A bit of inspiring fluff. It’s not clear to me that these programs considerably affect those they seek to help. What is clear, however, is that they definitely enrich the lives of those who champion them. (But, and perhaps as an intended consequence, as I ease into the Obama camp I’m attempting to curb my general cynicism.)

Perhaps the problem with viral marketing is that the disease metaphor is misleading. Watts thinks trends are more like forest fires: There are thousands a year, but only a few become roaring monsters. That’s because in those rare situations, the landscape was ripe: sparse rain, dry woods, badly equipped fire departments. If these conditions exist, any old match will do. “And nobody,” Watts says wryly, “will go around talking about the exceptional properties of the spark that started the fire.” 

“If free markets are just a tool, then their morality comes from how we apply them. Herein lies the role of government, in setting up the rules and regulations for enterprise, the government is using free markets as a tool and in doing so is embedding our morals into that market. By putting a price on externalities we are giving moral weight to the operation of the market. It is through government that we as a people can shape and guide the force of free markets to do our bidding, and to do so with in a way that reflects our morals. While a perfectly free market is amoral, a regulated one need not be.”

“Ultimately, I think we see this pattern in the economic development of every innovation. When a new technology is introduced, there’s a lot of green-field opportunity, and so much value is being created that there’s no need to capture it all. But as the technology matures, the winners need to capture more of the total value being created. They gradually crowd out suppliers as well as competitors.”

One for the holiday season: “You Get What You Give.”

“In other words, think of your entire business as the system you’re optimizing. If you’re spending time developing a feature for power users, but your business will not actually be successful unless your rate of growth increases, you’re optimizing the wrong thing (assuming the power-user feature isn’t directly related to growth). If you’re spending time getting more people to your front door, but no one’s signing up once they get there, you’re optimizing the wrong thing. If lots of people are signing up, but they’re not sticking around, then working on your ad platform is probably time misspent.”

“Out here in the wild we educate ourselves and each other while making stuff and helping others make stuff and thinking out loud about how it works and how it oughta work. It’s not R&D but R via D. Lots of great stuff gets made this way, but it doesn’t get covered much by the MSM because it’s not being done by big or hot companies and/or personalities.”

Why Being Outside of Silicon Valley is Good for Startups

“There is absolutely nothing wrong with having a multi-layered application. In many cases, anything but that would be a bad design. It’s absolutely critical, however, to not think of these layers as persistence, business, and presentation. Database, processing, and user interface are much more appropriate terms.”