10 Blogs to Make You Think

Essays

This article also ran on CNN.

There are a hundred million blogs in the world, and it’s part of my job as the co-founder of WordPress to help as many people start blogging as possible. I think we’re doing pretty well on that front, but it does mean that sometimes it feels overwhelming to wade through them all and find the blogs that will be informative, entertaining, or whatever it is you’re looking for.  Sometimes you might feel it’s like TV — you have a thousand channels but nothing good is on. If you want to take a dip into the blogosphere, here are ten eclectic blog picks that, if nothing else, will make you think (or at least, they make me think):

1. Scripting News is the blog of Dave Winer, the father of many technologies that are crucial to the web. Dave writes every day and you’re as likely to read about something intensely personal he’s going through, like the passing of his father, as you are to read about the real-time web.

2. Open… by Glyn Moody covers the application of Open Source thinking to fields as wide-ranging as politics, genomics, content, and of course, software.

3. Scott Berkun is a former Microsoftie who has graduated to being one of most erudite authors on innovation, creativity, management, and now public speaking. He’s like a modern-day Peter Drucker.

4. Raw Thought from Aaron Swartz is a diverse blog from a deep thinker and troublemaker. The former is evidenced by his New Yorker-length treatise on John Maynard Keynes’ General Theory, while the latter is shown in his posted FBI file (you can request yours).

5. Philip Greenspun posts “every day; an interesting idea every three months.” See how a successful startup founder and engineer thinks about his post-startup life, taxes, helicopters, and photography.

6. Tim Ferriss is best known for his best-seller The Four Hour Workweek, but I’m most impressed by his blog on “lifestyle design,” or basically taking an analytical approach to your health and happiness.

7. Paul Graham, also a successful startup founder, has transformed into a philosophical leader of entrepreneurs. He espouses his view through thoughtful essays (linked) and invests in aspiring entrepeneurs through Y Combinator.

8. The Official Dreamhost Weblog is probably the most interesting blog from a company, ever. Each entry floats and wanders through vaguely inappropriate language and visual non-sequiturs before finally bringing you back home in a way you couldn’t have predicted; it’s more crazy than corporate.

9. Signals vs. Noise is another company blog, this one from 37 Signals, but at its core is an ongoing argument for simplicity in all things: design, code, and culture.

10. XKCD is daily comic that you’ll never find in a newspaper — it’s too smart, too honest, too web. For an extra bonus, hover your mouse over the image and see a hidden caption.

11. And though it’s not a blog, check out Werner Vogel’s Twitter to get insight into the mind of the CTO of one of the most innovative technology companies in the world, Amazon.

First Impressions of Sony X

Review

I’m a little addicted to gadgets, especially Sony laptops which have served as my primary on-the-go machines for the past few years because of their power and portability. When I first saw the Vaio X, Sony’s new ultra-thin and ultra-light laptop, I was taken aback. It looked beautiful, but so was the Envy 133 and the Envy was a complete waste of time and money due to a really bad trackpad and performance. Anyway, I’ve been playing with the X1 for 5-6 hours now, and here are some unordered thoughts:

  1. It is the sexiest and most elegant laptop I’ve held or seen. Feels like it’s from the future.
  2. It feels almost too light, I actually threw it up and caught it, particularly with the normal-sized battery.
  3. I got the champagne color, which was a good choice.
  4. The ethernet port works in a really interesting way.
  5. Speed of browsing, installing, everything feels pretty good with Windows 7, but it’s obvious the graphics card is pretty underpowered. The moment you turn transparency on or get a flash video on Blip going it starts to stutter a bit.
  6. That said, I could imagine using this as my primary machine for short and medium trips.
  7. The keyboard takes a bit of getting used to in a way I haven’t run into before: the space bar is hard to hit. The keyboard is very compressed in vertical space so your thumb falls below where the space bar is, and you have to retrain your hand to be in a different position which isn’t as comfortable. The shift button can be hard to hit but that’s much easier to get used to, I’ve done it on other small keyboards. I’m not sure why they made it so small, it feels like it could stretch out a bit more.
  8. Other big annoyance is the trackpad — it’s really narrow. Windows machines do the trackpad scroll on the right and bottom edges of the pad and I find myself triggering that accidentally because the tracking area is so tiny. Again, lots of apparent space toward the bottom of the laptop just a really narrow tracking area. This is easier to get used to than the keyboard, though, and the trackpad feels nice like most Vaios and unlike the Voodoo Envy.
  9. I love that it has two USB ports, and a regular VGA connector instead of some weird micro-display-port you need a dongle for. (An Apple decision that bugs me almost as much as the recessed headphone connector on the original iPhone.)
  10. Screen is gorgeous, like all recent Vaios.
  11. Did I mention it’s drop-dead gorgeous? It’s the first laptop I’ve had in 5 years that I don’t want to put stickers on.
  12. Hardware-wise, way better than the Air.

So while it won’t be replacing my Z890 as primary workhorse for now, the X is so light I might take it on my next few trips and use it as a day-top. I’m especially excited by the prospect of the 14 hour battery life (probably 10 in real life use) giving me freedom from power cords through even a whole day at a WordCamp. We’ll see in a week or two if I’m able to comfortably adjust to the too-small keyboard and trackpad.

Kids are All Right

Asides

My friend Liz Welch recently finished up her new book with her siblings, The Kids are All Right. “Well, 1983 certainly wasn’t boring for the Welch family. Somehow, between their handsome father’s mysterious death, their glamorous soap opera star mother’s cancer diagnosis, and a phalanx of lawyers intent on bankruptcy proceedings, the four Welch siblings managed to handle each new heartbreaking misfortune together. But all that changed with the death of their mother. While nineteen year-old Amanda was legally on her own, the three younger siblings—Liz, 16; Dan, 14 and Diana, 8—were each dispersed to a different set of family friends.” I just ordered it on my Kindle.

Irrational Finance

Quote

Two excerpts from Rational Irrationality: The real reason that capitalism is so crash-prone.

What boosts a firm’s stock price, and the boss’s standing, is a rapid expansion in revenues and market share. Privately, he may harbor reservations about a particular business line, such as subprime securitization. But, once his peers have entered the field, and are making money, his firm has little choice except to join them. C.E.O.s certainly don’t have much personal incentive to exercise caution. Most of them receive compensation packages loaded with stock options, which reward them for delivering extraordinary growth rather than maintaining product quality and protecting their firm’s reputation.

Here is another on financial innovation, which made me think of my bank post:

Limiting the development of those securities would stifle innovation, the financial industry contends. But that’s precisely the point. “The goal is not to have the most advanced financial system, but a financial system that is reasonably advanced but robust,” Viral V. Acharya and Matthew Richardson, two economists at N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business, wrote in a recent paper. “That’s no different from what we seek in other areas of human activity. We don’t use the most advanced aircraft to move millions of people around the world. We use reasonably advanced aircrafts whose designs have proved to be reliable.”

Kindle Statistics

Ideas,

Dear Kindle Team, one of my favorite features of Google Reader has always been its “Trends” or more simply its statistics that give you insight into your reading patterns and volume.

As the Kindle has become a bigger and bigger part of my life, much of my reading time has shifted from RSS-based sources to content on my Kindle, but I’m really curious how much time, how many words, at what times of day, etc I’m consuming all this new content. I think providing stats would also encourage people to read more, and highlight to them how the Kindle has changed their habits.