Posts

The degree to which open source software has reduced time to market for web companies and saved them money in operational costs over time cannot be overstated. Indeed, open source is so crucial that in most cases we simply take it for granted. I don’t think people who have joined the industry in the past 10 years or so can really imagine what it was like. We used to pay for everything – databases, Web servers, application servers, version control software, compilers, and everything in between. ...

Danah Boyd thinks deeply about Facebook emotion experiment: What does the Facebook experiment teach us? Here’s a bit of it: Somehow, shrugging our shoulders and saying that we promoted content because it was popular is acceptable because those actors don’t voice that their intention is to manipulate your emotions so that you keep viewing their reporting and advertisements. And it’s also acceptable to manipulate people for advertising because that’s just business. But when researchers admit that they’re trying to learn if they can manipulate people’s emotions, they’re shunned. What this suggests is that the practice is acceptable, but admitting the intention and being transparent about the process is not. ...

I really enjoyed Camille Fournier’s post about the implications of exercising authority as a manager. In short, being told you screwed up by somebody who can fire you can lead to pretty serious anxiety. She nails it when she says this about her role has the head of engineering: In fact, it is important that I’m seen as an inspirational figure to my team, someone they look up to and look forward to interacting with, and not vice-versa. ...

My colleague Melissa Santos and I wrote a piece for Model View Culture about perks and how they can be divisive, in spite of the best intentions of the people offering them. The article really cautions companies about building their culture or even their recruiting pitch around perks, it’s a dangerous shortcut to take. Melissa has a blog, Allowed to Apply, which encourages people to just apply for things that interest them. It’s a great message. She’s @ansate on Twitter. ...

Alexis Madrigal has written an interesting look at how Google’s self-driving car really works. Google has figured out that rather than building a really smart car, they could instead build a really rich digital representation of the roads on which the car will drive. Obviously there are big questions about whether this approach can be scaled to work for a larger geographic area than Mountain View, California, but I love this approach, which only software engineer would come up with. I agree with the article that collecting and storing large amounts of this kind of data is a problem we understand better than the problem of building really intelligent machines. If this approach to controlling self-driving cars takes off, it also puts Google in a great position to make money licensing data to any company that wants to build them, rather than building cars itself. ...

Brent Simmons posted a really nice recollection of his days at UserLand back in the late nineties. I was a Mac user at the time, and I was building sites using Frontier. It really was something completely new. The idea of having “Edit This Page” buttons on sites was pretty radical at the time, and eventually became a compulsory part of any decent content management system. One slight correction – I think amphetaDesk was the first desktop RSS aggregator. Its creator, Morbus Iff, is still around, tweeting. ...

Search engine analyst Danny Sullivan applies his expertise to analyzing the penalties MetaFilter that might have cost the site a huge chunk of its Google search traffic. It’s a really interesting look at how Google penalizes sites that try to game the system. The section on how Google penalizes publishers for inbound “unnatural links” is really interesting: It’s insane because it has allowed the same sites that charged people to get links to now charge for them to be removed. Or for the rise of an entire link debuilding industry. Or for publishers who have long suffered terrible link requests to now get messages from people asking for links to be removed. ...

One of the big stories in my small world over the past week or so has been the layoffs at MetaFilter. Matt Haughey broke the news in a MetaTalk post on the state of the site. Here’s the bottom line: While MetaFilter approaches 15 years of being alive and kicking, the overall website saw steady growth for the first 13 of those years. A year and a half ago, we woke up one day to see a 40% decrease in revenue and traffic to Ask MetaFilter, likely the result of ongoing Google index updates. We scoured the web and took advice of reducing ads in the hopes traffic would improve but it never really did, staying steady for several months and then periodically decreasing by smaller amounts over time. ...

Walking on a high wire is inherently dangerous, but you’ve said that you prepare so much that death is not a risk. No, it’s not. I think this is very wrong to put your life in danger or to gamble with your life. I cannot do the first step not being absolutely sure that I will successfully perform the last. That’s from a Jessica Gross interview with Philippe Petit, the tight rope walker who was the subject of Man on Wire. ...

I would put it this way: the fewer people use RSS, the better content providers can allow RSS to be. Tyler Cowen in Are home pages dying? And what is the value of a shadow reader?