joshuago’s Bookmarks

Scaling from $5 to $50 million is not the toughest part of a new venture - it's getting your users to pay you anything at all. The biggest gap in any venture is that between a service that is free and one that costs a penny.

This is the perverse logic of meritocracy. Once a system grows sufficiently complex, it doesn’t matter how badly our best and brightest foul things up. Every crisis increases their authority, because they seem to be the only ones who understand the system well enough to fix it.

Strategies to overcome obstacles to building a successful marketplace business: one which connects buyers and sellers in some niche.

Immigration lawyers and Department of Homeland Security officials say that many thousands of people in the military have spouses or close relatives who are illegal immigrants. Many of those service members have fought to gain legal status for their family members — only to hit a legal dead end created in 1996, when Congress last made major revisions to the immigration laws.

After years of trying to broaden the appeal of Reader’s Digest, the publishers are pushing it in a decidedly conservative direction.

A government made up of rotating amateurs cannot maintain the steadiness and continuity that our expansive Republic requires.

Ten percent of the U.S. News rankings are based on spending per student, with additional points for high faculty salaries and other costly items. If an innovative college found a way to become more efficient and charge less while maintaining academic quality, its U.S. News ranking would actually go down.

The Internet highly values people who know things and can find things out, who can distinguish between what's important and what's not, and who can communicate succinctly and effectively. But it abhors the absence of voice.

An excellent and intriguing backgrounder on how Demand Media makes money from algorithmic determination of demand and low-cost content production.

A mini case study of how the Huffington Post grew its traffic.