Category Archives: Asides

Interesting links.

Nassim Taleb on Living with Black Swans — “During a recent visit to Wharton as part of The Goldstone Forum, he spoke with Wharton finance professor Richard Herring — who taught Taleb when he was a Wharton MBA student — about events in the Middle East, the oil supply, investing in options, the U.S. economy, the dollar, health care and of course, black swans.”

I think there’s a difference between having a bestselling book–meaning through marketing, PR and buying that first wave of customers–and writing a bestselling book. The second implies that the product propels itself to the best seller list. That’s not to say that I’m Tolstoy or the best writer, but I used Facebook and Twitter more for feed back as I was creating and refining the book than for the actual marketing itself. My main online tool for priming the pump for the launch of the book was the blog. That was the heartbeat and the nexus for all the different tools that I use.

Via Tim Ferriss On Facebook, Twitter And Building A Huge Web Brand – Steven Bertoni – Money Talks – Forbes. I also liked this quote:

SB: How can a magazine catch up to the Web?

TF: If I worked for a magazine that’s very behind the times, I wouldn’t reinvent the wheel. I’d use WordPress as a content management system which has very good SEO out of the box. Companies spend so much time trying to develop something proprietary it’s ridiculous–you have thousands of people already working on WordPress.

Last year Audrey made an investment in Enterproid, which just came out of stealth. Basically it’s a mod of Android that creates a virtualized environment so you can separate your work stuff and personal stuff, and be able to do fun stuff on your phone that everyone expects but not many IT departments allow. They’ve gotten good coverage on TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb, and just won several hundred thousand dollars from the QPrize and presented at the DEMO conference.

A few super-hip folks (Automattic, Wall Street Journal, and HostGator) are hosting a WordPress party with open bar and all-you-can-eat BBQ on Friday night at SxSW (deets here) but it’s invite only and there’ll be a list at the door. (We can only feed so many people!) However I have 15 spaces to give away to Ma.tt readers, which will go to the first 15 people to comment with a link to an image of the WP logo in a cool place (Photoshop allowed) and your WP-powered blog.