joshuago’s Bookmarks

The money in this networked economy does not follow the path of the copies. Rather it follows the path of attention, and attention has its own circuits.

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."

Our custom split-test reporting lets us really get a good handle on the lifetime behavior (and -value) of a particular group of users who have a specific and explicit Grockit experience. This goes above and beyond the more standard ‘did more people click through on this variation?’ flavor of split-test reporting.

Any time a string could be used over and over, a symbol may be a good candidate for replacement. If the content (i.e. the sequence of characters) of the object is important, use String. If the identity of the object is important, use a Symbol. Save memory.

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.