I just finished two projects:

• The most frequently cited books on Human Relations from 5+ years of Ask.MetaFilter Q&A
  
  
• The most frequently cited books on Work & Money from 5+ years of Ask.MetaFilter Q&A

I counted every amazon.com link in every single question and answer page (12,000+ pages) from the human relations and work & money categories of Ask.MetaFilter. This spans more than five years worth of advice.

Personally, I trust these lists to be the best books on their topics. That's because I believe in the power of hive minds, and I believe that MetaFilter is one of the best hive minds out there. I don't know why MetaFilter is so good. Perhaps it's because it costs $5 to join the community, or that it has a slight bias for librarians. All I know is that some book recommendations on there have changed my life.

And now I have a lot more reading to do.

Saw this quote on iGoogle:

The trouble with weather forecasting is that it's right too often for us to ignore it and wrong too often for us to rely on it.
- Patrick Young

That pretty much sums up my opinion on Rotten Tomatoes, MetaCritic, Ask.MetaFilter and any other Hive Mind-style systems. Except that I wouldn't consider them troublesome.

So I finally finished making a book. The title of it is: Life-Altering Experiences: How a Single Question Tapped into the Soul of MetaFilter.

The free eBook version is available here.

The hardcover version is available here.

Here is the description:

"I helped it die quicker."
"Go pick some doves off the telephone line."
"This thinking was really not normal."

These are voices from responses to one question: "Life-altering experiences. Can you point to a single experience in your life, as a child, which you can define as having contributed to the person you are today?" This simple question generated one of the most fascinating threads from the Internet community MetaFilter. This book serves as a compilation of 56 of those stories. Tap into the soul of MetaFilter and see what changes people.

MetaFilter is one of my favorite places on the Internet. While the rest of the Internet social spaces look like bathroom graffiti walls (cf: YouTube), MetaFilter has such a high density of good conversation. Maybe it's because of the $5 sign-up fee that Slate cited as being the "jerk-zapper."

For anybody that spends a lot of time on Internet social spaces, you can appreciate how amazing of an event the Life-Altering Experiences thread is. So many stories on there are of such high literary value. Constantly people kept saying, "someone should turn this into a book." And so I did.

This is not the first time that I made a tribute to a great hive mind. My compilation of the "perfect album" on Plastic is a good example of that. Another example is Meta-Life-Change which became the genesis of this book.

In summary, I agree with the headline of that Slate article: