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advice – jstrauss

Delicious Bookmarks for September 24th through March 8th

These are my Delicious links for September 24th through March 8th:

Delicious Bookmarks for July 21st through August 31st

These are my Delicious links for July 21st through August 31st:

Delicious Bookmarks for March 2nd through March 4th

These are my Delicious links for March 2nd through March 4th:

  • THRU YOU | Kutiman mixes YouTube – Unbelievable remixes of music samples from various YouTube videos into really great songs and fascinating videos. This is the poster-project for Remix culture! (hope someone sends it to Lessig)
  • Good design: The ten commandments of Dieter Rams – A great collection of rules on how to design products. While originally meant for physical products (industrial design), I think many of the rules still apply to online products and web design. Some of my favorites:
    – Good design makes a product useful
    – Good design helps a product to be understood
    – Good design is unobtrusive
    – *Good design is thorough to the last detail*
    – Good design is as little as possible

    And some quotes:
    "The aesthetic quality of a product – and the fascination it inspires – is an integral part of the its utility."
    "Things which are different in order to simply be different are seldom better, but that which is made to be better is almost always different."
    (And on a personal note, my late grandma had Rams's Cylindric T2 lighter in her apartment when I was a kid and I always got in trouble for playing with it, but its design fascinated me.)

Delicious Bookmarks for February 3rd through February 9th

These are my links for February 3rd through February 7th:

  • 5 Lessons I Learned After a Year as a Digital Nomad – The best piece of travel advice I've heard in a while: know the difference between traveling and living. If you're going to some place interesting, don't expect to have time to do other stuff like work. You'll just end up choosing between missing out on all the cool things to do where you are (and thus resenting your choice) or feeling guilty about not doing whatever it was you thought you were going to get done.
  • Dan Gilbert asks, Why are we happy? | Video on TED.com – Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, challenges the idea that we'll be miserable if we don't get what we want. Our "psychological immune system" lets us feel truly happy even when things don't go as planned. This is a really great talk. Well worth the 20min it takes to watch. You will be amazed at the empirical evidence on how bad humans are at predicting our own happiness and how subjective and relative happiness actually is.
  • Kareem Mayan’s Weblog: customer experience, emerging technology, media, and more – A great (old) blog post by Kareem on what makes people truly happy, how bad we are at predicting it, and how so few of us actually pursue it. Kudos to Kareem for taking his own advice and deciding to align his life to best pursue his dreams of traveling around the world (http://howsthewifi.com). The video at the end of this post is a must watch. Unfortunately, the embed is now broken – so, go see it here: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.html
  • random($foo): Online Tools for A New Small Business – Leonard Lin's list of recommended business tools for startups. Covering accounting, CRM, marketing and development.
  • Why Should I Care What Color the Bikeshed Is? – "The really, really short answer is that you should not. The somewhat longer answer is that just because you are capable of building a bikeshed does not mean you should stop others from building one just because you do not like the color they plan to paint it. This is a metaphor indicating that you need not argue about every little feature just because you know enough to do so. Some people have commented that the amount of noise generated by a change is inversely proportional to the complexity of the change."
  • FT Alphaville » Blog Archive » Happy Boycott CNBC Day! – "The real problem with mullets and Pabst and Toby Keith songs, and with CNBC, is that there are people, large swaths of humanity, in fact, who apparently regard the above unironically."

These are my Delicious links for February 3rd through February 9th:

  • TechStars » Seed capital and mentorship for startups – Documents that TechStars uses as a starting point for seed stage financing for their companies. Aimed to be model documents for an angel or seed financing in the $250k-$2M range. They represent a “light” preferred equity financing and have very simple terms that are generally “balanced” but if anything lean toward the entrepreneurs and represent a great deal of trust in them, which they think is appropriate for angel deals where you are primarily investing in the people at the early stage.
  • 5 Lessons I Learned After a Year as a Digital Nomad – The best piece of travel advice I've heard in a while: know the difference between traveling and living. If you're going to some place interesting, don't expect to have time to do other stuff like work. You'll just end up choosing between missing out on all the cool things to do where you are (and thus resenting your choice) or feeling guilty about not doing whatever it was you thought you were going to get done.
  • Dan Gilbert asks, Why are we happy? | Video on TED.com – Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, challenges the idea that we'll be miserable if we don't get what we want. Our "psychological immune system" lets us feel truly happy even when things don't go as planned. This is a really great talk. Well worth the 20min it takes to watch. You will be amazed at the empirical evidence on how bad humans are at predicting our own happiness and how subjective and relative happiness actually is.
  • Kareem Mayan’s Weblog: customer experience, emerging technology, media, and more – A great (old) blog post by Kareem on what makes people truly happy, how bad we are at predicting it, and how so few of us actually pursue it. Kudos to Kareem for taking his own advice and deciding to align his life to best pursue his dreams of traveling around the world (http://howsthewifi.com). The video at the end of this post is a must watch. Unfortunately, the embed is now broken – so, go see it here: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.html
  • random($foo): Online Tools for A New Small Business – Leonard Lin's list of recommended business tools for startups. Covering accounting, CRM, marketing and development.
  • Why Should I Care What Color the Bikeshed Is? – "The really, really short answer is that you should not. The somewhat longer answer is that just because you are capable of building a bikeshed does not mean you should stop others from building one just because you do not like the color they plan to paint it. This is a metaphor indicating that you need not argue about every little feature just because you know enough to do so. Some people have commented that the amount of noise generated by a change is inversely proportional to the complexity of the change."
  • FT Alphaville » Blog Archive » Happy Boycott CNBC Day! – "The real problem with mullets and Pabst and Toby Keith songs, and with CNBC, is that there are people, large swaths of humanity, in fact, who apparently regard the above unironically."

Delicious Bookmarks for January 27th through February 1st

These are my links for January 27th through February 1st:

  • Bookmarklet Builder – Handy tool for building bookmarklets, can convert back and forth from normal Javascript to bookmarklet form.
  • TwitterFriends – Your relevant network on Twitter – The most comprehensive (and interesting) Twitter stats application I've found to date. Instead of gimmickry about how you rank against other Twitter users in meaninglessly vague and opaque terms like "authority," this exposes the hard data about yours and your network's behavior compared to average, and gives you some pretty cool visualizations. If I understood statistics and such better, I think this is the kinda tool I could totally geek out on.
  • Which HD video Web service is the best? | Webware – CNET – In depth side-by-side comparison of online video hosting services.
    "- The victor: YouTube
    This time around, we feel really comfortable giving YouTube the quality crown. Its HD encoding is really nice, and you can't beat the price (free). One thing that really separates it from the others is that you can do so many things with your clip once it's up there. You can replace the music, as well as add subtitles and annotations. Community members can also respond to it, adding in-line video replies."
  • The Bacon Explosion – Take Bacon. Add Sausage. Blog. – NYTimes.com – A (very tasty) example of the power of social media to spread content virally. According to the article, the blog post about this recipe garnered 27,000 views 2 days after being posted thanks mostly to Twitter, Digg, and StumbleUpon. In the month since being posted, it has been viewed 390,000 times and linked to from 16,000 sites. Not bad for some bacon.
  • Secrets of my success: Netflix CEO Reed Hastings – Jan. 28, 2009 – A brief profile on Reed Hastings w/ business tips:
    – Target a specific niche: When there's an ache, you want to be like aspirin, not vitamins. Aspirin solves a very particular problem someone has, whereas vitamins are a general "nice to have" market.
    – Stay flexible: We named the company Netflix (NFLX), not DVDs by Mail because we knew that eventually we would deliver movies directly over the Internet.
    – Never underestimate the competition: We erroneously concluded that Blockbuster (BBI, Fortune 500) probably wasn't going to launch a competitive effort when they hadn't by 2003.
    – There are no shortcuts: Occasionally great wealth is created in a short amount of time, but it's through a lot of luck in those situations. You just have to think of building an organization as a lot of work. It may or may not turn into great wealth.
  • Streaming video cannibalizing DVD rentals, says Netflix – Ars Technica – Netflix results show that streaming video views are taking away from DVD-by-mail volume. Given that there is no price difference (both streaming and DVD-by-mail cost the same per month), the streaming bitrate is at DVD quality or less, and the selection of films available for streaming is worse than that of DVD-by-mail, this is further proof that *convenience* (the only real advantage of streaming vs. DVD-by-mail) is a very powerful motivator for media consumers.
  • Facebook Pages Leaderboard – A neat tool for tracking the popularity of Facebook Pages by number of fans over time. However, the data doesn't appear to be totally reliable. So, be sure to check the current stats on Facebook before hanging your hat on any of these numbers.
  • Announcing the AllFacebook Pages Tracker – Interesting facts about Facebook Page fan stats (as of January 27, 2009)
    – Barack Obama is #1 w/ 4.7M fans, Homer Simpson is #2 w/ 2.6M, and Coca-Cola is #3 w/ 2.3M (I pulled the stats for these from Facebook directly)
    – All Facebook is tracking 620,000 Pages
    – Only 50,000 Pages (~8%) have > 1,000 fans
    – Only 276 Pages (~0.04%) have > 500,000 fans
  • Deborah Schultz: Life isn’t binary, neither is the Social Web – "The social web is my web – it's PERSONAL to me. I am not creating media when I am online so much as I am connecting with people using media as my medium…The social web can actually provide much deeper and more interesting connections for customers and companies than simply being a marketing channel – it ties into the entire product lifecycle. And that is where stuff gets really interesting…and much more complex. This is where relevance and context and trust and intention all come into play."

These are my Delicious links for January 27th through February 1st:

  • Bookmarklet Builder – Handy tool for building bookmarklets, can convert back and forth from normal Javascript to bookmarklet form.
  • TwitterFriends – Your relevant network on Twitter – The most comprehensive (and interesting) Twitter stats application I've found to date. Instead of gimmickry about how you rank against other Twitter users in meaninglessly vague and opaque terms like "authority," this exposes the hard data about yours and your network's behavior compared to average, and gives you some pretty cool visualizations. If I understood statistics and such better, I think this is the kinda tool I could totally geek out on.
  • Which HD video Web service is the best? | Webware – CNET – In depth side-by-side comparison of online video hosting services.
    "- The victor: YouTube
    This time around, we feel really comfortable giving YouTube the quality crown. Its HD encoding is really nice, and you can't beat the price (free). One thing that really separates it from the others is that you can do so many things with your clip once it's up there. You can replace the music, as well as add subtitles and annotations. Community members can also respond to it, adding in-line video replies."
  • The Bacon Explosion – Take Bacon. Add Sausage. Blog. – NYTimes.com – A (very tasty) example of the power of social media to spread content virally. According to the article, the blog post about this recipe garnered 27,000 views 2 days after being posted thanks mostly to Twitter, Digg, and StumbleUpon. In the month since being posted, it has been viewed 390,000 times and linked to from 16,000 sites. Not bad for some bacon.
  • Secrets of my success: Netflix CEO Reed Hastings – Jan. 28, 2009 – A brief profile on Reed Hastings w/ business tips:
    – Target a specific niche: When there's an ache, you want to be like aspirin, not vitamins. Aspirin solves a very particular problem someone has, whereas vitamins are a general "nice to have" market.
    – Stay flexible: We named the company Netflix (NFLX), not DVDs by Mail because we knew that eventually we would deliver movies directly over the Internet.
    – Never underestimate the competition: We erroneously concluded that Blockbuster (BBI, Fortune 500) probably wasn't going to launch a competitive effort when they hadn't by 2003.
    – There are no shortcuts: Occasionally great wealth is created in a short amount of time, but it's through a lot of luck in those situations. You just have to think of building an organization as a lot of work. It may or may not turn into great wealth.
  • Streaming video cannibalizing DVD rentals, says Netflix – Ars Technica – Netflix results show that streaming video views are taking away from DVD-by-mail volume. Given that there is no price difference (both streaming and DVD-by-mail cost the same per month), the streaming bitrate is at DVD quality or less, and the selection of films available for streaming is worse than that of DVD-by-mail, this is further proof that *convenience* (the only real advantage of streaming vs. DVD-by-mail) is a very powerful motivator for media consumers.
  • Facebook Pages Leaderboard – A neat tool for tracking the popularity of Facebook Pages by number of fans over time. However, the data doesn't appear to be totally reliable. So, be sure to check the current stats on Facebook before hanging your hat on any of these numbers.
  • Announcing the AllFacebook Pages Tracker – Interesting facts about Facebook Page fan stats (as of January 27, 2009)
    – Barack Obama is #1 w/ 4.7M fans, Homer Simpson is #2 w/ 2.6M, and Coca-Cola is #3 w/ 2.3M (I pulled the stats for these from Facebook directly)
    – All Facebook is tracking 620,000 Pages
    – Only 50,000 Pages (~8%) have > 1,000 fans
    – Only 276 Pages (~0.04%) have > 500,000 fans
  • Deborah Schultz: Life isn’t binary, neither is the Social Web – "The social web is my web – it's PERSONAL to me. I am not creating media when I am online so much as I am connecting with people using media as my medium…The social web can actually provide much deeper and more interesting connections for customers and companies than simply being a marketing channel – it ties into the entire product lifecycle. And that is where stuff gets really interesting…and much more complex. This is where relevance and context and trust and intention all come into play."