I’ve been using del.icio.us more, so you can always go there to check out what I’ve been finding interesting in my trawls through the web, but I wanted to call out a couple specifically.

• I thought Paul Graham’s latest essay was really interesting and either inspiring or depressing depending on my mood. Inspiring because he is reminding me that I can and should be chasing after my dreams, no matter what my day job is. Depressing because his essay was aimed at high school students; shouldn’t I have a better handle on what I’m doing with my life by now? If nothing else, it points out that I should be trying to find a way to get more writing into my life; I have continued to regularly update this blog over the past year, which is astonishing given my lack of self-discipline. I need to sit down and start putting together some of these essays together into a submittable form and see if that goes anywhere.
• A conversation on Slate between Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink, and James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds. It’s interesting to read their takes on each other’s books, but I’m mostly including a link to it because Gladwell mentions Gary Klein’s work. That Gladwell would have read Klein’s work before writing Blink should have been totally obvious to me, but for some reason it wasn’t.
• Interesting New Yorker article about how our armed forces are adapting to life in Iraq. I really liked the description of how the soldiers have found their own decentralized ways of sharing information, particularly through stories. I think it’s also a good description of the power of breaking the hierarchy wide open and letting everybody use their initiative. I think it’s the way of the future, and given how the army has led many management trends, it shouldn’t surprise me to see them in the forefront yet again.