I assume John Lovelock intends his question -- "Why would someone in the creative industries just create content for others to enjoy for free?" -- to be rhetorical (Letters, 6 June). If so it demonstrates the blindness common to such industry bodies as his Federation Against Software Theft.

Millions of people are, right now, creating music, art, videos, writing, photography, websites and software with no expectation of making money from them. They do so because they love the activity and enjoy sharing the results with people, whether online or off. As with the work of professionals, some of it won't be very good and some of it will be breath-taking. Just because these creators don't expect financial reward, aren't part of an "industry", and so don't require the representation of expensive and blinkered industry bodies doesn't make them any less valuable.

Leon Rosselson elaborates: "I wrote the song in 1974 ... It's the story of the Digger Commune of 1649 and their vision of the earth as 'a common treasury'. It's become a kind of anthem for various radical groups, particularly since Billy Bragg recorded it [1985], and is not adapted from any other song. The title is taken from Christopher Hill's book about the English revolution."

Did you filter out some of the selections? I only ask because my own immortal contribution to the thread seems to be missing.

Yes, I did filter the list somewhat. I'm most interested in how to find the very best books about a topic. One way of doing that is to get recommendations from people who know the field well, which is what the original thread was all about. But some of the responses didn't do much more than name a book. I wanted to stick solely to books where the poster gave some indication (however vague or brief) that they'd read other, lesser, books on the topic or that they really knew the subject well. I also filtered out some books that were on really, really specific subjects, purely because the nature of my project (how to learn about everything) is looking at broader fields of study. Both ways of filtering were probably a bit hit and miss and arbitrary, so please don't be offended if I missed a contribution.

Macrobiology

I have no idea... I just copied the term from the original post and assumed that those who knew about biology would understand it. Obviously not :)

Didn't this get brought up before and pointed out that he's using his affiliate link to make a bit of cash off this list? I don't have a problem with this when the original person did the work, but he's just meta-mining and replacing meta's link with his amazon link.

I'm sorry if I've offended anyone with my last minute decision to use my affiliate link rather than Metafilter's. I couldn't decide whether to do that or not at first and made the choice I did simply because I usually err too far on the side of being nice and cautious. (As a direct example, five years ago I wrote a post asking some bloggers what books they were reading. If they had an Amazon affiliation set up, I added it to their links even if they didn't send them to me that way. They seemed pleasantly surprised.)

I'm not sure what to add that I haven't said already in the comments on that post. It is a tough call. If I'd copied the entire original post and changed the affiliate links that would have been very wrong in at least two ways. But I thought it would be a useful thing for people to have the list in a more easily browseable format, and after doing the work of compiling the list I felt a little more justified in changing the affiliation. If Matt or someone had put their foot down then of course I'd have been happy to change them back.

And don't get the impression I did it to make my fortune... I've been using Amazon affiliate links sporadically on my array of little-trafficked sites for years and can't remember the last time I received any money from them!

On the other hand there are lots of local things that aren't blogs. Where I live there's an active forum which is a great way to keep up with what's happening here and nearby. I've considered starting a blog about the area but can't see what value would be added (for someone like me) above the discussion forum. (I guess http://www.groupsnearyou.com/ is trying to list this kind of local thing.) But it's hard to summarise or aggregate a forum.

Do you know about Parkour? Look for videos on YouTube -- it sounds like the kind of thing that would interest him. I saw a kid his sort of age calmly showing off to crowds on London's South Bank not long ago by suddenly running up to trees and doing back flips off them. There must be groups and things in NY devoted to it.