joshuago’s product-ideas Bookmarks

More dynamic textbooks aren’t the solution to the problem of education — they’re not even the solution to the problem of textbooks.

Personal list of ideas.

Video of Steve Jobs and team during the early days of NeXT.

Great overview of LDAP, making clear and explicit what you'd be unsure of when grappling with the monstrosity of all that's involved. And yes, all the major servers are pretty much descended from the same original codebase.

We’re used to thinking of competitive advantage coming from a Eureka-innovation like Google’s PageRank, but the most lasting advantage comes from a million incremental improvements in an operationally intensive business. And there are thousands of opportunities to get operationally intensive.

Mongolia is like baking a cake. All the ingredients are on the table. You've got everything you need to build a modern, prosperous economy. The only thing that's missing is the political leadership to make the tough decisions.

The abundance of printed material replaced the natural, visceral human oral psychodynamics with those of literate and written ones. Twitter and Facebook bring us back to that unpolished conversational flow.

Among the elaborate seals, bronze statues and marble hallways that adorn federal Washington, there is another symbol of the machinery of government that is often overlooked: the lowly ballpoint pen.

Reading news online feels like flying Economy. Loud distracting banners, cheap stock picture material, sloppy typography, a lot of useless comment noise, machine generated reading tips, no human service, and a claustrophobic information design make the reading experience a torture.

Letter to Amazon's shareholders detailing the nature of investments technology infrastructure. Favorite tidbit, personally, is about how technologies are implemented almost exclusively as services, because it "reduces side effects and allows services to evolve at their own pace without impacting the other components of the overall system."