My RSS System / patrickrhone →

Patrick Rhone (curator of Minimal Mac) introduces his scheme for categorizing feeds to help him handle monitoring lots of feeds in order to find good content.

His scheme is simple: folders for an “A-list”, “B-List”, “Friends”, “Other”, and a “Probation” folder for newly added feeds still being evaluated. It is a simple and easy to implement scheme, so I’ve copied it for myself.

And then, of course, the second act is about how they become evil despite themselves. It’s like Animal Farm. The pigs make all these noble rules, and then systematically subvert them.

On Google, and evil — John August (via Daring Fireball)

Apple reaches for greatness without apology. Market share and profitability are important only as outcomes. They are not its purpose, which is to achieve the “insanely great.

Apple And Our Culture, Ctd - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan (via Daring Fireball)

HTML is the new HTML5 →

The WHATWG HTML spec can now be considered a “living standard”. It’s more mature than any version of the HTML specification to date, so it made no sense for us to keep referring to it as merely a draft.

Like most web applications, the WHATWG’s HTML specification is now “versionless” and will be continuously maintained. From the FAQ:

…new features get added to them over time, at a rate intended to keep the specifications a little ahead of the implementations but not so far ahead that the implementations give up.

It’s all about features, not a monolithic standard.

Bad fits make us curmudgeonly. We loathe what we have because it’s not quite right. It injects friction needlessly into processes we wish were fluid. A bad fit restricts movement, and life is about movement.

Frank Chimero - Your Shit, My Stuff, Goldilocks, and Making the Bed You Sleep In

R, the Software, Finds Fans in Data Analysts - NYTimes.com →

Nonetheless, starting in about 1991, they worked on R full time. “We were pretty much inseparable for five or six years,” Mr. Gentleman said. “One person would do the typing and one person would do the thinking.”

Interestingly, the above quote seems to indicate that R is a child of pair programming.

If you ever have to say ‘lighten up’ to someone, you’ve failed twice. The first time, when you misjudged an interaction and the other person reacted in a way you’re unhappy with, and the second time, when you issue this instruction, one that is guaranteed to evoke precisely the opposite reaction you’re intending.

Seth’s Blog: Self-destructive instructions

Imagine a new restaurant that wants to make the most of their burgeoning lunch traffic. They start serving low-quality meat: after all, it’s cheap, plentiful, and requires nothing more than placing a different order with their distributor. For a few weeks, profits are up. But pretty soon, so are customer complaints, and the stars on their Yelp page are rapidly dwindling. The owner doesn’t understand. The meat isn’t great, sure, but it’s perfectly edible, and for a while it seemed like the restaurant was making more money and attracting new customers. What went wrong?

Alex Payne — Shortchanging Your Business with User-Hostile Platforms via Daring Fireball

Alex Payne on how choosing a cross-platform solution over a native solution is often a matter of putting the expediency of the business ahead of the experience of your customers.

Cross-platform solutions always sound like a good idea in theory, but always fall short in someway or another.

What if Flickr fails? →

And the greater risk is not of Flickr’s deletion of customers, but of the market’s deletion of Flickr. Because, after all, Flickr is a business and no business lasts forever. Least of all in the tech world.

How sustainable are web companies? At what point do we stop trusting and start worrying? Perhaps the closest analogue to web services in the pre-internet world are banks and other financial services.Banks store your money, web services store your content, —- be it photos, mail, documents, video, or a social graph. Then they try to make money from it. But what if they fail?

(from Doc Searls Weblog via Michael Tsai)

"Today you.... tomorrow me." →

… a family that is undoubtedly poorer than you, me, and just about everyone else on that stretch of road, working on a seasonal basis where time is money, took an hour or two out of their day to help some strange dude on the side of the road when people in tow trucks were just passing me by. Wow…

via kottke