joshuago’s Bookmarks

If you’re planning a web app, it’s always worth reminding yourself what the base need is that you’re satisfying, and how much value it is likely to have with the user: a successful business/service should neither over nor under-value itself.

As more documents are scanned and go online, many works of historical scholarship will be exposed as flimsy and haphazard. The existence of modern search technology should push us to improve historical research.

Key variable in education is quality of teacher, not quality of school. Teach For America has been tracking what makes some teachers great. Basic quality seems to be "relentlessness."

By carefully curating the people you follow, Twitter becomes an always-on data stream from really bright people in their respective fields, whose tweets are often full of links to incredibly vital, timely information.

It has been reported that a full 40% of executives describe themselves as introverts, including Microsoft's Bill Gates, the über-investors Warren Buffett and Charles Schwab, Avon's chief executive, Andrea Jung, and the late publishing giant Katharine Graham. Odds are President Barack Obama is an innie as well. What does that mean? That introverts, not just extroverts, have the right stuff to lead organizations in a go-go, extroverted business culture.

One considerable advantage to building a paywall is that it forces newspapers to think hard about what their customers (as opposed to their advertisers) might really want.

The reason big new things sneak by incumbents is that the next big thing always starts out being dismissed as a “toy.” To distinguish toys that are disruptive from toys that will remain just toys, you need to look at products as processes.

In 2010, with talk of restructuring large swaths of our economy back in vogue, Prohibition should also remind us that Congress, scientists and economists seized by the noble desire to achieve some great moral goal may be abysmally wrong.

A tired brain, preoccupied with its problems, is going to struggle to resist what it wants, even when what it wants isn't what we need.

Progress will often require modifying or discarding old ideas, but not because they are old. New ideas are better ones only if they do a better job of explaining the world or improving the circumstances in which we live. The ones that fail those tests need to be set aside, not embraced simply because they were coined more recently.