(from sfgate.com
by Joshua Brustein)
Several weeks ago, Walter Isaacson, the author of the biography on Steve Jobs, quietly began an experiment: He posted a passage from his new book, about the origins of the personal-computing age, on the website LiveJournal and asked for feedback.
Not much happened, so he turned to Scribd, then to Medium, the writing website created by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams. One post on Medium was read by about 18,000 people and inspired about 125 comments, plus dozens of e-mails and a few full articles exploring some aspect of Isaacson's subject matter, the author said Saturday.
The people responding have ranged from people Isaacson doesn't know of to some of his primary subjects. Stewart Brand, the editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, who figured prominently in Silicon Valley circles in the 1960s and 1970s, wrote a lengthy response without specific prompting from Isaacson, who then posted it to Medium as a separate post.
The inspiration
Isaacson's search for online collaborators was inspired primarily from a desire for help in writing a book, which can be a difficult task. But he says it also makes sense, given the focus of his book: the people who laid the foundation of modern digital technology.
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