I’ve been reading Instapundit for about three years now. As one of the first bloggers Glenn Reynolds enjoys a huge readership. Recently he has been averaging 200,000 hits a day. He maintains his readership by providing a great variety of fascinating links. My wife and I have been blogging for a year and a half. I wonder how he is able to keep up the pace.
In addition to blogging on Instapundit Glen is also a Law Professor and a columnist. He writes for TCS Daily: Technology – Commerce – Society. His book An Army of Davids is a repacking of his columns.
The full title of the book is: “An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths.” The first half of the book is focused on the idea that technology can give great power to individuals. Glenn says that over the last couple hundred years production was concentrated in big businesses. Huge plants gave big businesses a compeditive advange over smaller companies. The same thing happened with governments. It took a lot of capital to build big armies and navies. And the same pattern happened with the media. Newspapers and television companies grew bigger and bigger.
But over the last couple decades the trend has changed. The reason is technology has gotten much cheaper. This allows individuals to challenge big organizations. Many of the successful technology startups have been done on a shoestring by a few individuals. Likewise blogging shows that individuals, like Glenn Reynolds, have more influence that many small and midsize town newspapers.
He has a brief interlude of a couple pages where he gives advice on how to be a better blogger. These couple pages are very worth reading. If the interaction of society and technology is not your bag, track this book down at a library just to read pages 115 to 119.
The second half of the book is a hodgepodge of ideas. Glenn writes about the potential of nanotechnology, what may happen as people live even longer, the future of space, and the coming singularity.
I enjoyed this book. It is well written and interesting. The basic premise that technology gives power to individuals and allows them to have great influence is the classic story of David v. Goliath. Glenn’s claim is that an “Army of Davids” is challenging the established Goliaths. I agree with Glenn that the future will be interesting.
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Technorati tags: technology, Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit, blogging, David, Goliath
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