A friend asked me for advice before conducting her first post-mortem. Here’s what I should have told her. All problems have the same root cause. When I state that cause, many of you will think I’m merely stating an obvious truism. But our inability to really accept this basic truth makes most problems much worse […]
[This post is part of a 4 part series on the key tensions in growing a high quality community-generated content site. It was presented at PubCon, Las Vegas, 2011.] Growing a community is like rocket science Growing a community is like rocket science. It takes an enormous amount of energy per mile to get off […]
[This post is part of a 4 part series on the key tensions in growing a high quality community-generated content site. It was presented at PubCon, Las Vegas, 2011.] “Given that you have worked on this tool … I believe you should recuse yourself of any discussion of this feature.” Wikipedia user suggesting WikiMedia product […]
[This post is part of a 4 part series on the key tensions in growing a high quality community-generated content site. It was presented at PubCon, Las Vegas, 2011] Dan Ariely tells the classic story of mixing social and market contexts. A man finishes Thanksgiving Dinner at his mother-in-law’s house and says “That was fantastic. […]
[This post is part of a 4 part series on the key tensions in growing a high quality community-generated content site. It was presented at PubCon, Las Vegas, 2011] I happened to pick up my (nearly) 30-year-old copy of In Search of Excellence while preparing my PubCon presentation on High Quality UGC. A few points […]
Marissa Mayer led the user interface and web servers teams when she joined Google in 1999. Her titles have changed through the years, and have included Director of Consumer Products and finally Vice President of Search Products and User Experience; but essentially from 1999 through last week Marissa was responsible for product direction and decisions […]
In Bad Advice Yelled Loudly Is Still Bad Advice Lisa Barone took on Forrester and AdAge’s call for most businesses to wait before spending resources on FourSquare and its competitors: “I’m not going to lie, it seems absolutely ridiculous to me that anyone in this space would advise marketers take a “sit and wait” approach to […]
Ironic that immediately after David Brooks’ column criticizing the Tea Party movement for being too radical, Brooks publishes a column criticizing politicians’ lack of passion and commitment for fiscal responsibility: “To actually reduce benefits and raise taxes, we’re going to need legislators who wake up in the morning passionate about fiscal sanity. The ones we […]
Fantastic post today by Joel Spolsky Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death? I could feel Joel’s pain. Essentially he was jettisoning the basic premises that had guided him for a decade. Joel came to the painful conclusion that there was only room for one big company in his market, and that if he continued only […]
Our fantastic product and project managers need a new teammate. The job is in the Jerusalem office of Answers.com. [We also need a New York based Director of Community and some Jerusalem based Engineers. See our jobs page for more details.] Bad news: you’d see me every day. Good news: everybody else is fantastic. We […]