World Wide Waste: How Digital Is Killing Our Planet—and What We Can Do About It


Book Description

Speaking out when it's unpopular. Back in the day, Henry David Thoreau raged at the robber barons-the big shots of their age, despoiling the environment in the name of progress. Deep in the throes of the seemingly unstoppable growth of tech, a modern-day Thoreau has emerged in the guise of Gerry McGovern-decrying the massive, hidden negative impacts of tech on the environment. McGovern has thoroughly documented in World Wide Waste how tech damages the Earth-and what we should be doing about it. It is not just the acres of discarded computer hardware conveniently dumped in Third World countries. Every time an email is downloaded it contributes to global warming. Every tweet, search, check of a webpage creates pollution. Digital is physical. Those data centers are not in the Cloud. They're on land in massive physical buildings packed full of computers hungry for energy. It seems invisible. It seems cheap and free. It's not. Digital costs the Earth.




Transform: A rebel’s guide for digital transformation


Book Description

"Are you an optimist? Are you a rebel? Do you think that because of digital technology, power is shifting away from organizations towards citizens and customers? Are you a digital change agent? Do you want to transform your organization? Then this book is here to help you"--Back cover.




Top Tasks: A How-to Guide


Book Description

Essence of Top Tasks is a prioritized list of what matters most to customers. You then continuously improve these top tasks based on evidence of customers trying to complete them. Developed as a result of 15 years of research and practice. Implemented by some of the world's largest organizations: Cisco, Microsoft, NetApp, IBM, Google, European Union, Toyota, Tetra Pak, and hundreds more. More than 300,000 customers have participated in Top Tasks studies in over 40 countries and 30 languages.




Killer Web Content


Book Description

On the Internet, if you're not read, you're dead. Written by an internationally-acclaimed specialist in this field, Killer Web Content gives you the strategies and practical techniques you need to get the very best out of your Web content. Accessible, concise and practical, it will make your website really work for you. This book helps readers to: - provide visitors to their website with the right content at just the right time - write compelling Web content that users really respond to and want more of - make sure their website has the best possible chance of getting into the first page of search results - understand the benefits of blogs, RSS, and e-mail newsletters Web content is an increasingly important asset. It helps sell products and deliver services. From travel companies to software companies, from universities to governments, it's something that has to be got right.




The Web Content Style Guide


Book Description

As quality becomes ever more critical in differentiating successful websites, the need for a professional approach to your content is growing. The Web Content Style Guideprovides a set of standards and rules to ensure consistent quality content and a flawless service to your readers.




The Stranger's Long Neck


Book Description

The long-awaited new title from THE corporate expert on building the right web presence to drive sales! In an age that is exploding with information, it's now critically important for companies to identify what truly matters on their Web site. The web customer is a “stranger” online to web teams who must work in a medium where it is very difficult to know who is clicking around on your site. Every Web site has a “long neck” or a small set of tasks that are very important to its customers. If you don't make these tasks easy and fast to complete, your customers will go to your competition. This book will give you practical advice and case studies on how to tune in effectively to deliver precisely what your web customers want to make the sale! Gerry McGovern is widely regarded as the number one worldwide authority on managing web content as a business asset. Named as one of the 100 most influential figures in e-commerce in the UK and Ireland, he has appeared on CNN , CNBC and BBC television and has been featured in numerous print media publications. Top 5 Tips for Improving Your Website by Gerry McGovern 1. On the Web, content may be king but the customer is dictator. There's one word to describe the web customer: IMPATIENT. 2. Traditional marketing and communication is about GETTING ATTENTION. Web marketing and communication is about PAYING ATTENTION. When customers are at your website you already have their attention. Don't waste their time by telling them things they already know. 3. Every website has a small set of top tasks what I call the “long neck” that customers expect to complete quickly and easily. The customers' top tasks are often not what the organisation thinks they are—or wants them to be! 4. The BIGGEST key to website improvement and efficiency of “long neck” consumer tasks is most often overlooked: companies must do rigorous, methodical and continuous testing! Great web management is based on facts about your consumers, not opinions offered by the smartest people in your company. 5. The Web is about doing, not talking about doing. A great website puts task-completion features on the homepage. In Web 1.0 you saw a picture of a hotel room on the homepage of a hotel website. Now, you book your room on the homepage. Find out more in The Stranger's Long Neck




The Uninhabitable Earth


Book Description

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The Uninhabitable Earth hits you like a comet, with an overflow of insanely lyrical prose about our pending Armageddon.”—Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New Yorker • The New York Times Book Review • Time • NPR • The Economist • The Paris Review • Toronto Star • GQ • The Times Literary Supplement • The New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible—food shortages, refugee emergencies, climate wars and economic devastation. An “epoch-defining book” (The Guardian) and “this generation’s Silent Spring” (The Washington Post), The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it—the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress. The Uninhabitable Earth is also an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation—today’s. LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/E.O. WILSON LITERARY SCIENCE WRITING AWARD “The Uninhabitable Earth is the most terrifying book I have ever read. Its subject is climate change, and its method is scientific, but its mode is Old Testament. The book is a meticulously documented, white-knuckled tour through the cascading catastrophes that will soon engulf our warming planet.”—Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times “Riveting. . . . Some readers will find Mr. Wallace-Wells’s outline of possible futures alarmist. He is indeed alarmed. You should be, too.”—The Economist “Potent and evocative. . . . Wallace-Wells has resolved to offer something other than the standard narrative of climate change. . . . He avoids the ‘eerily banal language of climatology’ in favor of lush, rolling prose.”—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times “The book has potential to be this generation’s Silent Spring.”—The Washington Post “The Uninhabitable Earth, which has become a best seller, taps into the underlying emotion of the day: fear. . . . I encourage people to read this book.”—Alan Weisman, The New York Review of Books




Content Critical


Book Description

The web's made everyone a publisher, so what's going to make people read what YOU write? The answer is high-quality, well-written, reader-focused, compelling content. This is the book that explores what "killer content" actually is, and shows how to create it for yourself.




The Road Ahead


Book Description

In this clear-eyed, candid, and ultimately reassuring




Falter


Book Description

Thirty years ago Bill McKibben offered one of the earliest warnings about climate change. Now he broadens the warning: the entire human game, he suggests, has begun to play itself out. Bill McKibben’s groundbreaking book The End of Nature -- issued in dozens of languages and long regarded as a classic -- was the first book to alert us to global warming. But the danger is broader than that: even as climate change shrinks the space where our civilization can exist, new technologies like artificial intelligence and robotics threaten to bleach away the variety of human experience. Falter tells the story of these converging trends and of the ideological fervor that keeps us from bringing them under control. And then, drawing on McKibben’s experience in building 350.org, the first truly global citizens movement to combat climate change, it offers some possible ways out of the trap. We’re at a bleak moment in human history -- and we’ll either confront that bleakness or watch the civilization our forebears built slip away. Falter is a powerful and sobering call to arms, to save not only our planet but also our humanity.