Posts

Loving Umair Haque these days and his excellently penned essays on the zombieconomy and how we got into this trouble in the first place How not to Hummer your business .

What is unnovation? It’s when your business eats its children and destroys the long term value it has been creating (if you’re lucky) by focusing on seductive, easy short-term profits. Great rant illustrated by the Hummer, but insert your value-destroying business move from the 90’s and noughts here.

Frightening short piece from the Atlantic about the effects of Tiananmen censorship on cultural memory. I find this amazingly Orwellian and chilling as all hell. I think we all hope to live in a world where censorship doesn’t work as a form of repression.

I have spent a lot of time over the past three years with Chinese university students. They know a lot about the world, and about American history, and about certain periods in their own country’s past… But you can’t assume they will ever have heard of what happened in Tiananmen Square twenty years ago. For a minority of people in China, the upcoming date of June 4 has tremendous significance. For most young people, it’s just another day.

Wow. Pretty incredible trailer for the video game Star Wars: The Old Republic. Don’t know anything about the game itself but have to say this is the best teaser for a video game I have ever seen. Seeths drama, menace, and intrigue.

I so want someone to come up with a Wii game I can duel with my WiiRemote like a lightsaber to… ;-)

I love the work the folks at MySociety are doing these days. Mapumental is a great bit of geekery allowing someone to figure out where they can live based on commute, housing prices and scenery. Check out the jaw-dropping demo below since the thing is still in private beta. I so wish they would have this for rental prices added in.

Great article in copyblogger about how to tighten up your copy to make sure you kill those sales conversion trolls .

Avoid the carney, the sea-monkeys, and the trolls. Write content to be identifiable, engender trust, and provide clarity on calls to action.

Ahhh… finally, the Google Wave developer preview of Google’s HTML 5 re-imagining of online collaboration and communications at Google’s I/O conference.

The interesting idea of it as a Product, Platform (for the embedding of things in the web) and Protocols as well as the re-visioning of email if it had been invented today, kinda sorts well with actual usage. For example, in the demo, the use of email and then a sort of “in-email” IM session (we’re going to need new verbs and adjectives, I can tell) being used is pretty similar to what really happens in real life though you generally have to jump to a new app and those conversations end up being isolated form each other. So, at least that idea in Wave is sound.

Amnesty International’s Annual Report for 2009 , the definitive report on the state of the world’s human rights is now live.

Pretty smooth sailing technically this time round due to using Drupal (the same CMS we use on the main amnesty.org site and some excellent dev help from the fine, fine folks over at CivicActions (except for a worrying little last-minute technical terror of a bug that slipped through).

Really useful article on how to start implementing continuous deployment in your organization. It encapsulates a lot of the stuff I just posted on the Five Whys and Lean Startups.

I can imagine a few other things you need here, like a complete sandbox for for each dev, as well as the continuous integration server to keep testing every commit, and the cultural change is enormous but not onerous.

I think the other important thing is that this is scary. Even me at my most crazy would be a bit concerned about this. People will be worried, especially if this is something you haven’t done from the very start. You also need a culture that doesn’t punish honest mistakes. Otherwise, people will fear to deploy something in short cycles from idea to production in nothing time.

Great article from the currently totally-on-fire Eric Ries.

One of the major things we’ve learned about user stories, even if we’ve never articulated it, is about “popping the why stack.” In essence, you ask “Why ?” a number of times and, if at the end of those five whys, the answer isn’t increasing revenue, protecting revenue, or reducing costs, that feature you’re writing probably isn’t worth the time.

I never realized the idea came from Toyota where it’s practically a gospel part of their keizen process in improving quality and reducing defects.

Really liked this article (dead link) by Lifehacker’s ex-hacker-in-chief Gina Trapani on her personal business model. Basically, it’s never always about the money (unless you’re a very shallow person). Primarily about freelancing, it has a nice framework for how to split your time between the benjamins and the other important things.

How she developed it her business model:

1. List of people you admire in business (and why)
2. List of people you enjoyed working with (and why)
3. Big Question: What do you want to accomplish ?

It distills to a 30/30/30/10 business model which is interesting. I’m hoping she updates this post at some point in the future with a followup telling us how the reality tracked to the ideal and what sort of tough decisions she might have made looking at that pie chart.