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happiness – jstrauss

Delicious Bookmarks for September 24th through March 8th

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

Delicious Bookmarks for September 2nd through September 6th

These are my Delicious links for September 2nd through September 6th:

  • Taking the Initiative: Carl Pope’s Blog – Sierra Club – This is as depressing as it is sickening. We progressive Americans who were finally so galvanized by our reaction to 8 years of Bush/Cheney coupled with the bright promise of the change Obama could bring have reverted back not just to complacency, but worse to underestimation. Just because *we* are immune to the politics of fear, does not mean they have lost their power — no matter how absurd the claims in question (whether it be death panels, Obama's racism, or Van Jones's "extremist views and coarse rhetoric"). Remember how much we underestimated George W. Bush in the 2000 election? We have to stop assuming people fact check outrageous claims and recognize that inflammatory propaganda must be stopped in it's tracks and those who perpetuate it must have their credibility undermined so they can't continue to spew it. Say something enough times (especially on tv) and too many people will start to think it's true.
  • Facebook Connect Plugin Directory – Facebook Developer Wiki – List of Facebook Connect publishing platform plugins by 3rd party developers.
  • 16 Best Facebook Connect Plugins for Your Blog, Forum, Wiki, or CMS – List of Facebook Connect plugins to add community functionality to your publishing platform.
  • Kareem Mayan’s Weblog – How I Discovered My Life’s Purpose – I've never really thought about coming up with a mission statement for my life, but that's what my friend Kareem has spent the last 18 months doing. I'm very excited that he feels he has come up with a verbal distillation of his life's purpose (even if I personally find the actual language to be a bit vague). I look forward to seeing the ways he comes up with to pursue this purpose.

    I agree with a lot of Kareem's thinking on these matters (which is probably why we're friends 🙂 ) and greatly admire (and somewhat envy) his courage to so aggressively pursue these questions. So, it's great to be able to ride along on his journey even from afar. My favorite line from this post is: "The opposite of quiet desperation, I reasoned, is magnificent fulfillment."

Delicious Bookmarks for March 31st through April 2nd

These are my Delicious links for March 31st through April 2nd:

  • Social Media ROI – Solid presentation on how to approach social media marketing from a quantitative perspective. Most interesting are the examples of different types of social media campaigns to drive different business goals. There is no one-size-fits all social media marketing campaign.
  • The Lab – A web-based Sass -> CSS compiler. Sass is basically a shorthand way to write stylesheets for your website. It allows for nesting with two spaces. Also, it can do some basic math with constants. No more going around your CSS files updating the size or color of something.
  • Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky – "When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse…With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem."
  • Changing Nature of Virality: Facebook and Twitter – A consolidation of interesting stats from Hitwise on percentages of traffic to entertainment sites driven by Twitter and Facebook. For example, perezhilton.com's biggest week ever was driven primarily by traffic from Facebook (8.70%) over Google (7.62%). It is clear that for certain types of sites, particularly entertainment-oriented, 'viral' discovery is an increasingly important discovery mechanism being fueled by the growth of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.
  • The Rising Power Of Social Media As A Traffic Driver – Fred Wilson on the impact he's seeing to traffic on his own blog from Twitter and Facebook: "Links are the currency of the web and traffic is money so these are important trends for our portfolio companies and for everyone who does business on the web."
  • Tony Hsieh: Zappos In The Business of Selling “Happiness” – This was a really great presentation that i was lucky enough to attend in person. Some of my favorite quotes were "Hire slowly, fire quicky", "When all your employees live the brand, you don't need to rely on marketing and PR to handle all your communications", and "We decided to take all the money we would have put into marketing and put it into making the customer experience better." While I do feel that Zappos sounds more like a management/corporate culture experiment than a business, I still think there are a ton of great lessons that less altruistic businesses can apply. My primary takeaway was probably on Slide 17 of the presentation, the idea of "Committable Core Values": having a company mission that is actionable for every employee.
  • Economy Tech trends in 2009 by Mary Meeker (Morgan Stanley) – An omnibus presentation on the current economic climate and the high-level trends that will drive the technology industry in the near future. The first ~40 slides contain some really interesting data and charts on the larger macroeconomic situation and are worth looking at even for people not interested in the technology industry.
  • The Memefication of Your Band – A more pragmatic take on the entertainment-as-a-service concept focused on how musical artists can more effectively promote themselves. "Your band must invade the Perception Economy. Your Band must no longer be a band. Your band must be a meme. A Meme Which Generates subMemes. These memes must be compelling, intriguing, and interesting enough for people to ‘follow’ or at least think that you are ‘worth following.’"
  • High-tech Market Research and Consulting – Quantitative application of the Lanchester model, a WWII military strategy framework, to business in which market share is the proxy for number of troops. Interesting theoretical construct for understanding how players with differing market share should seek to compete in order to maximize their competitive advantage — i.e. smaller players should seek to segment a larger market into smaller pieces in which they can compete closer to market share parity while larger players should seek to compete in the broadest market possible to maximize the value of their dominance.
  • WordPress › WP Greet Box « WordPress Plugins – A very useful WordPress plugin that shows visitors to your blog a unique greeting message depending on the page they are visiting from. E.g. Ask users coming from Digg.com to Digg your post, etc.
  • Chat Catcher – An interesting service to help you track mentions of your blog posts across Twitter, FriendFeed and identi.ca and aggregate them back to your blog. The coolest thing is probably the 'Scriptless' version which can run on WordPress.com and other hosted blogs.
  • Viral Arts: Making you money… Virally – A potentially interesting service that matches YouTube video producers with brands willing to pay them for product placement.
  • The changing face of usability testing: Optimal Workshop releases free service called Treejack » VentureBeat – Basic DIY usability testing tools that allow you to test designs in the form of online surveys. Simple, elegant, and IMHO 80/20 effective (vs full-service usability testing software).
  • Why Bit.ly Will Upstage Digg – Definitely what I would be working on if I was in charge of bit.ly. While analytics were the initial draw for sharers to use bit.ly, recognition as an influencer could be a differentiator now that others like cli.gs and tr.im are commoditizing analytics for shortened URLs. I totally agree with Om that a bit.ly powered Digg (Bigg?) would produce much more interesting and representative results than Digg, which has come to be dominated by an idiosyncratic user community. Also, I think it would be foolish of Bigg to be reserved to bit.ly URLs. Why wouldn't they want share/click data from all the shortened URLs they can get it for?
  • Topspin » “Josh Freese. What are you doin’? This summer.” – Brilliant (and hilarious) showcase of how the internet can make even the way you sell your art part of the experience. Definitely worth the read! My favorite is the $10k package, which includes: "Josh takes you and a guest to Club 33 (the super-duper exclusive and private restaurant at Disneyland located above Pirates of the Caribbean) and then hit a couple rides afterward (preferably the Tiki Room, the Haunted Mansion and Tower of Terror) / At the end of the day at Disneyland, drive away in Josh’s Volvo station wagon. It’s all yours … take it. Just drop him off on your way home, though, please."
  • Relationship Symmetry in Social Networks: Why Facebook will go Fully Asymmetric – Bokardo – A very interesting analysis of the difference between the asymmetric relationship model of Twitter (arguably pioneered by Flickr) and the mostly symmetric relationship model of Facebook today and why the reality of attention inequality is a barrier to Facebook's growth as long as they stick to symmetric relationships.

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."