the Black Swan

Look what I found! By accident no less... A couple weeks ago I had paid for an advertisement on BlogAds.com and after having it up for a week I was actually rather disappointed with the result. I'd paid about $2.85 per click though to woohooligan.com, and of course, none of those clickthroughs converted. OUCH!

However as I logged on blogads.com to check my stats, I noticed something in the sidebar that cought my attention and discovered that the site also is the home of the founder Henry Copeland's blog. The other blog entries I read weren't terribly useful (interesting though they were), but I scrolled down and found his bio in one of the entries.

In his bio, another link caught my attention, amongst a list of his favorite books, labelled Fooled by Randomness. And here I discover that the Black Swan, a book I've been interested in reading (but hadn't yet ordered) is actually the #1 best selling nonfiction book on Amazon.com published in 2007. So how did I discover it? Amazon suggested it when I ordered some other books...

Here's the crux. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of the Black Swan just happens to be saying much the same things I've been saying recently... It all goes back to the outsider effect -- how it is that the best inventions are created by people who work outside of the industries they revolutionize precisely because they are free to experiment with techniques and ideas that the industry prescribes as blasphemous. The difference is he's not talking specifically about software, he's talking about everything.

It's some food for thought, in light of my comments in Iron Man and about the 80% failure rate in The Devil Went Down to Silicon Valley.

Compare those articles to Taleb's article in Forbes magazine.

p.s. Henry Copeland's Bio is interesting too.