My idea of fun reading Before the Vanderbilt business students came back to school, I grabbed Macrowikinomics from their library for some fun reading. I didn't get to finish the book because I couldn't renew it after business school started back up and people placed holds on it, but I did read through the first half which covered business models, science, education, and health care.
Some of the highlights for me are as follows:
The car company of my dreams, local-motors
Citizen Scientist Alliances like Galaxy Zoo and involve ordinary people in the process of taking massive amounts of data and generating robust science from it.
Personal health pages which digitally keep all your medical information and belong solely to you have enormous potential for both safeguarding information like genetic predispositions for alcoholism or breast cancer while still being useful for large studies that could reveal much more clearly what treatments work for which kind of people. As usual wikipedia has a good page about such personal health records. Websites like PatientsLikeMe and WeAre are actively harnessing the power of people collaboratively tackling health challenges. RateMDs, MDjunction, and HelloHealth are also worth mentioning. The power of the personal health page idea is that you would own it and could choose to use various third party apps to (with your permission) connect you, your health information, and even your doctors to all these other resources that already exist online.
Online collaborations for teaching and learning. MIT has lead the way in opening access to course materials via their OpenCourseWare initiative. Wikiversity similarly pools course resources. Sakai project unites educators in their endeavors to teach students. Though not mentioned in the book, I want to mention some tools that have been useful to me: Prezi.com and SlideShare.net for presentation sharing and CompFight.com for finding great useable (creative common licensed) photos.
The reader should be aware that I never read wikinomics. Nevertheless, this book was engaging, mind-expanding, and just fun easy reading (compared to the science publications I deal with). I enjoyed the discussions of how to harness the internet to globally, collaboratively improve the world not just in small stepwise increments but in leaps and bounds as we improve businesses, science, education, and health care.
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