I just started reading The 4-Hour Work Week. I admit, in the beginning, I didn’t want to like it. Part of me wanted Tim Ferriss to be some shallow, cocky blowhard with a couple hundred pages of motivational fluff. But… he won me over by page 11 with a passing reference to J.B. Say, and it’s been all good ever since. This book has me fired up.
Category: Business
Lots of good stuff for sale at Coudal’s Swap Meat. I’m partial to the Ghost Prints.
Dorothy Gambrell has done some excellent illustrations based on the Schedule C table of Principal Business or Professional Activity Codes [p. 8-10, pdf].
Here’s an analysis of the economy of Second Life. Rapid, artificial inflation of the Linden dollar means a recession is due at some point. It’s hard to predict when they’ll reach it, but it seems pretty much unavoidable.
The New York Times has a new tower to work in. “Ultimately, itÄôs hard not to sense that the Times, so determined to have a building that makes a mark on the sky line, had a failure of nerve when it came to the interior.”
Anil Dash noticed the recent popularity of pixel graphs, citing an awful example in the New York Times and a not-as-bad one in Wired Magazine. I also recall this one from Business Week a while back, and another commenter mentioned one at Curbed today. It’ll take some time and trial & error to figure out what kind of data sets works best with the technique. I can appreciate the trend, but the only example I really like is the one from Business Week. Looks like a happy marriage of table and graph.
The Thing Quarterly: “Each year four artists, writers, filmmakers or musicians are invited to create a household object that somehow incorporates text. Every three months a new object will be hand wrapped in brown paper and string by the editors and mailed to subscribers.”[via jb]
Mises University is happening this week at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Tune in to the webcasts for some of the best economics learnin’ you’ll find anywhere.
Mark Hurst just published a book to get you back on track: Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload. Could be a good one.
An open letter to Subway regarding cheese placement. Couldn’t agree more.
Whither our literary arbiters? On NPR, a story about how newspapers are dedicating less space for book reviews than in the past. Goes along with the general decline in newsprint circulation & advertising dollars.
Might need this one day: 101 essential freelancing resources.
The Oregonian newspaper is publishing its daily photos on Flickr. It’s looks like they’re consistently geotagging them, too. I absolutely love it. [via matt]
Doc Searls talks about how to save newspapers. Nice tips there. The sad part is that readers (i.e. customers) have been complaining about many of these features for years [e.g. archive paywalls, complicated websites, lack of linking, etc.]
Some tribute/rip-off album covers from the world of hip-hop.
Justin wears the camera 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Even in the bathroom. Even on a date.
An interview with Jonathan Lethem. He talks about copyright and some of the ideas in his Harper’s article a couple months ago.
The Starfish & the Spider (review: 3/5)
The Starfish & the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations is another book along the lines of Wikinomics. This book has the typical anecdotes punctuated with bullet points that you’ll see in other business books. It’s breezy and well-paced. It covers the principles of decentralization (e.g. “when attached, a decentralized organization tends to become even more open and decentralized,” or “it’s easy to mistake starfish for spiders,” and “an open system doesn’t have central intelligence; the intelligence is spread throughout the system.”), and their implications for the business world. While this one isn’t nearly as tedious as Wikinomics, it’s also not as wide-ranging or historical. In this case, I think that’s a good thing.
The makers of Splenda have bought off hundreds of negative domain names, like splendakills.com. Is it just their paranoia or should I be concerned? [via torrez]
Mark Larson 