You have to read "Made To Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Some Die" on a practical level. The book takes the reader through a series of predictors of how to make your writing, publicity, organizing initiative reach its intended audience, and stick. When ideas stick, they stay with you and change your behavior or expectations.

Another recent book, Malcolm Gladwell’s "The Tipping Point," focused more on how social phenomena spread outward and take hold. Made to Stick focuses more on the formulation of ideas themselves.

Chip and Dan Heath offer six principles that underlie stickiness—simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions and stories. If you read it, you will get it.

What impresses me is that the book itself lives the life it advocates. The authors take you through each of the six themes using effective anecdotal stories, generally starting off each one with something unexpected to draw the reader in. They make their points very concretely and simply, for example by providing clear reader exercises to try out their ideas. The arguments are credible both because of these exercises and because of the examples and simple data they provide. And the book does have emotion—it comes alive as you begin to realize how much time one can easily waste crafting a message ineffectively.

I read the book when it came out, and just went back to now that we have added this nifty book review section. As we see increasingly even since this book came out, working with data and technology today increasingly has to do with effective communications, whether in web design or planning data collection systems. As we contemplate revamping our own site this winter, I we will come back to this book.

Published 2007 by Random House.