Malcolm Gladwell, author Blink and The Tipping Point, (two of my favorite books that I read last year,) has started blogging over at http://gladwell.typepad.com.
This only makes sense, since Gladwell has long been providing bloggers, especially business bloggers, with fodder for their posts.
What I love about Gladwell (and Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner and Seth Godin) is how he makes you reflect on your own world view. You won’t always agree with these guys, but it does cause you to examine your own preconceptions that you might be holding onto out of sheer laziness.
BTW, I had never visited Gladwell’s home page before today, but I’m pretty sure he stole the idea from us.
Welcome to the blogosphere, Malcolm. Glad to hear your voice in the first person!
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Pingback by Malcolm Gladwell Starts Blog at Signal Fire Strategies Blog — March 7, 2006 @ 9:35 am
Good catch Rich. For anyone in the Boston area, Malcolm is doing the keynote presentation for the Pubcon.com conference in April. I’ll be speaking on online public relations so it will be fun to meet him.
Comment by Lee Odden — March 7, 2006 @ 10:26 am
PR MACHINE: It seems lately there is an intense interest by the public in consuming media that deals with different ways of decision-making and questioning old patterns of thought. From identifying the patterns of how fads and trends develop in “The Tipping Point” via groupthink to identifying how people make split personal decisions in Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink”. We’ve noticed the co-branding of your books with Malcolm Gladwell and if all three of these books (“The Tipping Point,” “Blink,” and “Freakonomics”) are current best-selling business books, what does this tell us about Americans and business today? What is it that you three see?
DUBNER: Malcolm Gladwell’s books “The Tipping Point” and “Blink” and our book “Freakonomics” are all similar books in the sense that we try to write stories that are interesting, engaging, timely, useful and true.
PR MACHINE: What is it about “Blink,” “The Tipping Point,” and “Freakonomics” that keeps them on the top of the best-seller business lists? Is it that you have developed content people want to read about? Good and inventive marketing? A mixture of both?
DUBNER: I think we write what people want to read about. We’ve worked hard at that. But, we have been extraordinarily lucky. Again, we had a prominent first book review in the Wall Street Journal, which put us over the top (first book reviews are so important).
PR MACHINE: In what ways does “Freakonomics” differ from Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point” and “Blink,” though?
DUBNER: Malcolm Gladwell’s books and “Freakonomics” are similar in some ways. But, we differ a lot as well. In “The Tipping Point” and “Blink” Malcolm Gladwell corrals stories to illuminate his ideas, while we with “Freakonomics” take case studies and draw our stories from the case study data. We, unlike Malcolm Gladwell, have no initial central premise. “Freakonomics” has no direction-building story around its research idea. Instead, the data we are sharing “is what it is.”
http://prmachine.blogspot.com/2005/09/freakonomics-blog-pr-machine-interview.html
Comment by Robb Hecht — March 20, 2006 @ 7:54 am