Squidoo: Seth Godin's Purple Albatross?. Seth Godin is an exceptional marketing consultant. I’ve read all his books – my favorite is Purple Cow. I routinely bring up his ideas when talking to companies about the best way to get media and early adopter attention: build an exceptional, attention-grabbing product (and if you haven’t, go back… Continue reading Squidoo: Seth Godin's Purple Albatross?

Building a Web App? Don't Forget the Premium Plan!. We recently had an experience that was so surprising, I just had to share it with those of you who are building web apps – I believe you’ll find it very valuable. The Expensive Plan If you’re one of the many companies or individuals who are… Continue reading Building a Web App? Don't Forget the Premium Plan!

Startup lessons learned. Paul Graham, who gave us great ideas for startups now comes back with startup lessons learned. Lesson #1: release early. There are several reasons it pays to get version 1 done fast. One is that this is simply the right way to write software, whether for a startup or not. I've been… Continue reading Startup lessons learned

Keep your job. Start a company..  Business 2.0 says they've got 5 ways you can start a new business while keeping your day job. There are a few reasons why this might make sense for you, even if the reason why you're starting a new business is to get away from your old job. Just… Continue reading Keep your job. Start a company.

Productivity with a “time map”. The idea of a “time map” is an interesting one. Simply put, a Time Map is a budget of your day, week, or month that carves out distinct times for each of the key departments of your life. Instead of feeling that you have to act on every request the… Continue reading Productivity with a “time map”

A case for better collaboration software.  The Central Desktop Blog tells us all the reasons why e-mail is bad and explains why you might want to seek out a better solution for your collaboration. The single worst trait of email is that it's silo'ed. What I mean by silo'ed is that email traps information into… Continue reading A case for better collaboration software

Smokin' Mirrors. Resilvering — also known as resyncing, rebuilding, or reconstructing — is the process of repairing a damaged device using the contents of healthy devices. This is what every volume manager or RAID array must do when one of its disks dies, gets replaced, or suffers a transient outage. For a mirror, resilvering can… Continue reading Smokin' Mirrors

Database War Stories #5: craigslist. By tim Eric Scheide of craigslist offered me a stream of consciousness summary of the craigslist database setup. At a conference last year, Craig showed a slide (which helped inspire my postings about asymmetric competition [1, 2, 3]) that listed the number of employees at the top ten web sites.… Continue reading Database War Stories #5: craigslist

Database War Stories #6: O'Reilly Research. By tim In building our Research data mart, which includes data on book sales trends, job postings, blog postings, and other data sources, Roger Magoulas has had to deal with a lot of very messy textual data, transforming it into something with enough structure to put it into a… Continue reading Database War Stories #6: O'Reilly Research

Interview with millionaire Marc Allen. Self-improvement blogger Steve Pavlina does a great interview with entrepreneur and multi-millionaire Marc Allen. Allen describes himself as lazy, running his publishing company on less than 30 hours a week. He sleeps until 11AM, takes Mondays off, spends Sundays with his family, completely disconnected from the internet and work. He… Continue reading Interview with millionaire Marc Allen