Morrie the Toupee Salesman

“Techmeme is a template for a gazillion me-too bloggers who manage to write a dozen posts a day without ever expressing an original thought. That, depressingly, appears to be a successful business model, at least for now.”
Link

[Read more →]

Nice article in the Economist about another “entrepreneurship can fix anything” programs. In this case it’s a way to find careers for ex-convicts. But there’s a lot of truth to the assertion in the article that:
“… that many criminals are intelligent people with good heads for business and healthy appetites for risk, and that these […]

[Read more →]

“It’s clear that the real growth in the Web 2.0 sector is happening outside of the Bay Area”
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9896632-7.html

[Read more →]

Following up on my previous massively popular piece on bootstrapping, I’d like to outline what I see as the next logical step. In general programmers should feel comfortable with business planning - since it’s mostly the same design process, albeit with different tools, goals, language… The overall approach is familiar - invest a little time […]

[Read more →]

There’s lots of articles out there on strategy for entrepreneurs, but they seem heavily weighted towards those of us who have contacts in the venture capital industry, rather than the small, sometimes desperate bands of heroes that can be found out there in their home offices and coffee shops. With limited funds, time and other […]

[Read more →]

A nice piece from Jeremy Liew this morning. I have long felt that the kind of testing described there (which I’m going to condense into the catchphrase “A/B Testing”) is a great alternative to the vast assortment of mechanisms favored by orthodox marketers. Focus groups, polling, and the rest of the panoply of how marketers […]

[Read more →]

Love the Dave Winer comment here:
“…At a blogging conference, an open discussion, a young person asked me how much a guy my age could really understand about blogs.”
ex·pe·ri·ence
-noun
…
4. knowledge or practical wisdom gained from what one has observed, encountered, or undergone:a man of experience.
In my experience (and I have experienced similar comments) arrogance is a […]

[Read more →]

I’ve been building something really dumb Simple-stupid, kind of fun, seductive but with a little hint of guilt to go with it. Sound familiar?
Anyway as part of it I’ve been looking at search APIs. And boy, do they suck. I’m gonna write a little more about that, but one initial impression - these API […]

[Read more →]

The other day, digg announced that they had joined the Dataportability project. There’s lots of skepticism out there about whether that organization will actually produce anything useful, with lots of smart people saying it’s unlikely. I disagree, and as a shareholder in a member organization, I applaud the possibility. Here’s why.
The latest round of Google-inspired […]

[Read more →]

I’ve been watching some poker on tv lately - it’s probably fueled by my addiction to ujogo.com. What I find really interesting is how bad the “professional” poker players are. They constantly make rookie mistakes, pay to see the flop with really bad hands, chase straights that they have little hope of getting. Add to […]

[Read more →]