Follow MediaBlips on Twitter
NoahBrier.com Latest Blog Posts |
Add as Favorite
Claim Blog 
|
http://www.noahbrier.com/ - My world, for better or for worse.
Click on the "vote it up" button to submit a story below to our homepage.
If you're the owner of NoahBrier.com, claim your blog to unlock additional tools and reports.
I think Aaron Swartz's explanation of how he hires programmers is pretty applicable to hiring anyone. An excerpt:
There are three questions you have when you're hiring a programmer (or anyone, for that matter): Are they smart? Can they get stuff done? Can you work with them? Someone who's ...
Media
Josh Kopelman, Managing Director of First Round Capital hits the nail on the head with his latest post about the "viral strategy" of startups :
Virality is something that has to be engineered from the beginning...and it's harder to create virality than it is to create a good product. That's ...
Media
Today's Learn Something Every Day intrigued me: "NASCAR driver, Tim Flock is the only driver in motor racing history to have to make a pit stop to remove a monkey from his car."
The full story is over at Tim Flock's official site . The monkey's name was Jocko Flocko and actually drove with ...
Media
Just last night I was telling my mom how much I love Google Hot Trends . I get the hourly alerts via RSS and am amazed by the insight and grounding it gives me. It's easy to fall into our world of nerds and forget there are millions of people watching Florida quarterback and wondering why he ...
Media
Snarkmarket links to a very interesting On Language column and addendum about camel case. In addition to the idea that camel case has been popularized by programming languages (which makes sense), the following insight into the role of spaces between words caught my eye:
In Ireland and ...
Media
Russell Davies offers up an interesting bit of etymology (at least I think it would count as etymology):
Which reminded me of the origins of the word 'cliche' - in the days of movable type it meant a set of letters/words that were used together so frequently that the printer didn't bother ...
Media
I was listening to the radio in the car this afternoon and something struck me: Of the three songs I heard, two of them were in the new Guitar Hero. This isn't overly surprising, as the game is full of some of the most popular songs of the last thirty years, but it got me thinking about all the ...
Media
I just love this entry from Matt Jones about pareidolia, the phenomena that leads us to see faces in things. As he explains , it actually turns out that there is a reason for what happens, as we respond to faces more quickly than other images. Jones quotes a paper called Early (M170) activation ...
Media
Interesting article from Inside Higher Ed about how Sarah Palin is changing the way politics is done by manipulating the media in completely new ways :
I'm not sure what Sarah Palin's favorite work of postmodern theory might be (all of them, probably) but she seems to take her lead from Jean ...
Media
Doug Pfeffer , my supremely talented colleague at The Barbarian Group, has finally launched his newest creation, which I've been playing with for the last few months. It's called Last Night's Check-ins and it's an elegantly simple idea/execution. Basically, it takes all your Foursquare ...
Media
There is a certain beauty to the contradictory nature of sports analysis. Everyone is sure they're right all the time. And thank goodness they are, if not what would they put on the radio during the day?
Anyhow, there's a nice analysis of the analysis from last night's game over at rc3.org . ...
Media
Two articles worth highlighting from the Times this weekend. First, a look at cell phone pricing that's surprisingly full of interesting points. For instance, when Sprint offered the Fair and Flexible plan in 2004 ("300 minutes for $35, and each additional block of 50 minutes for $2.50") it ...
Media
File Under: Spammers are really smart (and funny).
So apparently in World of Warcraft you can't spam people with commercial messages or you get kicked off. However, there is a lot of money in selling gold to players and there are a bunch of sites that competing to sell it to you. So their ...
Media
The always-wise Russell Davies hits the nail on the head with this one : "As a semi-professional prognosticator I'm always tempted by the rhetorical power of statements like The Internet Is Killing X. But, of course, it isn't."
We are all tempted to make statements like this (or at least I ...
Media
Maybe I'm late to this game, but in a post describing the design decisions behind the new retweet functionality , Evan Williams articulates the Twitter mission in a way I had never heard before:
This last point [the need to have structured data around retweets] is not obvious but is ...
Media
George Packer has a good short essay where he tries to unpack people's fascination with Mad Men . I'm not really a fan of the show (I watched the first five episodes or so and was too bored to continue), but I am always interested in the things other people find interesting and Packer does a ...
Media
In case you ever wanted to read 5000+ words on optimal buffet strategies, I've got just the article for you . It's chock full of such insightful nuggets as:
"The morning of I would suggest a very small meal containing some sugar in order to get your metabolism up and running."
"A point to ...
Media
Like I said, I ran across two good Rushkoff insights today. The first was on newspapers and this one is on open source. It comes from Rushkoff's radio show The Media Squat where he talked about the realities of open source, all of which was very nicely summed up by abject learning (who also has ...
Media
Wikipedia
Ran across two quotes from Rushkoff today that struck me as quite insightful and worth sharing (in two separate posts for length purposes). The first comes from an article he wrote for Daily Beast about the Rupert Murdoch versus Google thing :
By opening themselves up to immediate ...
Media
Does tech promote one gender's approach to the world over another? I was reminded of this post I wrote a month ago (and never posted) when I read at Overcoming Bias that women being more picky than men at speed dating events was the result of the way the event was set up, not some insight ...
