About this time last year I went on a little day-trip to Birmingham with my friend Steven Johnson. It was grey and miserable and we had to go and buy umbrellas from Boots to keep dry. It was a fantastic day though.

We were on the trail of Joseph Priestly tracking down the places he hung out for Steven’s book The Invention of Air which is out today in the UK and is very, very good. I think you’ll hear quite a lot about it next week on the radio and in the papers and so on. Steven is also doing a number of talks including this one at Nesta on Monday.

The thing that got me was Steven’s description of Priestly as a relentless optimist. And when you look at all the things he did you can’t help but be impressed. There’s something about him that just makes you smile.

I picked up a copy of this in a bookshop when I was in the US and absolutely love it. Great for kids of all ages.

“Howtoons: The Possibilities Are Endless” (Saul Griffith, Joost Bonsen)

If you want a good insight into what being a first time entrepreneur is like, Nassim Taleb gets it spot on in this short passage from his book The Black Swan (the first book I’ve read in months by the way - when I was at Demos I read about one non-fiction book cover-to-cover per week):

“Many people labor in life under the impression that they are doing something right, yet they may not show solid results for a long time. They need a capacity for continually adjourned gratification to survive a steady diet of peer cruelty without becoming demoralized. They look like idiots to their cousins, they look like idiots to their peers, they need courage to continue. No confirmation comes to them, no validation, no fawning students, No Nobel, no Scnobel. “How was your year?” brings them a small but containable spasm of pain deep inside, since almost all of their years will seem wasted to someone looking at their life from the outside. Then bang, the lumpy event comes that brings the great vindication. Or it may never come.”

It’s been the strangest roller-coaster of a year for me. The emotional ups and downs have been more extreme than anything I’ve ever experienced before. I’ve bounced out of investor meetings, laughed myself silly with the team, surprised myself at how angry I can get and, on one occasion, found myself crying uncontrollably in a pub. I’ve been lucky and had an amazing amount of support from my co-founders, family and friends. I don’t know how people who don’t have that support manage it.

And I still can’t say whether it’s going to work or not. On paper - like any other start-up - the chances of us succeeding are tiny. We’re also trying to do something ridiculously ambitious that nobody has ever tried before. But somehow, I know deep down that we’re going to succeed. Don’t ask me how - I just know.

The funny thing is that now I’ve started, I can’t imagine doing anything else.

Jon Ronson had a great little piece in the Guardian Weekend yesterday that illustrates in just a few hundred words what’s changed and stayed the same about journalism in the last couple of decades.

Them is one of my favourite non-fiction books - way ahead of its time in terms of the characters Jon chose to follow. He was writing about Omar Bakri Muhammad well before anybody else was looking at radicalisation of Islam in the UK. It’s also one of the funniest books I’ve ever read.

There’s no escaping the similarities between the lonelygirl15 saga and the plot of William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition. From the Washington Post:

“The plot [of Pattern Recognition] centers on mysterious bits of video posted anonymously on the Internet. The shadowy black-and-white videos, called “the footage,” appear to feature a pair of lovers and hint deliciously at a larger, magnetically compelling story. The footage inspires a cultish following on the Web, including chat rooms, parodies and investigations — just like those created around lonelygirl15 — and the novel’s hero is dispatched by an advertising wizard to track down the filmmakers so the phenomenon can be monetized.”

The Wikipedians have done an excellent job of telling the unfolding story of lonelygirl15. It seems to have come to an end for now with a series of public admissions that it was staged, although the scene is set for it to develop more into an ARG.

Gibson blogs chaotically and confusingly, but he’s noticed the Post’s piece likening lonelygirl15 to his book.

I had a few thoughts on Pattern Recognition the first time around, when I realised the ideas in the book wouldn’t go away.

I have to admit lonelygirl15 thing has creeped me out a bit. It made me realise how manipulative compelling storytelling can be in a networked environment. Perhaps it’s because as Gibson himself has said, “Emergent technology is, by its very nature, out of control, and leads to unpredictable outcomes.”

I think we’re just seeing the beginnings of a new form of art and/or business.

I’ve got a review of Yochai Benkler’s book The Wealth of Networks in todays Financial Times Magazine. Since the FT website doesn’t let you comment, I’d be interested to know what other people who’ve read it think.

Here’s an excerpt from the piece:

“There is, of course, something perverse about the fact that perhaps the best work yet about the fast-moving, enthusiast-driven internet has taken an academic 10 years to write and is printed on 528 pages of dead tree. But perhaps the interesting social production happens post-publication. The book is released under a Creative Commons licence so you can download it free from his website (www.benkler.org) and Benkler has given readers all manner of collaborative tools to discuss the book and take the ideas forward. You’ll want a hard copy to thumb through, though. This is an important book.”

The full review is here.