Scientists published their work in journals that only scientists read, classicists in volumes that only classicists read, and engineers in blue books that no one read. So the reference book was born—the compendium of facts, the chrestomathy of passages, and the anthology of extracts—by which the rest of us could learn and use the information that print technology was producing, filling bookshelves that could be measured by the mile. #wikipedia
You could imagine a similar anxiety over how the telephone would undermine fiction. Perhaps it is just a matter of acceleration. #reader nostalgia
Of the many and conflicting stories about how Huffington Post came to be—how it boasts 68 sections, three international editions (with more to come), 1.2 billion monthly page views and 54 million comments in the past year alone, how it came to surpass the traffic of virtually all the nation’s established news organizations and amass content so voluminous that a visit to the website feels like a trip to a mall where the exits are impossible to locate—the earliest and arguably most telling begins with a lunch in March 2003 at which the idea of an online newspaper filled with celebrity bloggers and virally disseminated aggregated content did not come up. #online newspaper?
The number of websites that would now break if Amazon were to go down, and the growing pervasiveness of Amazon behind the scenes, is really quite impressive. The company stored 762 billion objects in its S3 storage cloud last year, three times the number of objects stored 2010. #Amazon
People often confuse my last point and the mantra of ‘lean startup’ and agile development and launch things that are flaky. That’s never okay. If you want to launch faster, make your product do less, but make that functionality the best in the field. #agile
Successful sports figures and musicians have long understood the value of time and practice in perfecting their skills. So why do entrepreneurs think that building a business is intuitively obvious, and should happen overnight? #practice
There is more than one way to make money in the tech field. AOL’s attempts to shift from a dialup Internet service provider to content king has had mixed success. But it has a trove of valuable patents - and just sold more than $1 billion worth to Microsoft. #aol
Indeed, the emergence of this empathetic consciousness has implications for the future that will likely be as profound and far-reaching as when Enlightenment philosophers upended faith-based consciousness with the canon of reason. #the empathatic civilization
Women overall were more optimistic than men about their businesses and more likely to feel successful. Ninety-one percent of women describe their businesses as successful, compared to 80 percent of men. #optimism
