I’ve been posting excerpts from any interesting links I’ve come across up at my posterous blog for the last month or so. This is mainly due to the fact that the previous system I was using has decided to no longer work after a wordpress upgrade (WordPress strips all markup characters) and I’m too busy at the moment to dig through the unholy mess that is wordpress to fix it.
Posterous is a pretty nice system for quickly putting together a simple blog. You can create a post by sending an email, and if you link to a flickr page It’ll automatically pull out the image. Likewise with youtube videos and a dozen other services.
Here’s a rundown of some of the more interesting links from the last month:
A self-help checklist. If you’re making any of these excuses, then you’re at risk of being left behind. Don’t be left making buggy whips when your competitors are out making cars!
This is an interesting perspective. While in college I would have had nothing but contempt for PR and Marketing, which I thought of as just adding noise to a perfect process. Somehow, I reasoned, if the product was good enough people would just start flocking to it. Not so unfortunately. This is a great guide to what value PR and marketing provide to a product.
A great article from Carsonified about using a cleverly designed “Thank you” process to add a more human touch to your business that makes them want to engage more. Carsonified have a very polished design process which stands out as original and eye-catching yet very human.
A few years old, but definitely worth another watch if you’ve already seen it. Andreessen is busy changing the world with his VC fund at the moment, but as one of the few people to have created not one, but two billion-dollar companies from scratch he’s someone who you want to listen to.
Fantastic article by Paul Buchheit on product focus. The message is simple – Pick two or three key things that will create a competitive advantage and do them really really well. Trying to implement every idea under the sun leads to mediocrity initially, and failure in the long run.