Reading about a Stanford professor who has done research demonstrating that distant reading (searching for trends within books) may be more important, and more effective than reading the actual books, themselves!   It reminds me of Marshall McLuhan’s famous saying “the medium is the message“, that has come up more than a few times, lately.

…In fact, today someone had mentioned to me, in relation to social media, that the monitoring tools are becoming more important than the data they seek to interpret.

According to the story, which first appeared at the New York Times about the sheer mass of books that multiply at ever increasing rate and are impossible to keep up with and read all the necessary content  we may want or need to…..

(I’m quoting liberally from the original New York Times article, rearranging some of the ordering of text, while keep to and amplifying the spirit contained within).

Which raises a question: What are we mortal beings supposed to do with all these books?

Answer: don’t read them.  To understand literature, Moretti argues, we must stop reading books. …..He advocates what he terms “distant reading”: understanding literature not by studying particular texts, but by aggregating and analyzing massive amounts of data.

…. Let’s say you pick up a copy of “Jude the Obscure,” become obsessed with Victorian fiction and somehow manage to make your way through all 200-odd books generally considered part of that canon. Moretti would say: So what? As many as 60,000 other novels were published in 19th-century England — to mention nothing of other times and places.

….it suggests that there are formal aspects of literature that people, unaided, cannot detect (or understanding segmentations of books by looking at overall patterns within a collection of books, and not so much reading any particular book).

Then again, maybe Distant Reading is more like Doonesbury than we think….

Also, today TechCrunch had a story on  Google+ Project: It’s Social, It’s Bold, It’s Fun, And It Looks Good — Now For The Hard Part

So far, the beta is closed and I can’t sign up, due to overcapacity, to try it out for myself, so I’ll have to take MC Siegler’s word for it about Google+.

Also Twitter for Newsrooms launched and looks like a masterful stroke for Newspapers and Reporters.  Meanwhile Monster.com launched BeKnown, a social network that runs in Facebook (a few years back. Monster regretted not buying LinkedIn when it could have).

BeKnown allows the users to create professional networks facilitated by the environment created by Monster without ever leaving Facebook. Users can download BeKnown at the Facebook apps site in one of the 19 available languages.

According to an estimate by Monster around 700 million users will be able to import their professional information to the Facebook app and set up their own professional network. Further Monster’s registered users can also import their data to the Facebook app and set up professional networks there as well.

Finishing up this post, did you know that most woman will not marry and unemployed man?

It’s harsh, but seventy-five percent of women surveyed by ForbesWoman and YourTango said they would not marry a man who was unemployed. Some marriage and relationship experts say women still look towards their husband as the main provider and won’t get hitched to someone without an income. Others claim women are being prudent and realize both partners must have a job to survive in these difficult economic times.

That’s enough for tonight and a lot to think of.