> I sometimes think about Paul McCartney. People always say, “Oh, Paul McCartney, he sold out. He writes popular music.” Paul McCartney is as true to himself as John Lennon was true to himself. They just had different interests. One of the things that I find is that I tend not to be very good at making commercial Hollywood movies. Every time I try, I fail, because I don’t understand them. I worked with Denzel Washington and he understands how to make a good Hollywood movie. He understands what the audience is thinking and wanting and knows how to do that without being crass. It’s an art; it’s a skill. It’s just a question of what your goal is. I do think about what I want from the second half of my life. I don’t know what I want to do…

This is the story of a wonderful idea. Something that had never been done before, a moment of change that shaped the Internet we know today. This is the story of Flickr. And how Yahoo bought it and murdered it and screwed itself out of relevance along the way.

A treasure trove of unearthed interviews, conducted by the writer who knew him best, reveals how Jobs's ultimate success at Apple can be traced directly to his so-called wilderness years.

We send a lot of mail for Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, and Campfire (and some for Sortfolio, the Jobs Board, Writeboard, and Tadalist). One of the most frequently asked questions we get is about how we handle mail delivery and ensure that emails are making it to people’s inboxes.

Design is popularly being hailed as the savior of many businesses yet many people don’t really know what design involves. This continues a cycle of doubt, underfunding, and incredulity at its true power. By revealing the inner workings of our design practices, explaining our choices, reinforcing those choices with references to provable academic theories, and teaching our colleagues what goes into every pixel placement, workflow, and word choice, we increase the value of our practice and of ourselves as practitioners. It’s the realization that designers are much more than simple pixel-pushers that will continue to bring new clients and new levels of corporate reach and achievement.

If every additional user is putting money in the developers' pockets, then you're less likely to see the site disappear overnight. If every new user is costing the developers money, and the site is really taking off, then get ready to read about those synergies.

Spotify uses some particularly clever streaming technology to deliver all that instant music. It’s been described in an academic paper by Spotify techno-wizards Gunnar Kreitz and Fredrik Niemelä, who included some very interesting statistics and analysis of their measurements taken during one week in the early part of 2010. It’s a pretty dense technical read, but there are some fascinating stats to be gleaned amongst the computer science. Read on for a condensed summary below!

By @philadams of @blondedigital: So I came up with this idea for a universal social strategy.It’s a one-size-fits-all framework that will hopefully help if you’re given a blank sheet of paper and asked to develop a “social media” strategy.It’s designed to ensure that you ask the right questions and avoid some of the common pitfalls, many of which arise from the sloppy use of language.

"Once you are Turing'd it is much easier to believe other occupations which we humans used to do uniquely, can be done by computers. You tend to be open to disruptive technology in all parts of your life."

Proposals are difficult. They take too long. They’re usually an exercise in unrequited love. Is it any surprise creative professionals cringe when it’s time to put one together? Proposals are, however, often vital to being in business. Whether you’re running a solo shop or keeping a team of 25 busy, they lead directly to that next paycheck, enable us to keep the gears of business turning, and, ultimately, to make wonderful stuff.

If you’re interested in learning something new, this article is for you.  Broken down by subject and/or category, here are several top-notch self-education resources I have bookmarked online over the past few years.

If you run a creative services business and haven’t seen Mike Monteiro’s F*ck You. Pay Me. talk, take 40 minutes and watch it. In his ever-so-subtle style, Mike provides a real world overview of the red flags that result in you not getting paid for your work. A lot of the talk focuses on the importance of having a sound contract and a lawyer’s ear, both of which are crucial. While Mike’s talk hit on the big points, there are also some smaller details that can a make big difference. For example, how you invoice.

The Idea: After losing a proxy fight to the activist investor Carl Icahn, Blockbuster’s then CEO faced a new obstacle: executing strategy in the face of boardroom opposition. He looks back on what he might have done differently.

> Business owners do not normally work for money either. They work for the enjoyment of their competitive skill, in the context of a life where competing skillfully makes sense. The money they earn supports this way of life. The same is true of their businesses. One might think that they view their businesses as nothing more than machines to produce profits, since they do closely monitor their accounts to keep tabs on those profits.

> But this way of thinking replaces the point of the machine's activity with a diagnostic test of how well it is performing. Normally, one senses whether one is performing skillfully. A basketball player does not need to count baskets to know whether the team as a whole is in flow. Saying that the point of business is to produce profit is like saying that the whole point of playing basketball is to make as many baskets as possible. One could make many more baskets by having no opponent.

> The game and styles of playing the game are what matter because they produce identities people care about. Likewise, a business develops an identity by providing a product or a service to people. To do that it needs capital, and it needs to make a profit, but no more than it needs to have competent employees or customers or any other thing that enables production to take place. None of this is the goal of the activity.

(via: http://kottke.org/11/01/the-goal-of-business)

For our purposes, it’s worth noting the difference between a critique (which happens between peers or from more senior professionals, such as art directors), and feedback (which comes from clients). In other words, feedback comes from people paying a designer to solve business problems—people who may not be suitably impressed that you implemented a 16 column grid across a golden mean. (I’ll be impressed FOR them.)

Shigeru Miyamoto has always tried to re-create his childhood wonderment. He’s the closest thing there is to an autobiographical game creator, and shuns focus groups: “As long as I can enjoy something, other people can enjoy it, too.”

Speaking just for myself, the next Bon Jovi concert I’ll consider attending now will be one with a completely different set list of tracks that I like as much as the ones you released 20 years ago. All you have to do is start recording them, and I promise that my wife or I will purchase them. So will the rest of your fans. Until that happens, and other musicians start churning out great music by the album rather than the song, the industry’s going to be in trouble. And if it keeps blaming the system rather than itself, it will deserve its fate.

I wrote a comment for Hacker News back in August in response to a guy's question about what a non-programmer should do in a startup. My response received 164 up votes and is the tenth most popular comment of all time. In this article I add some depth to most of my previous twenty bullet points.

Daring Fireball:<br />
<br />
> But what interests me about all this is the underlying war going on between those playing the pageview game, and those that hate the pageview game. To put it another (simplified) way: the war between quality versus quantity.<br />
Siegler comes close to getting it, but falls short. Pageviews, as a metric used for directly billing advertisers, are a scam. Publishers game it with sensational link-bait articles and bullshit tricks like breaking articles into multiple “pages”. Advertisers get stuck paying for valueless impressions. Readers get stuck with the sensational bullshit articles, the tricks (like breaking single articles into multiple “pages”), and suffer through too many annoying ads surrounding actual content.<br />
It is, as Jim Coudal and I argued at SXSW, a race to the bottom. Be careful of the “everyones” who say pageviews are imperfect but the best we can do. They’re the ones who are happy with the web as a market for bullshit.

I'm about to leave a company with notoriously poor meetings. A 'meeting faerie' as Godin suggest might be just the ticket.

If anyone can be said to represent the spirit of an entrepreneurial generation, the man to beat for now is the charismatic cofounder and chairman of Apple Computer, Inc., Steven Jobs. He transformed a small business begun in a garage in Los Altos, California, into a revolutionary billion-dollar company--one that joined the ranks of the Fortune 500 in just five years, faster than any other company in history. And what's most galling about it is that the guy is only 29 years old

50 scientifically proven ways constitute 50 chapters of the book, longest of which take 7 pages. The authors take the position that persuasion is a science, not art, hence with the right approach anybody can become the master in the skill of persuasion. So, what are the 50 ways?

The toilets in my apartment spontaneously overflowed, and then I got an iPhone. That’s the short version of the story, but really, the long version is funnier.

Why do people say 'yes'? How can we get them to comply with our requests? I asked my Fripp Associate David Palmer, PhD, MBA, CPA, an expert on negotiations and marketing. David Palmer has read more business books and managements books than any other person I have ever met; without hesitation he always refers to the best book to help anyone in their career is Robert Cialdini's Influence: Science and Practice. Enjoy my interview. You next logic step is to buy Dr. Cialdini's book.

You know what we’ve found? Magical things happen when employees know they’ll get to be king for a week. Gone is the complaining about what management is forcing them to do, because rotating management gives them a clear perspective of both sides of the fence. Employees will step up and grow if you give them the chance.

AIR, like the cross-platform widget toolkits and application frameworks that came before it, is the gray mystery meat of client-side software. It gets the job done, but it’s hard to stomach. For anyone who used a computer in the 1990s, AIR probably brings back scarring memories of Java apps: slow, ugly, inconsistent, awkward.

“I think that ‘Designed by Apple in California’ is the most brilliant thing to ever appear on a package,” I wrote on the application-site that was mentioned in yesterday’s post on sites that landed jobs at 37signals. SvN reader Michael P. Mills asked:

One way to escape a commodity market is to offer something that isn’t a commodity. This has been the preferred advice of people committed to the re-invention of newspapers. It is a truism bordering on drinking game material that anyone advising newspapers will at some point say “All you need to do is offer a product so relevant and valuable the consumer is willing to pay for it!”<br />
This advice is well-meaning. It’s just not much help. The suggestion that newspapers should, in the future, create a digital product users are willing to pay for is merely a restatement of the problem, by way of admission that the current product does not pass that test.

Among fans and artists, of course, Ticketmaster is widely despised. It extracts high service fees (known commonly as “those goddamned Ticketmaster service fees”) but has offered very little innovation in ticketing over the past 30 years. The Pixies, for example, added thousands of names, complete with contact info, to their marketing database thanks to the Troxy gig—something they can’t generally get when they sell tickets through Ticketmaster. And now, in the wake of the Live Nation merger, many in the concert industry are worried that Ticketmaster might be more interested in promoting its own artists and venues than in selling tickets for rival acts.

Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream.

I left Yahoo over two years ago, but prior to that I spent three years running product for Delicious.  Since then I’ve remained a loyal user and supporter.  To this day I keep in touch with former Delicious colleagues and consider many to be friends.  And though I’ve felt that Delicious has been frustratingly slow to evolve in recent years, I’ve always wished the best for the product and the remaining team members.

WASHINGTON — How did a 153-year-old magazine — one that first published the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and gave voice to the abolitionist and transcendentalist movements — reinvent itself for the 21st century?<br />
<br />
By pretending it was a Silicon Valley start-up that needed to kill itself to survive.

He's worth an estimated $450 million and hobnobs with Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. How the Brooklyn-born performer has become the leading music impresario of his generation.

Tony Hsieh: Yeah, on average it’s about 2 or 3% of people take it. ... We started this a few years ago and it actually started out at $100 dollars and we keep actually upping the offer.  It’s at $2,000 now and actually at the end of the training, which is 4 weeks we up it to $3,000 and extend it beyond that and we keep upping it because we feel like not enough people are taking it and the original motivation was to get people that...  We don’t want people at Zappos that are there just for a paycheck.  Is this a company whose culture I want to be a part of and contribute to and when they decide to turn down the easy money when they come back to the office on Monday they’re that much more passionate and engaged and committed and that has been by far, the biggest benefit.

Youth Radio obtained a hand-written business plan from a pimp (PDF below) during our investigation for Trafficked (obtained from a prosecutor.) The business plan titled Keep It Pimpin states how the pimp wants to expand his trafficking business locally as well as nationally. He also writes that he wants to discover girls “from all over”--especially girls in jail houses and in small cities.

I think this will prove to be important: 3 great editable custom report templates for analysing page efficiency, visitor acquisition efficiency and a paid search 'micro-ecosystem' for employees at all levels.

Lore and Bharara did about $180 million in revenue in 2009 and expect to bring in about $300 million in 2010. Just five years old, Quidsi (the name means "what if?" in Latin) is already breaking even in a category that wasn't supposed to work on the internet: Quickly shipping bulky, low-margin commodities. The partners don't make money on diapers, and never planned to. Diapers are the draw that brings in loyal customers who order over and over. The money comes when a shopper throws in one of the other 25,000 SKUs, or Stock Keeping Units, that Diapers.com lists on its site—higher-margin items like brand-name baby shampoo, wipes, and formula.

It’s also one of the frankest CEO interviews you’ll ever read. Sculley talks openly about Jobs and Apple, admits it was a mistake to hire him to run the company and that he knows little about computers. It’s rare for anyone, never mind a big-time CEO, to make such frank assessment of their career in public.

This blog post is a starter guide that outlines the steps I personally undertake most commonly when handed the keys to the data for a website. 
I want to share where in your web analytics data you can find valuable starting points, even without any context about the site / business / priorities. Reports to look at, KPIs to evaluate, inferences to make.
I hope you'll benefit from my humble experience. Let's go!

Management speak - don't you just hate it? Emphatically yes, judging by readers' responses to writer Lucy Kellaway's campaign against office jargon. Here, we list 50 of the best worst examples.

How do you hire a programmer if you’re not one yourself? Some things to look for…

According to his Facebook profile, Zuckerberg has three sisters (Randi, Donna, and Arielle), all of whom he’s friends with. He’s friends with his parents, Karen and Edward Zuckerberg. He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy and attended Harvard University. He’s a fan of the comedian Andy Samberg and counts among his favorite musicians Green Day, Jay-Z, Taylor Swift, and Shakira. He is twenty-six years old.

Paul Rand (1914-1996) was a pioneering figure in American graphic design whose career spanned almost seven decades. Always enquiring and investigating, he explored the formal vocabulary of European avant-garde art movements and synthesised them to produce a distinctive graphic language. Rand was a major force in editorial design, advertising and corporate identity. He worked at the Weintraub Advertising Agency from 1941-1954 and, in 1955, established his own design studio, acting as consultant to companies such as IBM, Westinghouse and UPS. His logos for these companies are world-renowned design classics. This book comprises a definitive collection of Rand's works, through an exploration of his advertising, publishing and corporate identity work. Steven Heller's text, with a foreword by designer Armin Hofmann, introduction by advertising guru George Lois, and a concluding essay by designer and writer Jessica Helfand, offer an insight into Paul Rand's work.

In September 2008, Mr. Sicha, Alex Balk and David Cho all found themselves laid off from Radar, the on-again-off-again magazine and Web site. Confronted by the headwinds of a growing media recession, they decided to hand-crank a future by starting their own site.

At 19, Sean Parker helped create Napster. At 24, he was founding president of Facebook. At 30, he’s the hard-partying, press-shy genius of social networking, a budding billionaire, and about to be famous—played by Justin Timberlake in David Fincher’s new film, The Social Network.

Here are the top five reasons why being a “jack of all trades,” what I prefer to call a “generalist,” is making a comeback:

Drawing on a wide body of research, including extensive in-depth interviews, "The One Thing You Need To Know" reveals the central insights that lie at the core of: Great Managing, Great Leadership and Great Careers. Buckingham uses a wealth of relevant examples to reveal that at the heart of each insight lies a controlling insight. Lose sight of this 'one thing' and all of your best efforts at managing, leading, or individual achievement will be diminished. For great managing, the controlling insight has less to do with fairness, or team building, or clear expectations (although all are important). Rather, the one thing great managers know is the need to discover and then capitalize on what is unique about each person. For leadership, the controlling insight is the opposite - discover and capitalize on what is universal to all your people, regardless of differences in personality, race, sex, or age.

Do you have the opportunity to do what you do best everyday? Chances are you don t. All too often, our natural talents go untapped. From the cradle to the cubicle, we devote more time to fixing our shortcomings than to developing our strengths. To help people uncover their talents, Gallup introduced the first version of its online assessment, StrengthsFinder, in the 2001 management book Now, Discover Your Strengths. The book spent more than five years on the bestseller lists and ignited a global conversation, while Strengths Finder helped millions to discover their Top 5 talents. In StrengthsFinder 2.0, Gallup unveils the new and improved version of its popular assessment, language of 34 themes, and much more. Loaded with hundreds of strategies for applying your strengths, this new book and accompanying website will change the way you look at yourself - and the world around you - forever. While you can read this book in one sitting, you ll use it as a reference forever.

These qualities – the ones that make for a fulfilling career – can be distilled down into 4 main categories, or “pillars,” as I like to call them. They are: Meaning, Atmosphere, Passion, and Skills – aka M.A.P.S., a career compass to help point you in the right direction.

What terrible business jargon do you need unsucked?

As some people here don’t care about making their living from the internet, I understand that this post will not be for everybody. However, if you’ve just made the leap to working for yourself, currently run your own business, or you’re looking to make your money online in the future, this article may be just what you need. Over the last 18 months of working for myself, I’ve learned a ton of things on my journey. Not every piece of advice I took on board has helped, with many ideas quickly being discarded. From reading dozens of books, speaking with hundreds of entrepreneurs, and living this life myself for a year and a half, there are a few lessons I would like to share.

Jordan Kavoosi built an empire of fake term papers. Now the writers want their cut.

Everyone wants to be like Steve Jobs and his powerhouse company. It's not as easy as it looks.

With the opening of stores in the north of England, Tony Naylor has been compelled to reassess his distaste for Waitrose. Is it the standard by which all supermarkets should be judged?

"A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living."

"David’s victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time. The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases."

RT @dcurtis: Why I Sold Zappos, by Tony Hseih http://bit.ly/cLg6zp

You really should read this.

"Forget about the Gates Foundation. The world's biggest charity owns IKEA—and is devoted to interior design."

"Having accurate information about competitors is vital to your company's ability to maintain its competitive advantage. With a structured way to manage competitive knowledge, your company can maximize opportunity in your market while minimizing the threat of current and potential competitors. Competitious is an easy, confidential way to discover and share competitive information collaboratively across your organization, and keep your company competitive."

"After a decline in popularity in the 1990s, Lego is once more the toy topping Christmas lists, thanks to a canny mix of innovative designs and a re-embracing of the company’s original vision. "

"At Google we believe that open systems win. They lead to more innovation, value, and freedom of choice for consumers, and a vibrant, profitable, and competitive ecosystem for businesses. Many companies will claim roughly the same thing since they know that declaring themselves to be open is both good for their brand and completely without risk. After all, in our industry there is no clear definition of what open really means. It is a Rashomon-like term: highly subjective and vitally important."

"Presidential candidates are calling for tougher labor standards in trade agreements. But can such standards be enforced? Here's what I learned from my old job."

"And in a corner of the white board at the end of his long conference room, Mr. Collins keeps a short list. That, he explains, is a running tally of how he’s spending his time, and whether he’s sticking to a big goal he set for himself years ago: to spend 50 percent of his workdays on creative pursuits like research and writing books, 30 percent on teaching-related activities, and 20 percent on all the other things he has to do."

Summary of four types of people management.

"Tips For Students with a Bachelors in Computer Science" - but relevant for many more.

"I decided to explore the idea of freelancing when several people from the office complimented my writing one after the other. My problem was that I had no idea what I wanted to do exactly. Yes, it was going to involve writing of some sorts. I discovered I had a knack for words (my boss even trusted me to write a press release about a new product we were launching — not bad for someone 6 months out of university!) but I had never been specifically hired and paid by others just to 'write stuff.'"

"It's 1996, and you're bored. What do you do? If you're one of the lucky people with an AOL account, you probably do the same thing you'd do in 2009: Go online."

The wonderful Steve Albini: "Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit."

"American journalism is in trouble, and the problem is not just financial. My profession is in distress because for more than a decade it has been chasing the false idols of fame and fortune. While engaged in those pursuits, it forgot its readers and the need to produce a commercial product that appealed to its mass audience, which in turn drew advertisers and thus paid for it all. While most corporate owners were seeking increased earnings, higher stock prices, and bigger salaries, editors and reporters focused more on winning prizes or making television appearances."

"The world’s biggest food company is betting on an emerging class of health and nutrition products to spur its growth. But risks abound."