When I first went to work for Applied Strategies, I didn’t really understand what they did. Applied Strategies (at that time) specialized in doing demand forecasting using decision analysis, which meant that we constructed mathematical models to estimate the size of a market for a drug or a vaccine. Our analysts used complicated decision trees, […]
Is an elite university worth it?
Paul Graham makes the provocative claim that “It may not matter all that much where you go to college.” He’s been evaluating startup founders as part of his Y Combinator program for a few years now, and “what we’ve found is that the variation between schools is so much smaller than the variation between individuals […]
Shared experience and community
I spent last weekend up in Boston hanging out with TEPs, most of whom were younger folks that had joined TEP years after I had left Boston. And yet I felt reasonably at home with them. I continue to be fascinated by these questions of what makes a community and how community is linked to […]
Checking in
Gosh, it’s been ten days since I last posted. I’ve had lots of scattered ideas, but haven’t quite had the focus to pull any of them together into a full post. Things have been busy at work as we prepare for the release of FogBugz 6, the newest version of our main product, so that’s […]
Community media usage
As usual, good comments on my last post that you should read. Anca picked up on my last point that one might be able to design the direction a community takes by designing the media interaction spaces for that community. But before trying to design something, I think it’s useful to observe my current and […]
Transmedia conversations
I had a minor epiphany last week after my friend Jocelyn posted a quote from our conversation at dinner on my Facebook wall. For those of you not on Facebook, the wall is a single-threaded discussion board, where people can write comments to you that are visible to others. One of the reasons I didn’t […]
Chip Kidd: Book One: Work: 1986-2006, by Chip Kidd
Amazon link Do you recognize any of these book covers? Then you know of Chip Kidd’s work. I first became aware of Chip Kidd when I picked up a book with a striking cover at the library a few years ago. The book was The Cheese Monkeys, and I enjoyed the hilarious over-the-top antics of […]
Why social software
Why does anybody use social software? I talked about some possible uses in my last post about affordances, but there’s more going on. Grant McCracken wrote a great post about how social networks work where he describes the concept of “phatic communication”, which he describes as “communication with little hard, informational content, but lots of […]
Affordances of social software
Following up on my last post, let’s spend some time discussing what makes certain social software sites easier to adopt than others. I’ve written about technology affordances before, but I think the affordances of a given social software site have a huge impact on its adoption. We’ll start by analyzing why I found LiveJournal so […]
Generations of social software
A couple weeks ago, we had a discussion over on the nextNY mailing list about how to use social networking software such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc. What was interesting to me about the conversation was how it broke down generationally – us older folks were struggling to figure out what we were supposed to […]
