Read the original article at Review: Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky

Clay Shirky tells a great story. Here Comes Everybody begins with a case of a lost phone in a taxi cab, and the extraordinary turn of events that led to the owner retrieving it. From photos posted online, to NYPD who were uninterested in following up, to taking it all online. Through that online publicity, the story got picked up by the NY Times and CNN, which put pressure on the police to track down the taxi.  It's a great example that illustrates the nuances, both good and bad, powerful and persistent that the Internet can unleash.

Throughout the book he weaves stories about the network effect, friends and friends of friends, and how that impacts information, organization, and the spread …

Read the original article at How to hire a developer that doesn’t suck

Strip by Randall Munroe; xkcd.com

First things first. This is not meant to be a beef against developers. But let’s not ignore the elephant in the living room that is the divide between brilliant code writers and the risk averse operations team.

It is almost by default that developers are disruptive with their creative coding while the guys in operations, those who deploy the code, constantly cross their fingers in the hope that application changes won’t tilt the machine. And when you’re woken up at 4am to deal with an outage or your sluggish site is costing millions in losses, the blame game and finger-pointing starts.

If you manage a startup …

Read the original article at Book review – Trust Agents by Chris Brogan & Julien Smith

Stumbling onto 800-CEO-Read, and their top books feature, I found Brogan and Smith's work.  Brogan's blog intrigued me enough so I walked down to the Strand here in NYC to pick up a copy.

What I found was an excellent introduction to the nebulous world of social media marketing, where you find all sorts of advice and suggestions on how to engage your target audience.  If you're feeling like an ignoramus on matters of social media, Trust Agents is a great place to start and will give you ideas of how to 'humanize' your digital connections.

The authors illustrate the Trust Agent idea with Comcast Cares for example and how they engaged customers, and …

Read the original article at Book Review – The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

What do you do after founding not one, but two companies and watching them fail miserably all by the time you were barely out of college?

Move to the Valley, make shrewd investments in other startups and become insanely rich like Sean Parker? A Bit lofty perhaps. How about try, try again and succeed. Then reinvent yourself as a guru dishing out startup wisdom through your blog and publishing a book that ends up the top of the New York Times Bestseller's list. That's essentially what Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup did.

True entrepreneurs fail many times before they succeed and continuously find opportunities to reinvent …

Read the original article at Book Review – Help! by Oliver Burkeman

Help! How To Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done

I've long overcome that sheepish feeling when browsing the Self-help section at the bookstore. Sure, How to Make Friends and Influence People or the Seven Steps to World Domination in your bookcase aren't exactly the sort of titles to suggest a deep intellect but I like to keep an open mind when checking out the latest hardcover secret to happiness and prosperity. Basically I try not to diss a book just because it's got "soup" on the cover.

I will concede that publishers have …

Restaurant Scalability

Could pro-waitering serve up some lessons on web scalability? Observing peak hour dining at a New York restaurant gave us some insight.

I was dining at a restaurant the other day with friends. It was a warm and cozy place, nicely decorated with a long, narrow dining room.  The food was scrumptious, yet we were getting increasingly frustrated by the service as the night went along.

With some waiting experience behind me, I could immediately see the problem. The waiters, probably through lack of experience, were making the mistake of doing one thing at a time.  They would go to a table, respond to one customer's request, and go and fetch that item.  Back and forth, back and forth they would dart, but always dealing with …