A beautifully designed collage of stuff that’s happening on the web. Right now.
It’s a more graphic follow-up of last year’s State of the Web, also by Matthew Inman.
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The State of the Web – Summer 2008
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Feynman on the Bongos (and Orange Juice)
We all know that the eminent physicist Richard Feynman was an extremely talented man. But who knew his talents stretched to that of the bongos? Here are some videos:
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Key Factors in the Economic Slowdown
The BBC has compiled a number of graphs vividly showing the key factors affecting the current economic ‘crisis’ – the results are quite enlightening.
Some aspects aren’t deviating far from the general long-term trend (petrol prices); some are not as dramatic (with a long-term comparison) as some fear (house prices); while others genuinely are anomalies worthy of worry (inflation).
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The Startup Bibles
Want a crash course in entrepreneurship? Then read the startup bibles.
[These books] range from academic textbooks to sales essays, recruiting tips to popular science. Each book and article provides insight into the skills needed to successfully run a startup.
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Mamihlapinatapai
This “most succinct word” is classed as one of the most difficult to translate. It’s definition is beautiful and painful… I can’t count the time I’ve experienced this.
A look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start. This could perhaps be translated more succinctly as “eye-contact implying ‘after you…’”. A more literal approximation is “ending up mutually at a loss as to what to do about each other”
via Kottke
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Transparent or Secret Salaries?
Penelope Trunk—The Brazen Careerist—on why salaries should be transparent (and how to find out how much you should be paid).
Who is being protected by secret salaries? Certainly not the employee—the more transparent salaries are, the more accurately an employee can assess his or her value to a company.
You’d think that companies benefit from secret salaries and that’s why they keep them secret, but really, if salaries were 100% accurate—perfectly pegged at the employee’s worth to the company—then the company would have no problem revealing all salaries.
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Peopleware and Private Offices
A Field Guide to Developers is an article by Joel ‘on Software’ Spolsky. From reading this you can tell that Joel is a man who knows how to run a software house and how to keep staff happy. From it, I’ve also added another book to my reading list.
Last year I went to a Computer Science conference at Yale. One of the speakers, a Silicon Valley veteran who had founded or led quite an honor roll of venture-capital funded startups, held up the book Peopleware.
“You have to read this book,” he said. “This is the bible of how to run a software company. This is the most important book out there for how to run software companies.”
I had to agree with him: Peopleware is a great book.
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37signals on Creating a Devoted Audience
37signlas—creators of the book for software designers—have given us a round-up of how they built a devoted audience/client-base.
From the beginning, we allotted plenty of time for side projects. Things that would get us attention, experiments with new ways of selling our services, ways to show off our design thinking, etc.
Here are a few of the key non-client projects that enabled us to build up an audience:
- The 37signals manifesto
- The 37Better Project
- eNormicom
- Design Not Found
- 37express
- Research
- Signal vs. Noise
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Joel Spolsky on Strategy
Trawling through the Joel on Software archive, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading the Strategy Letter series.
Building a company? You’ve got one very important decision to make, because it affects everything else you do. No matter what else you do, you absolutely must figure out which camp you’re in, and gear everything you do accordingly, or you’re going to have a disaster on your hands.
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Ayn Rand in Playboy (Interview)
Playboy‘s 1964 Ayn Rand interview in full; a deep and prophetic discussion.
PLAYBOY: Has no religion, in your estimation, ever offered anything of constructive value to human life?
RAND: Qua religion, no — in the sense of blind belief, belief unsupported by, or contrary to, the facts of reality and the conclusions of reason. Faith, as such, is extremely detrimental to human life: it is the negation of reason. But you must remember that religion is an early form of philosophy, that the first attempts to explain the universe, to give a coherent frame of reference to man’s life and a code of moral values, were made by religion, before men graduated or developed enough to have philosophy. And, as philosophies, some religions have very valuable moral points. They may have a good influence or proper principles to inculcate, but in a very contradictory context and, on a very — how should I say it? — dangerous or malevolent base: on the ground of faith.
via Kottke