I’ve put together a list of the best “big picture” business books I’ve read in the past years to demonstrate Wajapi tags and to illustrate a nifty feature I call javascript widgets (for more on js widgets, see below).

The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric Raymond: The best analysis I’ve read on the impact of open source on business models and software, written by uber geek, open source promoter and gun enthusiast(!) E. Raymond.

The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman or as I call it “globalization happened, get over it”. Another interesting read for those interested in open source and how it affects business.

The Pirate’s Dilemma by Matt Mason: Why are you reading Lawrence Lessig when you could be reading Matt Mason? Mason was a pirate radio and club DJ in London, and later became founding Editor-in-Chief of the magazine RWD. Who cares if he thinks Linux is a corporation? Read this book!

The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb – the core message of this book is “shit happens, wear a helmet” and it explains why financial risk models don’t work, why you should go to networking events and how the movie business is similar to the VC industry.

The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen: Of all the five books this is the most academic and best researched. Clayton’s insight into disruptive technologies has far reaching implications for any business.

We’ve updated Wajapi so that registered users can change the Amazon locale Wajapi uses to search. All Amazon supported locales have been added. These are:

• Amazon.com
• Amazon.co.uk
• Amazon.fr (new)
• Amazon.de (new)
• Amazon.ca (new)
• Amazon.co.jp (new)

We don’t have any users coming in from as far east as Japan yet, but at least now they can! Click on the screenshot above to see search results for “Harry Potter” in Japanese.

To get search results in Japanese, register on the site and pick amazon.co.jp as your “amazon region”.

I’ve also added the German version of Harry’s book 7, Harry Potter und die Heiligtümer des Todes to my own booklist on Wajapi, as you can see on the sidebar to the right.

Whether it’s Thomas Friedman, who, it seems, cannot go a whole week without inventing a new fruit-based metaphor explaining everything about the entire modern world, all based on some random jibberish he misunderstood from a taxi driver in Kuala Lumpur, or Malcolm Gladwell with his weak theories on tipping points, crazy incorrect theories on first impressions, or utterly lunatic theories on experts, it all becomes insanely popular simply because the stories are fun and interesting and everybody wants to hear a good story. Spare me.

“Fruit-based metaphor.” I like that.

While we’re on the subject of pseudo-science, we might as well cover the “pedagogic graph”. The pedagogic graph is used to illustrate an idea, rather than display any actual data. A great example is the Laffer curve, used to illustrate how lowering taxes actually increases tax revenue. It doesn’t illustrate any empirical evidence of course, it’s just a great curve.

A close relative to the pedagogic, non-empirical graph is the Pointless Diagram. I’ll leave that to the excellent Indexed blog:

The number one secret of the great blogs. Every one of them leads a tribe.

This reminds me of the excellent “22 Immutable Laws of Branding” by Al and Laura Reis. Their number one rule?

The power of a brand is inversely proportional to its scope

In other words: Focus.

Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful … What is likely is that the market will move higher, perhaps substantially so, well before either sentiment or the economy turns up. So if you wait for the robins, spring will be over.

Yesterday I bought his biography from Amazon, which should be an interesting read given that this is the guy who never seems to get caught up in the hubris. Apparently, the book is the first biography written with his full cooperation and collaboration.

Halting State, by Charlie Stross.

What’s clever is that the praise for the book isn’t on the back, the praise is the cover. The fact that the first quote was from William Gibson and that Eric Raymond is in the acknowledgements meant that I purchased a copy straight away. I later found out that the author is a Linux guru with a subsection of his homepage dedicated to published writings on Perl!

If a great cover, a Gibson quote and an author who uses Linux isn’t enough to sell you this book, check out Cory Doctorow’s review on Boing boing:

Blend an Iain Banks thriller with a copy of Count Zero, throw in the Tokyo Games Show and a Bourne movie (and possibly a Bourne shell) and you’ve got something approximating Halting State.