January 2012
1 post
“The position of the leader is ultimately an intensely solitary, even intensely...”
– Former Yale professor turned critic and essayist William Deresiewicz on the importance of spending time alone to articulate a leadership vision. “Solitude and Leadership.”
December 2011
1 post
“Users still only have 24 hours a day. So if you launch a new product, you have...”
– Keith Rabois, COO of Square, on the difficulty of gaining user attention in an oversaturated consumer startup market. TechCrunch Disrupt.
November 2011
1 post
“You can take something that is thought of as a creative process and turn it into...”
– A sad but fascinating idea from the CIO of Demand Media in Wired’s piece ‘The Answer Factory.’
October 2011
2 posts
“And that’s what a computer is to me — the equivalent of a bicycle...”
– Steve Jobs likens the computer’s effect on the human mind to the bicycle’s effect on human locomotion. Memory and Imagination, 1989.
“Abstinence from new book buying has proved one of the hardest challenges I have...”
– Edward Stourton of the FT recounts a year of giving up physical books for an ereader. In an age when bookstores and hard copies are losing their allure, his perspective is a charming one. ‘The year of reading differently.’
May 2011
1 post
“Satan runs a website too, but I can’t tell you the URL… **COUGH COUGH...”
– Dilbert blogs.
April 2011
1 post
“I have the funny sense now when I’m reading a good book that I’m...”
– An excerpt from Peggy Noonan’s media diet, from The Atlantic’s most excellent series ‘What I Read.’
March 2011
1 post
“Why does the average drug store contain 55 floss alternatives and more than 350...”
– Jonah Lehrer for Wired: ‘Why Easy Decisions Are So Hard.’ Marketers are realizing that extreme differentiation within product categories actually intimidates the consumer and hurts sales. Trader Joe’s avoids this fallacy well. The indie grocery retailer culls its inventory to one...
January 2011
3 posts
“The Sunday New York Times contains more factual information in one edition than...”
– From The Attention Economy, a book concerned with our decreasing supply of attention in a world that increasingly demands it.
“When a key corporate asset isn’t owned, it could leave a company vulnerable to...”
– Lessons from an earlier time — the virtues of both owning and operating your assets! This in particular is a reminder that Facebook pages are increasingly trumping corporate branding sites, which can put the corporation in a position of dependency on Facebook. That’s not to say Facebook...
October 2010
1 post
“‘The cloud’ has most broadly come to stand for the web, a metaphor...”
– From my current commuting preoccupation, Virtual Words: Language on the Edge of Science and Technology by Jonathan Keats. Chapter titles include ‘Unparticle,’ ‘Tweet,’ ‘w00t,’ ‘singularity,’ ‘Lifehacker’ (!), and ‘k.’
July 2010
2 posts
“Anything that removes complexity or cycles from your day is really valuable. I...”
– NYT explores a trend in minimal dressing, which also helps to explain why my sartorial life is so frequently monochromatic.
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by brevity, over-connectedness,...”
– Oyl Miller reprises Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ as a self-aware commentary on our impending intellectual death by Internets. A must read: ‘Tweet.’
June 2010
3 posts
May 2010
5 posts
“I’d encourage anyone starting a startup to become one of its users,...”
– Paul Graham in a minor footnote to his much larger point that startups should solve real (not imagined) problems. It all goes back to building off of what you know.
April 2010
10 posts
“Location-awareness leads to vector-awareness.”
– Dave Winer opining on the future of location services as not merely descriptive but also predictive.
March 2010
1 post
“You can’t tell a book by its cover if it doesn’t have one.”
– NYT warns against potential loss of that graphical marvel — the book cover — as e-readers threaten to disrupt the physical distribution model for books. Reminds me of some of the lovely ways that books have been a part of my life.
February 2010
4 posts
“Don’t take any money, don’t owe anything to anyone, build [your business] how...”
– Matt Haughey of MetaFilter reveals the secret to entrepreneurship.
“For example, the query “Do you have any good babysitter recommendations in Palo...”
– The minds behind Aardvark explain why mining the social graph can really augment the information retrieval performed by standard search engines. [pdf]
“The Internet has its own shadow culture, a tech-savvy nation separated from...”
– A swift treatment of the tech subculture from Paul Boutin’s guide to Twitter. His piece also touches on one of my favorite aspects of the service: we’re all equals when it comes to tweeting.
November 2009
2 posts
October 2009
3 posts
“Dividing content along these lines is like classifying brownies based on whether...”
– Zachary M. Seward for Nieman Journalism Lab, explaining the ridiculousness of classifying content according to the platform on which it is produced (in response to Google News’s addition of the modifier ‘blog’ for some news sources).
Content quality is determined by the...
September 2009
1 post
“Since most trains are still devoid of Internet access and cellphone reception,...”
– The New York Times examines subterranean reading habits and discovers what publications are most popular.
August 2009
1 post
Why Not Live a Big Life?
I’m a sucker for a good turn of phrase. The best are aphorisms, blending brevity and cogency with the captivating mysticism of future seers. A good line is deliciously catchy, sticking because of the way it sounds and the way it feels — both seductive. These lines are also rare and not often invented, given the limitations of our relatively overwrought language. Once a good phrase is...
July 2009
2 posts
“[A modern economist] is used to measuring the ’standard of living’ by the amount...”
– E.F. Schumacher, an underappreciated economist (via SiftStar). Of note: the consumptive black hole toward which we’re trending turbulently. Currently doing some reading on alternatives to the ideal of constant, logarithmic growth. Anyone have suggestions?
“How do you make things?
You could lay out the process as a line… start...”
– As in iterating constantly rather than releasing perfected final products. From Snarkmarket’s collection of essays New Liberal Arts (a laundry list of topics for contemporary study inspired by Kottke’s term ‘liberal arts 2.0’).
June 2009
3 posts
“The basic scam in the Internet Age is pretty easy even for the financially...”
– Matt Taibbi says it like it was in this month’s Rolling Stone.
“A new report published this week by researchers at Stanford University suggests...”
– The Onion reports a mindboggling new trend (via Dave Morin).
“The net has gone from people being actively participatory to being vicarious.”
– Agree and disagree. Society in general has a greater population of passive consumers than it does active producers — the people who actually make things. We’re just seeing this equilibrium replicate itself on the web as the digital world becomes better representative of the physical...
May 2009
1 post
“Tech magazines, no matter how well executed, are nothing more than a cute...”
– Joel Johnson on Wired’s paradoxical favoritism of its print efforts over its online opportunities.