My first book! Life-Altering Experiences: How a Single Question Tapped into the Soul of MetaFilter

by phil on Tuesday Mar 3, 2009 1:21 PM
hive mind ism, mainfeed, personal projects

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: