The combination of “seems impossible” and “strong network effects” is about as close as you can get to the magic formula for incredible, sustainable success, as with eBay, Wikipedia, and Google.
Trenchant analysis from Joel Spolsky.

As someone who has definitely expended too much of my life on the watching of Gilligan’s Island, this is heartening news. Shirky argues that there has been a cognitive surplus in the developed world and for the past 50 years we have been soaking up that surplus with situation comedies and that now we are [...]

As part of my re-evaluation of my toolkit, I’ve started using MarsEdit.
For those who don’t know, MarsEdit is a Macintosh program to write blog posts.
There are a couple of small features in the way the Mars Edit works that could have been deal breakers for me, so I was going back to the MarsEdit [...]

A few weeks ago, I had a bad experience using search at an e-commerce site. It cost me a little money and it cost the merchant a little good will. It was neither enough money nor enough good will to be serious, but that was just luck. If this had happened with a higher cost [...]

I was looking around on the web for some of the works of the Japanese printmaker Hokusai. Here is The Great Wave of Kanagawa, from his series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. but if you are unfamiliar with his work I urge you to seek out a larger version and study up on the [...]

As part of a larger project to clarify all my various work and personal projects, I have redesigned this site. The redesign is not 100% complete but it is well over 90% so I’m turning it wild to see if anyone else turns up any problems.
What I did
I had been using standard Wordpress themes, most [...]

Here’s a keyboard shortcut that I don’t think I ever learned.
From the TextMate documentation:

4.5.2 Find Clipboard
Two useful key equivalents are ⌘E and ⌘G. The first copies the selection to the shared find clipboard. This works in the majority of applications and allows you to find the next occurrence of that string by then pressing ⌘G.
The [...]

Merlin Mann pens a statistically improbable sentence, “I suspect that children will eventually support some kind of thin-client email-to-affection gateway.”

In Hunting the elusive search strategy Jon Udell proposes to study the methods that people use to effectively search. He proposes capturing individual cases of searching for something and then analyzing those cases.
The point is to help people learn to search.
That’s an interesting approach, and it would benefit from having some good tools to capture [...]