Online monoculture and the end of the niche. In summary: online recommendation systems tend to offer a more diverse selection, but tends to reward fewer products more greatly than others:
In Internet World the customers see further, but they are all looking out from the same tall hilltop. In Offline World individual customers are standing on [...]
“I opened a charming neighborhood coffee shop. Then it destroyed my life.” I can understand the surface appeal, but this always seemed like a very bad idea to me. [via link banana]
It’s just so damn easy to look upon someone else and jealously think, “Wow, he sure got lucky.” Real people did not have great opportunities fall in their lap. Mostly, crappy opportunities come along, and in the meantime, you make the best of them.
—Po Bronson [via powazek]
A map of the world showing the most recent piracy incidents at sea. The hottest spot is the Gulf of Arden, between Yemen and Somalia (surprised?). The next worst are the West African coast and the areas around Singapore.
“As the parent of a four-year-old and a four-year-old who just inherited an additional $540 billion in bailout this week (on top of the $840 billion that everyone already knew about), I felt the need to write a primer that speaks to them.” A primer on the subprime mortgage crisis, written for the young ones. [...]
This makes the third Michael Lewis book I’ve read (see also my take on Moneyball and The Blind Side from last fall). It’s another good one. Liar’s Poker is Lewis’ first book. He writes about his years on Wall Street working with the Salomon Brothers investment firm during the heady 1980s. It’s a biography of [...]
When I heard that milk jugs are being redesigned for better efficiency, I felt a sort of witless glee. Part of that is my usual response to efficiency. And also because most of my high school employment was in the local Kroger, stores #444 and #432 (I still remember that…?). I mostly did night stock, [...]
MagCloud is a new print-on-demand service just for magazines. I’m surprised this didn’t exist already.
I like the idea of a corporate artist in residence. Surely a few companies would buy into it?
Dan Roam does a pretty good job with this one: The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures. One of Roam’s main arguments (sometimes belabored) is that we were all comfortable drawing when we were in kindergarten. Somehow we got frigid. We play visually dumb. We don’t need to.
Visual thinking is [...]
For one year I worked at a regular nine to five job, and I remember well the strange, cozy feeling that comes over one during meetings. I was very aware, because of the novelty, that I was being paid for programming. It seemed just amazing, as if there was a machine on my desk that [...]
Shop Class as Soulcraft, an article about the value of working with your hands and the increasing assembly-line nature of knowledge work:
Much of the “jobs of the future” rhetoric surrounding the eagerness to end shop class and get every warm body into college, thence into a cubicle, implicitly assumes that we are heading to a [...]
It’s almost always the anecdotes that bore me in business books. The Definite Drucker is a sort biography of the ideas of Peter Drucker, the late consultant and management guru. I like a lot of the theory and philosophy, but when we get to the struggles of Motorola’s supply chain or decreasing overhead at Colgate-Palmolive, [...]
Business on the back of the napkin, a slideshow of basic doodling frameworks: portraits, charts, maps & timelines.
A long essay on why crunch mode doesn’t work. The gist is that productivity peaks within the first 4, 5, or 6 hours of the day, then starts dropping. Eventually it dissolves completely. In the long run, that continuous overtime isn’t helping you or your company.
I first heard about A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age when Joshua Blankenship posted this excellent quote from author Daniel Pink. Great stuff, so I found the book, which isn’t as great.
The premise is that the Information Age was led by left-brained, linear-thinkers. Now, as we enter the [...]
There’s going to be a movie version of The Surrogates, starring Bruce Willis (see my review of The Surrogates). I really, really liked the comics, especially because I haven’t found a lot of decent scifi. Very cool book—I hope those Hollywood folks treat it kindly.
By the by, the publishers of The Surrogates, Top Shelf Productions, [...]
I’m really fascinated with this idea of coworking. The trend has gotten some press in NPR, Business Week, Wired, and the New York Post, among others. Folks like Jelly, Citizen Space, and Independents Hall are all doing really cool things, making a business of it. Looks like there’s a coworking group just getting started in [...]
I, too, wonder why famous musicians don’t put out as much music. “I’d feel a bit cheated if they couldn’t put together more than three or four decent new tunes a year. These people are musicians, this is their job. In the mid-’60s, Bob Dylan was probably putting down three or four great new songs [...]
Tim Walker writes about meme entrepreneurship. I love it. Go read it. Unless I misunderstand the point, it seems like a lot of folks are already working in that vein—writers. Just glancing at my bookshelf, there’s Florida and his Creative Class, Friedman and his Flat World, Weinberger’s Miscellany, Anderson’s Long Tail.
I don’t mean that to [...]
A Toyota factory in Georgetown, Kentucky, has a fairly relentless culture of improvement: “Doing the task and doing the task better become one and the same thing. This is what it means to come to work.”
A couple artists are selling paintings of things they want. The price of the painting is the same as the item itself. The Wii painting cost $270.92.
Something I learned today: I was reading this NYT article about fashion, and I discovered that if you double-click a word in an NYT article, it will make a pop-up with a little dictionary/ reference search for you. Doesn’t look like it works on the home page, but that’s pretty cool. Am I the last [...]
Peter has written a lovely little piece about Radiohead’s new album, In Rainbows. Everybody and their mom has touched on the overthrow of the big labels and the utopian arrival of direct-to-ear music subscription, but I thought this was really perceptive:
“They can independently master their disc and shuttle straight to their service provider, with no [...]
I’m prone to reading phases, veering off on thematic streaks. Do other people do this? For example, in the past year I read through the Edward Tufte corpus pretty much back-to-back (reviewed Beautiful Evidence and Envisioning Information), all but one of Steven Johnson’s (reviewed The Ghost Map, Everything Bad Is Good for You), the Scott [...]
An old commercial with the Flintstones advertising Winston cigarettes—”delivers flavor 20 times a pack!” Another good smokes commercial: more doctors smoke camel than any other cigarette.
Good book. I posted a while ago about my initial doubts and then how excited I became about this book as I began to read it. It all turned out fairly well, though I think the glow is gone.
Despite the hokey title, 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich seems to [...]
Subscribe