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“WHAT IS YOUR GOOGLE STRATEGY FOR YOUR NEW BOOK?”

As somebody with a couple of books gestating in various stages in my head, on paper and in my computer(s), I found this post by Dr. David Friedman ( himself an author of academic political economy and fiction) at Ideas to be intriguing – leveraging Lulu.com and Google as a publishing revolution in favor of creators. An excerpt:

“….There remains the third function. To judge, at least, by horrified accounts of the contents of editorial slush piles, enormously more books are written than are worth reading. While publishers do an imperfect job of searching out the needle of literature in the haystack of slush—imperfect in both directions—they do a much better job than a reader faced with millions of webbed texts could do for himself. In order to eliminate publishers, we need an alternative filter, ideally a better one.

I therefor propose that Google ought to undertake the project of replacing publishers. To do so it needs to create mechanisms by which readers can find, not pages of information, but books—the particular books those readers will want to read, buried in an enormously larger number of webbed books that those readers will not want to read. I leave the details of the project to Google’s very talented employees “

The best way to evaluate and leverage platforms like this proposal by Friedman is really not my field. Critt, or Dave Davison or John Robb or Steve DeAngelis all might have something pertinent to add here that I cannot. Until then, my eyebrows are raised.

LET IT SNOW, LET IT SNOW, LET IT SNOW

The Chicago area is set to get six to twelve inches of snow and I am comfortably ensconced at home. Even two of my private sector friends called excitedly this morning ( regrettably, waking me up) that they too were having a ” snow day” as well.

Perhaps, a snowman is in order with the children later today.

UPDATE:

Dave is remarking on the snow too.

WILSONIANISM WITHOUT APOLOGY

Here’s something interesting I just read; and it is bound to fluster some of my more ideological readers, be they right or left.

Nonpartisan, the guiding spirit at Progressive Historians, which Cliopatria’s avuncular Dr. Ralph Luker called ” A sort of Daily Kos for the historical set” has posted a ringing defense of Woodrow Wilson and Wilsonianism from a progressive perspective:

“Woodrow Wilson to historians: Stop lying about my record! “

“That’s it. I’m sick and tired of people unfairly maligning Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policy. I’m tired of people like John Lewis Gaddis calling Wilson’s foreign policy “Fukuyama plus force.” (That’s the same Francis Fukuyama, if you didn’t know, who declared American hegemony the beneficent and permanent result of “The End of History.) And I’m particularly fed up with people like Tufts professor Tony Smith calling Bush’s imperialism Wilsonian:

When Wilson wanted to bring America into the League of Nations in 1919, it was the paleocons like Henry Cabot Lodge who brought down the idea and the President. Sure, nutty isolationists like Hiram Johnson and William Borah were its most vocal critics; but it was Lodge and his confreres who shot down the League of Nations, the bilateral security treaty with France, and the International Criminal Court — all because of a desire for worldwide American hegemony — and then lamely signed a no-more-war treaty with France (yeah, that big enemy of ours) nine years later.”

Read Nonpartisan’s post in full.

Provocative and debatable.

Theodore Roosevelt, of whom I am a qualified admirer, was a nationalist and at times an imperialist but he would not have been a neoconservative, despite Bill Kristol’s affinity for “national greatness conservatism”. T.R. was very much a progressive at home, at times moreso than was Wilson, particularly on racial questions, an issue that carried over into foreign affairs with Japan and China. While Roosevelt was a gung-ho militarist, he strived to prevent a general war from breaking out amongst the great powers in his diplomatic efforts and in doing so, tilted against the interests of autocratic states like Imperial Germany and Tsarist Russia. States, T.R. correctly perceived as potential threatening to peace and unadmirable in their political systems. Roosevelt was, far and away, a more effective diplomat than was Wilson, though Wilson’s visionary ideas of national self-determination, democracy promotion and a League of Nations made the greater longitudinal impact on the world stage.

Given Wilson’s record in Mexico, I find the idea of Wilson chumming up to Hugo Chavez a stretch. If anything, it would be Chavez and Pancho Villa who would be knocking back tequilas together if the latter were alive today. On the other hand, I think Nonpartisan is right on Wilson’s motivations regarding democracy and America’s role in world affairs. Wilson was an intellectual and approached the world through a prism of abstractions.

While I understand Nonpartisan’s partisan motivation in casting out the neocons as apostates in the Wilsonian Church, and his description fits for some of them, it doesn’t fit for all of them. For those neoconservatives for whom the intent to plant democracy in Iraq was sincere, that idea is firmly in the Wisonian tradition of teaching South American republics to ” elect a few good men”.

Reader thoughts ?