Why Twitter Will Endure - NYTimes.com
By carefully curating the people you follow, Twitter becomes an always-on data stream from really bright people in their respective fields, whose tweets are often full of links to incredibly vital, timely information.
Nice article on Twitter from NY Times. The quote above sums up my exact feeling on why Twitter matters.
6 Ways to Start the New Year Doing Instead of Dreaming - by Dumb Little Man
The year in numbers
2009 was a year I promised myself I would get more involved in blogging, twitter and keeping up with family and friends through social networks. As the year draws to a close, I thought I would reflect on the number of posts, visitors and tweets that made up my 2009. I am sure the numbers pale in comparison to the more prolific bloggers and twitter fiends out there, I was actually surprised to see the numbers I had racked up.
How to Run a Meeting Like Google
Mayer holds an average of 70 meetings a week and serves as the last stop before engineers and project managers get the opportunity to pitch their ideas to Google's co-founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Eight teams consisting of directors, managers, and engineers—all at various stages of product development—answer to Mayer.In a shop like Google (GOOG), much of the work takes place in meetings, and her goal is to make sure teams have a firm mandate, strategic direction, and actionable information, while making participants feel motivated and respected.
Excellent article in BusinessWeek on Google's meeting process. While a lot of these techniques really work best with large groups, many of the ideas can be "scaled" down to the small business (especially agile ones). I have seen several articles that have talked about the way Google uses a "numbers" approach to make market and product decisions rather than an emotional approach. In fact there was recently a popular article from a Google creative director who left based on this very issue.
While sometimes this has created some sterile products, overall it works well for Google and some of that approach can be applied to most software businesses successfully.
How a Web Design Goes Straight to Hell - The Oatmeal
10 Words You Need to Stop Misspelling - The Oatmeal
Totally awesome and funny spelling tips for oft misused/spelled words. Too bad they left off Moot and Mute (oh, and "allright").
Great advice from 37 Signals (Ryan)
You Don't Need to Regularly Reinstall Windows
Some good tips here. Definitely worth reading and implementing. From the Lifehacker gang.
WordPress 2.9 Enhancements Every Developer Must Know | W3Avenue
Nice roundup of new features - better than the official blog post from Wordpress. The upgrade this time around was more difficult than usual. For some reason the automatic update would not work, so had to do a manual install and upgrade instead. Not terrible, it did provide the excuse to backup SQL database which I never do, which is bad.
