Tom is spot-on here: you shouldn’t be afraid of writing about yourself …especially not for fear of damaging some kind of “personal brand” or pissing off some potential future employer.
If your personal brand demands that you live your life in fear of disclosing important parts of your life or your experience, the answer is to reject the whole sodding concept of personal brands.
Do things I write about my personal life threaten my personal brand? Perhaps. Are there people who wouldn’t hire me based on things I write? Probably. Do I give even a whiff of a fuck? Absolutely not. I wouldn’t want to work for them anyway.
The latest Clearleft product will be like having an intensive set of discovery, collaboration, and exploration workshops in a box. Perfect for startups and other small businesses short on time or budget.
It starts in Spring but you can register your interest now.
If you’re coming along to the Responsive Day Out and you’ve got some tech books you no longer need, bring them along. We’ll collect them and distribute them to schools.
Oh, my! This excellent, excellent post from Anil Dash is a great summation of what has changed on the web, and how many of today’s big-name services are no longer imbued with the spirit of the web.
Either you remember how things used to be and you’ll nod your head vigorously in recognition and agreement …or you’re too young to remember this, and you won’t quite believe that is how things worked.
This isn’t some standard polemic about “those stupid walled-garden networks are bad!” I know that Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and LinkedIn and the rest are great sites, and they give their users a lot of value. They’re amazing achievements, from a pure software perspective. But they’re based on a few assumptions that aren’t necessarily correct. The primary fallacy that underpins many of their mistakes is that user flexibility and control necessarily lead to a user experience complexity that hurts growth. And the second, more grave fallacy, is the thinking that exerting extreme control over users is the best way to maximize the profitability and sustainability of their networks.
A lovely new service from Mike Stenhouse: install the bookmarklet and then when you come across a website with a nice combination of fonts, you can save a snapshot of the page (and its fonts) for later perusal. You can then browse those fonts on Typekit, Fontdeck, MyFonts or Google Fonts.
Laura explains the problems with hiding content for small screens, and uses this as an opportunity to elucidate why you should blog, even if you’re think that no-one would be interested in what you have to say:
The point I’m trying to make is that we shouldn’t be fearful of writing about what we know. Even if you write from the most basic point of view, about something which has been ‘around for ages’, you’ll likely be saying something new to someone. They might be new to the industry, you might just be filling in the holes in someone’s knowledge.
I’m trying to figure out which forthcoming sci-fi work this guerrilla marketing site is promoting—featuring customised shoes from bio-engineered stingray—but I’m not having any luck.
A heartbreaking article about just how badly Yahoo fucked up with Flickr. It’s particularly sad coming out right as the Flickr devs roll out an improved uploader and a more liquid photo page …but it seems like band-aid development at this point.
Not only does the web make publishers of those willing to put in the work, it also makes most of us free sharers of our hard-won trade, craft, and business secrets. The minute we grab hold of a new angle on design, interaction, code, or content, we share it with a friend — or with friends we haven’t met yet.
Insanely in-depth look at how browsers work, right down to the nitty gritty. You’d think there’d be a lot of engineering talk, but actually a lot of it is more about linguistics and language parsing.
This is wonderful stuff: a long-term project to track the performance of high-traffic sites over time: oodles of lovely data and some quite shocking stats.
Don Norman bemoans the seemingly-inevitable direction that the internet is taking; from an open system of exchange to a closed, controlled broadcast channel. I share his fear.
James Bridle propsed Open Bookmarks during a presentation at Tools of Change in Frankfurt today: "Open Bookmarks is not a thing, it’s a proposal, a flag in the ground. We need to agree on a way of sharing and storing annotations and bookmarks, reading attention data and everything around the book: that aura."
An alternative to the space elevator, an inflatable tower nine miles tall and tethered to a mountain top, could be made of commercially available materials.
Tiki Bar TV's Johnny Johnny saves a woman from being killed on the New York subway. This is incontrovertible proof that outlandish cocktails can make you superhuman. Seriously though... bravo, Johnny Johnny, bravo!
I don't think the end of Catcher In The Rye will have quite the same impact after browsing through the signs on display here. This is big and it is clever.
I saw Steven Pinker give a talk recently and he spent a fair amount of time talking about swearing. He has written up that part of the talk into an article for the New Republic.
One of many code-snippet sharing sites out there but this one has some nice features like tagging and popularity. The interface is yuck though. dpaste,com is nicer but more ephemeral.
Probably old news by now but Last.fm has been acquired by CBS, who I hope are not evil. The good news is that our favourite music site is staying in London. Rock on, FMers.
Meri has created a wiki where would-be speakers can get advice and mentoring from established speakers. I don't know if I'm established but I'm offering my services.
This is fascinating in a voyeuristic way - photographs found on peer to peer networks from people who are (perhaps accidentally) sharing their entire home folder.
