Category Archives: Web/Tech

Quick thoughts and links:

• There’s nothing like reading about a personal experience that supports an age-old aphorism like "Try one new thing every day." To me, tired wisdom such as "work hard" only resonates if there’s a compelling personal example under it. My friends Paul Berberian and Seth Levine both recently blogged about doing something for the first time. For Paul, it was flying his plane through clouds for the first time. For Seth, it was kick-boxing with his wife. Have you accumulated an interesting and new experience this week?
• Hail casual attire! The official Neck Tie Association recently closed…after a particularly telling sign: members showed up to their annual meeting without wearing a tie.
• Awesome list of questions any sales exec should ask him/herself about revenue projection numbers.
• Megan McArdle on the ridiculous notion spread through European poltiical circles that American neo-cons got Ireland to vote down the Lisbon treaty:
  

  Canada and Europe, particularly, seem to be prone to the illusion that we spend all of our time thinking up ways to make them feel bad, when in truth we barely think about them at all. Probably we should, more. But it’s hard to imagine a situation in which our first thought would be: "Let’s make Irish voters reject the . . . what was the name of that treaty again?"

• Felix Salmon with a wise line on what makes a person’s writing/thinking valuable, via Walt Mossberg rarely saying anything new but re-stating known ideas in interesting ways:
  

  This is a powerful idea, I think, and one which the best politicians understand intuitively: if you say something which everybody already knows, that doesn’t automatically make you boring.

• Bill Flagg identifies two popular business models for internet companies: the profit model or the popularity model. Should a web company charge for their service (aka Match.com) or become really popular (aka YouTube) and generate profit via ads and sponsorship from that scale?
• An interesting assessment of David Foster Wallace’s voice:
  

  Wallace has the vocabulary. He has the energy. He has the big ideas. He has the attitude. Yet too often he sounds like a hyperarticulate Tin Man. Maybe this is concentrated version of how we all sound lately. Data-dazed. Cybernetic. Overstimulated. Maybe this is the voice of the true now. Or maybe genius, like language, can’t do everything, and maybe the Wizard should give the guy a heart.

• Tyler Cowen on how to overcome book fatigue: read books in a category you wouldn’t normally touch.
  

  The reality is this: the best popular book on geology, gardening, or basketball is very very good, whether or not you like or care about the topic. Try to find those books and read them.

• A deliciously devastating take-down of Sex and the City movie in the New Yorker. One of the best movie reviews I’ve read.

With the four-year anniversary of this blog coming up next month, I thought it’s time to directly solicit feedback and ideas from you, dear reader, on how this blog can be improved. It’s 10 simple/easy questions. The last question is an open text box. It will take less than a minute. It is entirely anonymous. Here’s your chance to influence what content appears on this site!

Here’s the link to the survey.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts! I’ll post the results later. (And thanks to my friends at Survey Gizmo providing the software for the survey — it’s the best polling app I’ve used on the web.)

From The Economist on the software industry:

An industry rule of thumb is that a bug which costs $1 to fix on the programmer’s desktop costs $100 to fix once it is incorporated into a build, and thousands of dollars if it is identified only after the software has been deployed in the field.

The larger idea about fixing things early in its lifecycle is interesting. Take hiring/firing. We almost always wait too long to fire someone. When was the last time you heard someone say, "I think I fired him too soon." The longer we wait to correct a screw-up, the more expensive the mistake becomes. Yet stubbornness or overvaluing sunk costs often keep us from acting as quickly as we should.

(Here’s my Rule of Thumb wiki.)

Doing interviews is hard. I’ve been interviewed many times and few really become interesting. The handful of times I’ve been on the questioning side I’m always struck by how hard it is to get to something revealing in a short period of time.

For those not following the SxSW conference scene, BusinessWeek reporter Sarah Lacy conducted a disastrous on-stage interview with Mark Zuckerberg. It’s a worthwhile study for anyone interested in the art of interviewing. It’s also a fascinating example of how powerful online crowds can become: it didn’t take long for people Twittering and blogging the interview to turn against Lacy, and this online negative momentum carried into the physical room and led to heckles and shouts.

Jeff Jarvis, one of the sharpest bloggers on journalism and blogging, has a good post-fiasco analysis. He starts by saying Lacy didn’t know her audience. Knowing your audience: the golden rule for all writing and public speaking.

Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior VP for Product Management and Marketing at Google, spoke at Claremont last week, and one of the things he said was that in the old days everybody thought convergence would happen at the device level. We’d have some super duper device that would do everything. Instead, as we all continue to lug around many different power chargers, it’s clear convergence will happen at the data level. Integration and global access to this data, then, will be a key challenge.

I’ve been thinking about this as I reflect on one of my 2008 goals which is to re-vamp the way I manage my address book and “social data.” The people I know and the relationships I have are important to me, yet the information I have about these people is scattered across many databases and services. This makes it difficult to know who I know, the last time I talked to them, what other services they use, their latest contact info, etc.

Currently, my base for social info is my address book which lives in an Exchange server that I access locally in Microsoft Entourage (the sucky Mac alternative to Outlook) and on my T-Mobile Dash. Within Entourage I do email, calendar, address book, and tasks — accessing this integrated data in one app is awesome. Thanks to Exchange, I enjoy real time sync across my local machine, mobile device, and webmail.

Then I have many fringe data centers. I have over 1,000 friends in Facebook. Hundreds in LinkedIn and Plaxo and other networks. I have a few thousand in my email newsletter database (MailerMailer). A few dozen in Salesforce.com Personal Edition (which I use for more conventional sales-type leads). And then the 1,200 contacts in my address book on Exchange. Some of these records overlap, some do not. Then there are even more fringe places like my 350 RSS feeds, IM, del.icio.us, Twitter, and other places where I have silos of contact data.

None of it is integrated. When I go to a city, I can’t quickly see who I know in the city. When I pull up an entry in my address book, I can’t immediately see when my last contact with that person was. I can’t easily see who I’m not connected to on a social network even though I know the person. As a Mac user, I can’t use plug-ins like Xobni or the Salesforce Outlook plug-in (and run a SFDC CRM system for personal use). Without a plug-in to my email workhorse, I’m screwed, because non-integrated web-based solutions such as HighRise require too much double-entry (though if anyone wants to persuade me otherwise, I’m all ears). And I’m not prepared to jump 100% into one social network – I’d prefer for my data to be on my own server and be platform agnostic.

Obviously, this is not just my challenge. Data convergence in the cloud, particularly around social information, is one of the primary drivers of the new wave of internet stuff being developed. If you hear the phrases “implicit web” or “defrag” or “social graph” – it usually refers to these issues.

One interesting result of this non-integrated infrastructure is that I’m not devoting much energy toward maintaining ties with people who don’t intersect with me on at least one level of my “social stack”. In other words, if I’m not reading your blog, not following you on Twitter, not friends with you on a social network, not following you on del.icio.us, if you’re not on my email newsletter: I forget about you. Moreover, when deciding whether to invest time in an old friend who isn’t engaging with me somewhere on this stack or in someone new who is engaging with me (reading my blog or del.icio.us or whatever), I’m inclined toward the latter. As my interests and life changes, I find I have a stronger connection with people who are following me in “real time.”

In an ideal world the technology would allow me to organize my social data in a global way and not discriminate against those who don’t care for blogs or Twittering. Alas, it’s not there yet, though any fellow Mac users who have clever strategies are encouraged to comment on this post! In the meantime, as I spend more and more time producing and consuming content on the internet, my real-life connections and social habits have changed accordingly.