Mind Like Water

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Simplifying your product practically ↵

We spent two weeks designing and creating an iPhone app. I sent an email to my mum with the name and the one line description of the app. She wrote back a single sentence: "I don't get it." We threw out the code and the product and started over.

and

If you cannot describe your product in one sentence, you cannot sell it. People don't want to listen to you explain, they just want a simple and clear answer to the question: What does it do? If you need two sentences to answer that, then you are in for trouble. 

Becoming a self-employed graphic designer ↵

David Airey shares a quick overview on how he switched to self-employment, the first step of which was to freelance.

Starting out with a retainer client was vital to my success, and while those three days per week brought in just enough cash to get me by, they allowed plenty of time to work on the build of my website and blog (my main self-promotion tool).

Do you really want to be rich? ↵

There are three types of people who want to make money:
- those who want to be looked up to
- those who want to be comfortable
- those who want to have more money

Which one of the three should you be having business partnerships with?

Culture and children remain biggest barriers to women in tech ↵

Chris O’Brien, one-time stay-at-home dad, is reminded that it’s so often that mothers are the ones who have to plan their lives around children.

...the overwhelming force of our culture (women are expected to raise the kids), economy (disparity in pay) and policies (California remains one of the few states that provides paid paternity and maternity leaves) place the role of child raising on women. 

But achieving the equity in the office that we claim to want is going to require much more radical changes in our culture, economy and policies than we have been willing to contemplate. 

What You Should Read About Monetizing Your Tweetstream ↵

Mark Drapeau gives us both sides of the coin:

There's been a lot of discussion about the authority of Twitter users, and how users with many followers, or authority, or subject-matter expertise, might monetize their tweetstream via inserting paid advertisements. Here are the most important articles I've seen about this debate. I recommend reading them in the order below.

The New York Times has a piece that makes it sound cool and neat-o. 

Paul Carr has a piece at TechCrunch that makes it sound like the end of civilization. 

A venture capitalist investor in one of the services wrote a piece defending the idea. 

Robert Scoble crunches some numbers and writes a good piece that digs deeper. 

Finally, read this piece about the hypothetical SuperTweet with a "metadata payload."

The One Superhero the iPad Can't Save

The Power of Less

The Power of Less: The 6 Essential Productivity Principles That Will Change Your Life by Leo Babauta.

In Babauta’s typical style and simplicity, this book is a lovely collection of philosophies on productivity, minimalism, moving on, getting sh*t done, and focusing on what you really want to do. Along with The 4-Hour Workweek, this book changed my attitude about my time (a non-renewable resource!) and how I make decisions.

5 Stages of Programmer Incompetence ↵

Every now and again I see glimpses of myself in ‘younger’ programmers as they struggle with the same concepts I did, fall into the same mental traps and generally make similar mistakes. Writing the 4 wrong ways post made me wonder how common these phases really are and whether we could categorize them. 

You too? Well wonder no longer, for I have completed this herculean task! I’ve found myself in each of these traps at least once – some of them several times – and have seen them in others too. Are there more out there?

Bring microblogging (like Twitter) to your own domain ↵

You may have heard of Status.net in its early days when it was called laconi.ca .

Status.net is a microblogging platform - just like Twitter. Except that, unlike Twitter, Status.net is completely open-source and you can run your entire microblog privately..

The folks at Dreamhost set up a site to demonstrate: behold, PetStatus.com

Please, make stuff. ↵

We pay people to do all sorts of things we used to do ourselves. In some cases, this makes sense; “outsourcing” can free us from work we find drudgery, allowing us to pursue our passions. But sometimes this reliance on professionals and experts makes us more detached from the things we ought to know about.

If you've never made a thing yourself, you will never know the value of time and labour.
So, please: make stuff.

Women-owned businesses less likely to fail per this "Women in high tech study" ↵

As the global economy regenerates, new business models are needed to stimulate economic and job growth. Investors seeking to reinvigorate bottom-line performance and to favorably impact the entrepreneurial strength of our economy would be wise to support strategies that enable high-tech start-ups that are inclusive of women entrepreneurs.

How Many Social Networks Are You Part Of? ↵

Immediately Facebook, Twitter and perhaps LinkedIn comes to mind. But even e-mail, as Mark Drapeau points out, is a social network in itself.

Being part of a social network is rewarding in itself. But connecting ideas between them takes things to another level; often people in one community have solved a problem in a way that's useful to another community. Are you the person sharing those ideas across social networks?

Microstorytelling Overkill and the Conundrum of the Exciting Event ↵

For the hashtag-happy:

At some points, some participants were tweeting something every couple of minutes. And in some cases participants were retweeting other participants. What's the "right" number of tweets? Everyone has to decide that for themselves.

I've personally always preferred to wait for the well-thought out blog post, after the event.

Small businesses flocking to social media, but still like to self-promote ↵

Talking about their own expertise is popular, customer service is not. But what's new, right?

They want engagement, but aren't doing a good job of BEING engaging, it seems.

Genius is misunderstood as a bolt of lightning ↵

Genius is actually the eventual public recognition of dozens (or hundreds) of failed attempts at solving a problem. Sometimes we fail in public, often we fail in private, but people who are doing creative work are constantly failing.

In the words of a famous man: Stay hungry. Stay foolish.

Interview with the creator of the Apple startup sound ↵

What's most interesting to me is all of the math behind it -- while making music is traditionally seen as an art, there's a lot of technical know how and information that actually went into the sound's creation. Essentially, you're creating a beep that has to represent a brand, and that mix of technical data with artistic representation is fascinating.

Rude Q&A ↵

Jason Cohen compiles a laundry list of the harshest questions a startup might be asked, and how they might be dealt with.

Palm Pre sales doing poorly because of small screen ↵

Robert Scoble:

I believe Palm made a fundamental market miscall. They assumed that people would adopt a small phone with a decent experience and web browser.
They bet against the geeks. They bet against the web.
They bet wrong.

The missus insists she's alright with a smaller screen though, because she wants a smaller phone (the iPhone/Blackberry types are "clunky"). We'll see if she changes her mind.

There’s a Bizarro app for that ↵

Expertise vs Inadequacy ↵

I'm sick of being admonished that success is predicated on spending the next 10,000 hours of our lives becoming "an expert."

Jason Cohen, on how everyone is so caught up trying to be an expert that we're forgetting about what's important: just getting work done.

Always Be Marketing ↵

Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software, in an interview on the Mac Indie Marketing blog:

...we developers are shy, scared, and would rather be programming than doing anything “out there in public.” So I often implore other developers to say yes to interviews, speaking engagements, etc., before your scared nerd-brain can take over and run screaming.