hey, it's noah

I really like what Ezra Klein has to say about the documentary ‘Inside Job’ and the genre of crisis-explanation journalism we’re experiencing:

There’s a lot to dislike about Wall Street. The pay….

I really like this thought on the value of moving from Steven Johnson:

Another old friend — my oldest, in fact — wrote an email to me after I told him the news of our move. We’ve both been in New York for two decades, and we are both watching our kids growing up at lightning speed. “Change like this slows down time,” he wrote. When you’re in your routine, frequenting the same old haunts, time seems to accelerate — was it just four years ago that our youngest son was born? But all the complexities of moving — figuring out where to live, getting there, and then navigating all the new realities of the changed environment — means that the minutes and hours that once passed as a kind of background process, the rote memory of knowing your place, suddenly are thrust into your conscious awareness. You have to figure it out, and figuring things out makes you aware of the passing days and months more acutely. You get disoriented, or at least you have to think for a while before you can be properly oriented again.

It’s an interesting way to think about things.

[Via Adam Isserlis]

Via: On Moving // NoahBrier.com

Over at Geekwire, they sum up a question served up to Jeff Bezos at Amazon’s most recent shareholder meeting:

The question: Amazon seems to be executing well lately — is the company taking enough risks? Added the shareholder, “If it’s still Amazon’s philosophy to make bold bets, I would expect that maybe some of them wouldn’t work out, but I am just not seeing that. So, my question is where are the losers?”

Bezos answer is long and thoughtful, but nicely summed up in the first few sentences:

In a way, that is like the nicest compliment I’ve ever gotten. First of all, I think we have gotten pretty lucky recently. You should anticipate a certain amount of failure. Our two big initiatives, AWS and Kindle — two big, clean-sheet initiatives — have worked out very well. Ninety-plus percent of the innovation at Amazon is incremental and critical and much less risky. We know how to open new product categories. We know how to open new geographies.

I really like how Bezos seems to recognize the distinction between invention (creation of a new thing) and innovation (adaptation of an existing thing to a market). Later in his answer he even says, “I believe if you don’t have that set of things in your corporate culture, then you can’t do large-scale invention. You can do incremental invention, which is critically important for any company. But it is very difficult [to make big bets on large-scale invention] — if you are not willing to be misunderstood. People will misunderstand you.”

[Via James Gross]

Via: Invention at Amazon // NoahBrier.com

For the last few months I’ve been called the word “curation” a semantic wormhole: A word that immediately drives people into a rather asinine argument that doesn’t really add anything to the greater conversation their trying to have. As an example, “social media” seems like the ultimate semantic wormhole as everyone knows what you’re talking about and yet it’s easy to completely derail a conversation by saying something like “what media isn’t social?” (For the record, I’ve been known to do exactly this. I have a tendency towards these sorts of dumb arguments because I think words are very important. Which makes the argument less dumb … but …)

Anyway, I liked this turn of phrase from Maria Popova in discussing the word curation (which I wrote about a few months ago):

Like any appropriated buzzword, the term “curation” has become nearly vacant of meaning. But, until we come up with a better one, it remains the semantic placeholder that best captures the central paradigm of Twitter as a conduit of discovery and direction for what is meaningful, interesting and relevant in the world.

Semantic placeholder … That’s a nice one.

Via: Semantic Wormholes and Placeholders // NoahBrier.com

[Editor’s Note: This is a bit self serving, so forgive me.]

Tomorrow I’m going to be on an Internet Week panel about side projects called, aptly, The Art of the Side Project. To get myself prepared (not really) I launched a side project I’d been working on for just over a year called Fortnighter. The idea, which came out of a random Tumblrsection with Alexander Basek, a New York-based travel writer, was to create a service that let people answer a few simple questions about their travel preferences and get a totally custom itinerary written for them by a travel writer with expertise in the area they’re visiting.

After joining forces with a few other friends (one silent, one Colin Nagy), we quietly launched the service last week and have been picking up some nice steam with a great Thrillist shoutout yesterday morning (as well as The Next Web and Gadling in the days before). The prices for itineraries start at $100 for a 3 day, which gets you a fully packed weekend wherever you are headed.

We’ve bootstrapped this whole thing and managed to get it done for what I’d consider a very reasonable amount of money. Thanks to the four partner thing we’ve been able to distribute the workload well, allowing me to focus on the non-side projects in my life (more on that soon, I promise) while still contributing. The goal with this iteration of the product was to get something to prove the concept out the door (which I feel like we accomplished). We have some larger ideas for where Fortnighter could go, but first we all felt like it was prudent (both logically and financially) to see if there was real interest for a product like this (which seemed so obvious to us, but also seemed to antithetical to the boom in crowdsourced knowledge). Luckily we’ve sold enough itineraries so far that I think we know the answer to that one (yes). Anyway, just wanted to share this. Am pretty excited about it. Oh, and if you’re around Internet Week, come to my panel tomorrow.

Via: Fortnighter // NoahBrier.com