joshuago’s Bookmarks

Normals make up far more than 99% of Internet users. They also stick around a lot longer and are far more loyal than early adopters.

Spending a little or spending a lot is a means, not an end. Choose the right strategy to win the market or you may end up going straight to purgatory. From Ben Horowitz, former CEO of Opsware, which sold to HP for $1.6B.

When programming in higher level languages that allow for increased productivity by orders of magnitude, running into rare but important cases -- where abstractions leak -- will eventually force you to drop down and understand things at the lower level anyway. It's helpful to know how the underlying thing works.

A fascinating comparison between journalism and religion. Likens j-school to a school of theology, cites "The Journalist's Creed" as a declaration of journalistic faith, points out the "no orthodoxy" orthodoxy, highlights existence of practitioners who don't fully understand the significance of what they're doing, looks at the First Amendment as the press religion, isolates "the public" as journalism's god, likens emergence of public journalism to breakaway churches/schisms.

Lame excuses by old media. Trends are irreversible, so save what's important: investigative journalism. But it needs to be subsidized, so we need to experiment on ways to fund it. Success not guaranteed if we experiment, but failure guaranteed if we don't.

An excellent and entertaining backgrounder that should be required reading for anyone trying to solve the problem of funding journalism in the Internet age. Historical review of how newspapers came to be, how they started off brazenly partisan, moved to being produced by a professional elite, and split out again on the Internet. Touches on a fascinating reference to Walter Lippmann and John Dewey's competing visions for journalism.

What we discovered, of course, was that innovation survived the death of its institutions. High tech companies didn't own innovation; the innovators did. News organizations don't own journalism: journalists do.

Rich and powerful people will always get their news. When trying to save investigative journalism, one challenge is to fight the fatalistic notion that the masses -- or public opinion, depending on who you ask -- do not deserve to be informed. Public opinion cannot be avoided, but in a democracy we're better off if public opinion is informed. The press will be necessary and can continue as long as it can still serve the public.

The idea is Deal Brokering. You use your knowledge of the local scene, your brand and your contacts to negotiate group deals with local businesses from bars to restaurants to dry cleaners. The businesses offer big one-time discounts to attract new customers, your audience gets access to great deals, and you broker the deal on your site and get a substantial cut of the money. It’s already happening around the country.

Collection of Mac style widgets written in Java.