余者”的攻击。网络“剪贴文化”窃取了学者、艺术家、编辑、制片人辛勤创作的成果。网络博主的个人意见成为引领大众的舆论指标，YouTube上的自制视频取代了电视网，数字盗版压垮了音乐产业……面对业余玩票凌驾专业考虑、智力成果在网络上免费下载，并将其视为理所当然的现象，该如何重建信息的专业性和版权保护系统？作者并不反对科技，而是指出误用科技将对人类价值观、经济与创造力造成严重伤害。尤其是当一知半解的业余者与受过训练的专家变得模糊难辨，让人开始质疑信息的可信度之际，真相将成为可买卖与包装的商品！书中简洁有力的论述提醒众人：勿沉醉于民主理想，却扼杀了专业主流媒体的存在意义。

书中阐述，商业和文化的未来不在于传统需求曲线上那个代表“畅销商品”（hits）的头部； 而是那条代表“冷门商品”（misses）经常为人遗忘的长尾。 举例来说， 一家大型书店通常可摆放10万本书，但亚马逊网络书店的图书销售额中，有四分之一来自排名10万以后的书籍。这些“冷门”书籍的销售比例正以高速成长，预估未来可占整体书市的一半。
这意味着消费者在面对无限的选择时，真正想要的东西、和想要取得的渠道都出现了重大的变化，一套崭新的商业模式也跟着崛起。
传统的市场曲线是符合80/20铁律的，为了抢夺那带来80% 利润的畅销品市场，我们厮杀得天昏地暗，但是我们所谓的热门商品正越来越名不副实，比如说黄金电视节目的收视率几十年来一直在萎缩，若放在1970年，现在的一档最佳节目恐怕连前10名之列都难以进入。简言之，尽管我们仍然对大热门着迷，但它们的经济力量已经今非昔比。那么，那些反复无常的消费者们已经转向了什么地方？答案并非唯一。他们散向了四面八方，因为市场已经分化成了无数不同的领域。互联网的出现改变了这种局面，使得99%的商品都有机会进行销售，市场曲线中那条长长的尾部（所谓的利基产品）也咸鱼翻身，成为我们可以寄予厚望的新的利润增长点。

这本书的作者是世界著名的网站设计师，书中的范例来自网站设计领域最著名的网站——CSS Zen Garden（CSS禅意花园）。全书分为两个主要部分。第1章为第一部分，讨论网站“CSS禅意花同”及其最基本的主题，包含正确的标记结构和灵活性规划等。第二部分包括6章，占据了书中的大部分篇幅。
每章剖析“CSS禅意花园”收录的6件设计作品，这些作品围绕一个主要的设计概念展开，如文字的使用等。通过探索36件设计作品面临的挑战和解决的问题，读者将洞悉主要的Web设计原则以及它们运用的CSS布局技巧，理解CSS设计的精髓，恰当地处理图形和字体来创建界面优美、性能优良且具有强大生命力的网站。