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Bringing Nothing To The Party: True Confessions Of A New Media Whore (2008)

by Paul Carr(Favorite Author)

3.68 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

029785545X (ISBN13: 9780297855453)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

W&N

review 1: I was reading up on Paul Carr, of NSFWCORP, and I saw he wrote this book a while back. I figured one day I might have a look. Later, I read that he once gave it away for free on the Internets. I consulted the Google and was able to find a link that still worked. Bonus.Bringing Nothing to the Party is an early memoir, focusing on his career in various mostly failed online businesses, from way TF back in the late '90s until about '08. He got his start with a sort of amateur city guide that eventually became a newsletter and a series of books that no one bought. He gained a bit of notoriety with a controversial column he wrote, which leads to a few somewhat amusing stories.Covering the mid '00s-era tech industry for one of the newspapers over in the UK, plus jealousy, led him... more try his hand at a startup. Despite being in the industry, in some form or another, from jump, he obviously knows jack schitt about how to build a website, and so you can see where this is headed. He was only about as close to starting the next Facebook as I was, and I never even attempted to start the next Facebook.The fact that he was able to get so many people to take meetings with him, invite him to parties where free champagne was served, lend him money, so on and so forth, really was impressive, and there probably is a lesson or two to be learned by future hucksters. Otherwise, this isn't a story that anyone necessarily needs to hear.
review 2: I really enjoyed Paul Carr's Huffington Post blog series this past spring (he stayed in 33 different Las Vegas Strip hotels for 33 consecutive nights) and I wanted to read more by him. I started with his first book, Bringing Nothing to the Party (his second, Upgrade, isn't out in the U.S. yet). Brining Nothing to the Party is a memoir about his foray into trying (and failing) to become an Internet entrepreneur. A bit self-involved at times (although it IS a memoir, so that's excusable) it's a great look back at how the big Internet and, particularly, social media sites of today established themselves. I loved reading Paul's flawed journey from the famous Internet entrepreneur he thought he should be to the journalist he loves being. Many of us struggle to find out who we are and what we should be doing with our life. Paul's story reminds us to stick to the path that makes us happy and aligns with who we are rather than trying to shove ourselves into some uncomfortable mold of what others (or even we) think we are supposed to be. less

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