Posts filed under “Technology”
LinkedIn Q&A Rocks
I was trying to get some information on using a Cingular Blackberry in India and I decided to post a question in LinkedIn’s Q&A section (login required). Within 24 hours, I got some great responses, information about flight training and a strong sense of appreciation for what LinkedIn is doing at the moment. My best [...]
Put yourself in a position to innovate (via Ask the Wizard)
Dick Costolo’s post titled “Launch Late to Launch Often” contains (as always) some terrific ideas. Extensible architectures generally provide more long-term business value than point solutions, although point solutions may monetize a specific market more quickly Software that hasn’t been released can be changed in ways that become less possible N customers after launch. As [...]
List of Sites Banned from Digg (via Naffziger's Net)
Dave has a great post up about the list of sites banned from Digg. It’s a great piece of work. Dave got the top 10,000 domains from Alexa and then tested them against digg to get back a list of 183 banned domains. He also makes an insightful point about UGC sites that are banned: [...]
User Generated Content is great. Moderated User Generated Content is Better
One of the real-time lessons we learned at Judy’s Book is that while UGC is great, without vigilant moderation of that content, you’re going to get a lot of noise in the system, which is not great. When we were aggressively seeking reviews, we relied exclusively on the community to flag posts and then reviewed [...]
Great Wired Article – How Yahoo Blew It…
Brad Feld has a post about this article in Wired which led me to read it. It’s a critical account of how Yahoo lost the search advertising war to Google. Highly recommended. From the article: The problem, of course, is that better-late-than-never often fails in technology markets that operate as winner-take-all games. Just as Microsoft [...]
Measure Aggregate Behavior, but also remember to observe individuals
Measuring consumer behavior and watching consumers interact with your site are the best ways to find out what works and what doesn’t. There’s a great post on Signal vs. Noise about some of the things behind Amazon’s success. Two paragraphs that jumped out at me: Use measurement and objective debate to separate the good from [...]
Post-Release
The last week has been a hectic one at Judy’s Book. We released an update to our deals site on Monday and most of the week has been spent in addressing the numerous issues that come up post release. Dave and the engineering team did a fantastic job identifying and then whittling down our bug [...]
Site Down for 24 hours
My apologies, my site was down for 24 hours while my hosting provider f-ed around with “deploying some quick fixes” on their end. You get what you pay for when it comes to tech. Good times. download movie megamind hq
Interesting Post on Hard Disk Failure Rates (via All Things Distributed)
Werner Vogels has a really interesting post up about the reliability of hard disks. The bottom line? You get what you pay for. In their study they found that there was no correlation between disk failure rates and utilization, environmental conditions such as temperature, or age. This means that high disk utilization or age of [...]
Don't forget about your Ops Team
You’re not done until it’s tested, deployed and running. When working hard to build a site you think users will rave about, it’s critical to not lose sight of the operations support required to test, deploy and keep your site running. The best site in the world is a complete waste of time if pages [...]