Swedegeek's Blog

I was a bit overwhelmed with a ton of captivating articles in my Twitter feed earlier tonight. I wanted to get caught up on Twitter, so I just popped the most interesting looking articles open in my browser, then went back to TweetDeck to finish up. I’ve finally managed to blaze through reading all those links. Here’s what I learned…

Mobile Stuff

Apple’s day-old iPad 2 may have a defect with backlight bleed. Also, the post hints at iPad 3 later in the year with Retina display. Guess that’s two good reasons to wait another round! At the same time, the curious folks over at AnandTech have been taking a detailed look at iPad 2 GPU performance. At least things look good there. Think I’ll still wait, though.

Also on the mobile front (yes, I consider iPad a mobile device, unlike Facebook), Android devices recently had a malware infection that led to Google stepping in to remotely kill the malicious software. This led to the article in my Twitter feed on walled garden technology. Basically, it points out that the prolific growth in Android and iOS based devices is essentially giving to large corporations (i.e., Google and Apple) a big red button they can push at any time to shutdown, among other things, the primary source of Internet access for a great many people.

Twitter is not s-m-r-t

Twitter is also building their own walled garden after letting everyone play in the backyard until now. It was announced that the company would prohibit any new third-party clients for the insanely popular Web service. You can even say that it was this playing around by third-parties creating great, usable Twitter clients that allowed the company its meteoric rise.

This kind of protectionism is never received well on the Interwebs. Even DHH chimed in and a very thoughtful open letter to Twitter by Fred Oliveira. He definitely seems like he has a mind for this kind of stuff, so my recommendation is that Twitter consider his points. He also mentioned Twitter’s other recent major kerfuffle, the #Dickbar, so bonus points to him. Also you can follow Fred as @f on Twitter. That’s pretty sweet!

Politically Infographic

Brief intermission on the tech news. Here’s an infographic (albeit, not a very fancy one) on tax breaks for the wealthy vs. federal programs on the chopping block. It’s on the Internet, so believe at your own risk.

The Good of Google

Co-founder of O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, Bryce Roberts, talks some about Google and Facebook at their best and worst. He uses the Crisis Response team as an example of Google doing one of the things it is good at: “use technology to organize information in a time its most needed”.

Google also is looking to build a better boss. As one would expect, they used lots of data to come up with Eight Good Behaviors (and some pitfalls) to guide managers. Reading about their process is as interesting as the actual output of their effort.

Here are the rules, in order of importance:

1. Be a good coach
2. Empower your team and don’t micromanage
3. Express interest in team members’ success and personal well-being
4. Don’t be a sissy: Be productive and results-oriented
5. Be a good communicator and listen to your team
6. Help your employees with career development
7. Have a clear vision and strategy for the team
8. Have key technical skills so you can help advise the team

Being I’m a manager of people and teams myself, this great stuff. I advise anyone in a similar position to make sure to read this one.

On Bellwether Events

The first panel on the first day of the 2011 South By Southwest conference talked about unleashing employees to create empowerment in the workplace. This coincides well with Google’s rules for managers, but probably a lot more difficult for organizations with a lot of history and process at their backs. Sounds like time to break some molds!

TED is another big conference at the forefront of a lot of today’s thinking on technology, science and art. Edward Tenner provided this brief glimpse into becoming a TED speaker.

Crazy-Busy

People are always looking for ways to streamline how they do work, myself included. Jill Konrath, author of SNAP Selling, shares some ideas to avoid feeling crazy-busy. Nothing groundbreaking here, but this kind of stuff is always a good reminder. Here’s the quick list:

1. Pick the “One Thing”
2. Put up a Barricade
3. Dump Your Ideas

Entrepreneurship

Earlier in the year, Google released it’s Panda update to reduce the influence content farms have in search engine rankings. Itinerant entrepreneur, Robert Dempsey, notes that only impacted the content farms themselves but also a lot of affiliate marketers who relied on links from those sources. He claims the war is on for affiliate marketing. He even has some suggestions on how to be ready for it. Short version: make blogs with original content added over time.

If you try to keep up on Hacker News in any way, there’s usually some new start-up announcement on the front page at all times. There’s been a lot of talk on the process of starting a start-up. One of those methods is known as Lean development. Jared Brown talks about  how Lean Startups Rule in his latest post. In related news, I’m going to go see Steve Blank in Ann Arbor talk about such things later this month.

Web Applications

Pinboard recently received massive attention as a replacement for the ailing Delicious service. A case study for simple systems has been made in demonstrating how their servers handled the massive spike when it was first announced Yahoo! was killing Delicious. Apache FTW! Here’s Pinboard’s own account of that fateful day.

ReadWriteWeb announced that NowJS is a new remote procedure call module for NodeJS to more easily enable real-time web applications. I keep putting off finding time to play around with NodeJS, but seeing this kind of stuff pushes me more and more.

I’m a huge fan of Instapaper. If I don’t have time to read an interesting article, I click one button to send it off to Instapaper and I can easily read it later. One of its best features is that when I go back to read the article, all the crap is removed and I get to read the article in a consistent and clean manner. Turns out the magic behind that austere look has a ton of work behind it in article text extraction from HTML documents. I’ve been looking at cooking up my own idea with similar behavior, so this is good stuff for me to hold go through. (I just read the post not all of the links in it.)

The End

Whew, finished! Lots of stuff from that informative Twitter feed of mine. Did you read any of these yourself? What was your favorite? Post a comment and let me know!

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