Here is the original List of What To Read Before You Die.  A highschool teacher I had put this together and here it is:

Swift – Gulliver’s Travels
Tolkein - The Lord of the Rings
Tolstoy - War and Peace
Cervantes-  Don Quixote
Shakespeare – all his plays esp. tradgeies
Camus Strangers - The Plague
Sartre - No Exit, Being and Nothingness
Beckett - Waiting for Godot, Endgame
Malamud - The Fixer
Twain - Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn
Dickens - all of his books
Checkov - The Cherry Orchard
Orwell - Animal Farm, 1984
Golding -  Lord of the Flies
Dostoyevsky - The Brothers of Karamazov
Solzhenitsyn - A Day in the life of Ivan Denisovich and anything else
Le Carre - The Spy who came in from the cold
Herman Melville -  Moby Dick
Romarque - All’s Quiet on the Western Fromt
Hesse - Steppenwoolf
James - What Maisy Knew
Huxley - Brave New World
Ford Maddox Ford - The Soldier
Virginia Wolf – To the Lighthouse
Faulkner –anything
Pynchon – anything
Conrad - Nostro or anything else
Joyce - Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man
Fielding - Tom Jones
Bronte – Wuthering Heights
Hardy - Mayor of Casterbridge
 

Non-fiction

The Bible
Plato’s republic
St Augustine City of God
Machiavelli - The prince
Hobbes - Leviathon
Locke - Second Treatise on Government
Rousseau Social Contract
Mill on Liberty
Karl Marx The Communist Manifesto
Zola - J’Accuse
McLuhan Understanding Media
Friedan - The Feminine Mystique
Paine - The Rights of Man
Burke – Reflections on the Revolution in France
Moore - Utopia
Tom Wolfe – anything

Our readers write:
Think of radio. Radio is required for music to become popular. A&R reps buy out slots on major broadcast networks to get airplay for their new singles and artists.

Its true that this is how this industry used to work.  Send off your focus track with your payola to radio station programmers in key markets (Detroit Rock City!) and wait til you get it in rotation. The T. worked at a radio station and has stories of the stacks of focus tracks that landed on desks there.

But have you talked to a teenager lately?  What is their favorite radio station?  Seriously, I would like to know because I would listen to it.

I spend time listening to radio and from what I can tell (by advertising) in Toronto they are geared towards adults who drive or work in offices (dentist, doctor) that play radio.  Aside from the Flow, there are no radio stations that have more than half of their songs in rotation recorded in 2004 or 2005.

I think most teenagers these days get their music from these sources: TV shows, Advertisements (played on TV, at the beginning of movies) Movies, and their friends.   And don't forget that they are mining alot of music from the past (parents).  Led Zeppelin and AC/DC are new again!  Kurt Cobain has a whole new batch of fans every year someone turns 14.  From what I hear the A/R business is changing but I would guess (warning: theory without extensive research backing it up) that they talk to a lot more than the programmer at the Jack trying to get their song popular.

There is always a role for broadcast media.  But I think its a fragmenting industry and its changing.  It used it to be about infrastructure and now its becoming about content.  Personally, I'm excited by the changes and I'm interested in see what becomes of it. 

There is PR going around lately for a great idea, MIT's Fabrication  Lab.  It is a lab sponsored by the school (and no doubt a few private sector firms) that offers people a place to fabricate a new device.

The lab includes traditional fabrication tools such as a laser cutter, milling machine and computers with programs used by product designers (Autocad, PCB layout tools).  The labs are located around the world so the devices created have been reflecting cultural needs - for example, a solar powered cooker in Ghana.

This is an excellent idea that introduces students to the mechanical aspects of making a product rather than just focusing on software.  It also illustrates how inexpensive ($25,000 per lab) this type of equipment has become. 

Look out for more entrepreneurs and young start-up companies who build interesting and innovative devices rather than just software solutions. 

Why does Robert Scoble, Microsoft Blogger-in-Chief keep using the word disruptive?  Did he write this article just to illustrate how over used the word 'disruptive' is these days?

Everywhere you look someone is pointing out the next disruptive technology.  This term describes a condition that continually affects business and was developed and popularized by Clayton M. Christiansen based on broad body of research.  How can a company justify investing in an innovation that would appear to have no substantial market?  How can a company survive when most of its best inventions destroy its existing (usually cash cow) business model? 

In 1942, Joseph Schumpter coined the term creative destruction to describe the economic reality that innovative entrepreneurial ideas will eventually destroy established companies.  Christiansen illustrates that with famous technology examples.

So back to Scoble who got out of bed because he realized that Google is disrupting Microsoft's business. And then later asks the question: can your business be disrupted at all if you know its happening (or if your Blogger-in-Chief points it out to you)?

The answer is no.

 If Seagate knew that there was going to be a personal computer on every desktop, they would have manufactured a small footprint, low memory hard drive instead of telling the engineers who developed one that there was no market for it.  If Xerox knew that the personal computer (complete with WYSIWYG interface) was not going to destroy their existing business model of paper printers (but actually expand it) they would have kept funding development at Xerox PARC. 

If Disruptive Technologies were so easy to find and point out then bookies in Britain would calculate the odds and take bets on them (Honestly, they will bet on anything that has a finite number of outcomes).

Disruptive technology is about a lot more than a Google map API mash up.  It is about an invention that changes the way we behave or interact with our environment.  They are few and far between and most of them are laughed at initially.  Next time you are laughing at a new idea and asking 'who would ever use that', you should be asking is this the next big one?

On Wednesday, Microsoft's announced that it is moving towards a service-based model, a strategy change in which Microsoft would deliver many of its key products and services on line.  In this annoucement there is an important footnote about Dell. 

Dell's success can be largely attributed to the Wintel monopoly of the past 10 years.  Every single Dell computer was shipped with an Intel processor and a Windows operating system.  Dell's business model of on-line sales, and low price via a highly efficient supply chain gave them the foothold into the business and consumer market place.  Dell was one of the most important distribution channels for Microsoft. 

Not anymore.

Now with on-line service delivery, Microsoft has effectively cut Dell out of their value chain.  So tell me, why should I buy a new computer from Dell if I can download a new Operating System from the Internet?  And if I can download an Operating System from the Internet, do I really want something that looks like the Dell PC on my desktop?

Intel has already made attempts to diversify away from the Wintel - Dell cash cow.  Intel is pushing its small, lower power chips which can go in a variety of devices (Blackberrys, for example.)  And they made a nice deal with Apple that at least bought them some look at us! we're-doing-new-things! publicity.

Meanwhile on Monday, Dell lowered its third quarter forecast.  This is the second quarter that Dell had to warn and predictably the stock was pounded in trading.

Poor Dell.  It would seem that someone didn't invite them to the party or let them know the party was over.

Apple announced yesterday that in 20 days 1 million videos were downloaded off of iTunes.  To put this in some perspective, every week Hockey Night in Canada draws 1.2 million viewers.  This is the most watched television program in Canada, on air for over 50 years.

Apple drew in 1 million viewers in 20 days and its viewers paid to watch something that was going to air for free on broadcast television. 

Video streamed from the Internet is something that has long been predicted.  But like most things it was predicted too soon, amongst the dot.com noise and before the infrastructure and consumer technology was available to support it.

After the dot.com bust, many broadcast executives felt that they had weathered a storm by repeating a mantra of television will never be replaced by the Internet.  Why?  Because more content can be driven out via traditional broadcast infrastructure than the Internet, with its famous QofS problems, could ever hope to handle. 

And yet iTunes is offering video downloads (to be watched on a teeny tiny screen) and Apple is scooping television's only revenue source:advertising.  No wonder affiliate stations are upset that the broadcast parent is giving content to Apple.  What the parent company said would never happen is happening.

Also making news today is that NBC Nightly News will now be available on the Internet after it has aired on TV.  Why is this important?  Most public broadcasters including the BBCand CBC already offer this.  Its news in the US broadcast market because again, it affects affiliates who will lose viewers as the parent gives content away.

My suggestion to Affiliate owners: Sell the equipment at their stations while its still worth something on an auction site.