- Top 5 Business Movies
Andy over at Get A New Browser lists his Top 5 Business movies. I can’t really disagree with the list at all, all are classics.
“We don’t have a lot of time on this earth. We weren’t meant to spend it this way. Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day, filling out useless forms and listening to eight different bosses drone on about mission statements.”
- Be The Center of Attention
Pole Positioning… Nothing like some targeted advertising.
- The Twitter Bail-Out Plan
Looks it is up to all of us… It is our duty to find way for Twitter to make money!
Twitter is addictive and fun and even occasionally useful. If anybody can pull this business model off, it will be Twitter. It has scale, seem to be moving mainstream and they’ve even fixed their reliability issues.
But Twitter won’t survive if it doesn’t find a great revenue model. This matters to all of us.
- Living Behind the Pay Wall
Techdirt has two really good posts today about making information hard-to-find when customers are looking for it.
The first deals directly with it by looking at newspapers holding their archives hostage by putting up a pay wall in front of them after a certain amount of time has passed. This is silly and yes, I know we do it officially but I’ve been fighting that since I started here. It’s one of the main reasons why a few of us created this. It seems pretty easy to me to see the benefit of doing this. We haven’t promoted anything about the article server at all yet people find us thru search engines. It’s really quite simple.
The second post is about Howard Stern and his shrinking influence since his move off of free radio and onto satellite. It’s based on one of our articles.
Overall, you either make your information easily found by users or they will route around you, looking elsewhere and more than likely ignoring you forever. It’s your choice.
- Campaign Finance API from the NY Times
The New York Times opened up an API to get data about campaign financing. Yes, I’m jealous that they did this before we did.
- The Importance of being Developer-Friendly
I’ve been working with a legacy framework the last couple of weeks. It’s something that’s been in production for over 6 years and you can definitely tell. There are files checked in with dates as extensions, always a sure sign of legacy. It’s obvious that there hasn’t been any new developers coming onto the project because the documentation is out-of-date and the entire process is wonky.
A very large problem is that everything needs to be setup with production paths or it is almost impossible to get up-and-running. I’ve been spoiled by how Rails handles the environments. Being able to separate what is for local development, what is QA testing and what is for production is an amazing way of allowing developers to get involved quickly and easily.
If you don’t have that, developers will flail around, searching thru config files or trying to follow stack traces, hoping some information can be gleaned from error messages. It isn’t easy and very frustrating and generally causes someone to lose all interest in future development.
- DropBox
I’ve been using DropBox for the past few days and it is really nice especially the sharing aspect. I’ve been able to give co-workers access to a collection of folders which have various tarballs inside. This is so much better than trying to upload attachments to a Wiki page or emailing them around.
Great stuff!
