May 2012
24 posts
The Safety of Brands →
An aside in the book I’m reading sparked a thought I figured might be worth sharing. First, the snippet:
From our e-mail providers to our mobile-phone carriers, most companies’ business models are too lucrative to risk by mishandling our personal information and angering the consumer. So it is safe to say that despite the many potential risks represented by the volumes of data available, our past...
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Politically Correct →
Paul Krugman wrote an interesting little post on the use of language by liberals and conservatives over the last few years. His basic argument is that while conservatives complained of “political correctness” from liberals, they’ve now taken on the strategy to a frightening degree: “Thus, even talking about ‘the wealthy’ brings angry denunciations; we’re supposed to call them ‘job creators’. Even...
Thoughts on Games →
[Editor’s Note: Prepare for some jumping between thoughts here.]
First off, I’m trying to blog more, which you’ll be able to tell by the fact I’ve written a few things over the last few days. Whether this actually stays consistent only time will tell.
Second (and actual point of this post) thing, I want to connect a few pieces together about video games I’ve run in to. I don’t have...
David Grann →
Yesterday I wrote about David Grann’s amazing New Yorker essay on William Morgan, an American revolutionary in Cuba. While I was reading I remembered thinking to myself, “that’s a great sentence, I should blog that,” but then I couldn’t find it again when I finished (I should have just underlined it in the magazine). Anyway, it came back to me last night and I wrote myself a note (only to not be...
Oldsmobile Rocket 88 and Other Gibson Memories →
Loved this first paragraph of William Gibson’s explanation of what drew him to science fiction:
Some of my earliest memories are of science fiction. Not of prose fiction, or of film, but of the cultural and industrial semiotics of the American nineteen-fifties: the interplanetarily themed chrome trim on my father’s Oldsmobile Rocket 88; the sturdy injection-molded styrene spacemen on the counter...
Sporting Stuff →
Was poking around my Kindle highlights (looking to see if there was a way to export them easily) and I ran across a quote from Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s biography “I Am Zlatan”. I was going to post that and then I thought, maybe I should just post lots of sports stuff in one big post, so that’s what I’m doing. No rhyme or reason here, just some interesting sports-related stuff I’ve run into lately.
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An American Revolutionary →
Not sure what to say about this VERY long New Yorker article about William Morgan, an American solider in the Cuban revolution, other than it’s incredibly detailed a well-written. Give yourself plenty of time to get through it, though, as it’s a good 20 pages long. Here’s a quick paragraph to give you a taste:
Menoyo cursed under his breath as both sides began shooting. Bullets split trees in...
1.5 Years of Percolate →
I haven’t written a ton about starting Percolate, partly because I don’t want this to become a place where I just promote what I’m up to and partly because I’ve been so busy I haven’t had a lot of time to write (as I’m guessing you’ve noticed).
Well, now I’m on a train and I forgot my Verizon card at my last meeting and I decided it would be a good chance to get some things down. These are a...
“Sometimes, late at night, I Google Latrell Sprewell. I don’t really know...”
– An ode to Latrell Sprewell
The Legacy of Latrell Sprewell : The New Yorker
My Favorite Marketing(ish) Articles →
This post is the intersection of a few different things I’ve been thinking about lately. First is Percolate. Part of the process of introducing the company to new people is frequently recounting the story of where the product came from. James and I have probably sent each other a thousand different articles back and forth and I asked him recently for his list of top articles that really inspired...
On Facebook, Intent and Marketing
This is a cross-post from the Percolate Blog. I thought you all might enjoy reading it here as well.
Let me get something out of the way before we get started: In case you haven’t heard, Facebook is going to IPO this week.
Okay, seriously, all this IPO talk has driven people to dive into Facebook’s business model and lots of folks are coming up with doubts. As Peter Kafka points out, even...
Baby Platypus
This story of NBA player JaVale McGee pretending to have bought a pet platypus (two of them, actually, but I don’t know the plural for platypus) is pretty amazing. The gist is that he was tired of the way the media was treating him, so he Tweeted saying he had “just copped a pet platypus” and then posted a picture forty minutes later of two hands holding a platypus duo (like how I’m avoiding that...
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Super Bowl Ads Work
This is for everyone that says Super Bowl ads don’t work. From Pando Daily’s article on GoDaddy:
Those ads unquestionably worked. They ran the first one in 2004, with no idea if it’d be brilliant or a colossal waste of money. But the company was paying for it out of cash flow, not venture capital, so why not? Go Daddy had 16 percent marketshare at that point, and the week after the ad, it jumped...
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What Ecosystem?
After reading about Apple iOS VP Scott Forstall selling off almost $40 million in shares I was curious to learn more about him. I found this BsuienssWeek profile from last October that had an interesting tidbit about the Apple ecosystem:
Yet even critics don’t deny his accomplishments or ability to troubleshoot. Before the introduction of the iPhone, Forstall supported Jobs’s view that Apple...
April 2012
10 posts
Why We Buy
The data here is sort of interesting, but I’m not sure I buy the premise:
Ask Americans if they are willing to spend more to buy American-made products, and nearly half say they are often willing to do this. But in the latest Economist/YouGov Poll, the country where a product is made trails price, quality, and even convenience, as an important factor in consumer decision-making. The public gives...
“Percolate is like a butcher with an algorithm”
– Approve This Message: Politics through Awl-colored glasses » Nieman Journalism Lab (via jamesgross)
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“All of this is wonderful for the employees — and of course well deserved — but...”
– A view on why Google and Facebook are lagging in mobile. [via @james_gross]
Google and Facebook Grow Comfortable and Complacent - NYTimes.com
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“Luke Kuechly (Boston College): Scouts rave about Kuechly’s work ethic. But...”
– Chuck Klosterman’s on why teams shouldn’t draft every NFL prospect made me laugh a lot. It shouldn’t have, but it did.
The case against Andrew Luck, Robert Griffin, and the rest of this year’s top NFL draft prospects - Grantland
“Now that you mention it, here’s how I think about stock and flow. Flow is how I...”
– Really interesting comment from Alexis Madrigal on Robin Sloan’s Stock & Flow post from 2010. Fun to go back and discover new stuff like this.
Stock and flow « Snarkmarket
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“Databases are the functional muscle of the web, so it’s not surprising that...”
– I’ve been talking about this a lot lately … I need to write something bigger about the impact of databases on design.
Everything You Use is a Database Application
March 2012
24 posts
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The Curation Debate | Noah Brier dot Com →
I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about curation over the last year and it was interesting to watch the conversation explode this week. I felt like I had to weigh in and this is an attempt … I don’t have all the answers, but I think the debate is healthy and productive. We need to find better ways to credit creators of content.
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“Fetishizing “social” has become a major distraction, and we’re...”
– Am I the only one shocked to read Arianna Huffington railing against the fetishization of social media and “virality”?
Arianna Huffington: Virality Uber Alles: What the Fetishization of Social Media Is Costing Us All
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Percolate Founder James Gross On Starting Up and... →
Nice story about James and his foray into Hispanic advertising prior to Percolate.
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