Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas
If it’s hard to change something so simple as a name, imagine how hard it is to garbage-collect an idea. A name only has one point of attachment into your head. An idea for a company gets woven into your thoughts. So you must consciously discount for that. Plunge in, by all means, but remember later to look at your idea in the harsh light of morning and ask: is this something people will pay for? Is this, of all the things we could make, the thing people will pay most for? (By Paul Graham)

Impressive paper-based project management workflow
These are both things that I’d like to get much better at. Working at home, I have a habit of half-assing through the working hours of the day, and then half-assing through the supposedly relaxed family time of the evening. Neither one gets the attention it deserves as I blithely flip through emails or surf the web. So I find the idea of an “end of day” ritual intriguing. (Via 43 Folders)

Be A More Productive Blogger
The thing is, I go to great lengths to keep my sites up-to-date, interesting and moving forward. My off-the-cuff answer is that I “write fast”, and that’s true, but there is a bit more to it than that. To be a productive content provider (blogger) you need to be organized, do your best to hold on to good ideas and know when to work and when to wait. (From some random weblog)

11 steps to a better Brain
Your brain is the greediest organ in your body, with some quite specific dietary requirements. So it is hardly surprising that what you eat can affect how you think. If you believe the dietary supplement industry, you could become the next Einstein just by popping the right combination of pills. Look closer, however, and it isn’t that simple. The savvy consumer should take talk of brain-boosting diets with a pinch of low-sodium salt. But if it is possible to eat your way to genius, it must surely be worth a try. (Found at New Scientist)

Ten Things I Didn’t Know About Google
I spent most of today at an event called the Google Factory Tour–which involved neither a factory nor a tour, but turned out to be a worthwhile opportunity to hear a bunch of Google people talk about Google the company, Google the array of services, and Google the philosophy. (If you’re sorry you missed it, check out this Webcast of the whole thing, including me asking a couple of questions.) (Via PC World)

Nintendo’s Long Tail
And then Nintendo announces that they’ll be working on making their back catalog available. Miyamoto doesn’t know which games they’ll make available, but everything can run. I can pretty much guarantee that the chance to play Dr. Mario on a big screen is going to sell my father a Revolution. Admittedly he’s not necessarily your typical approaching 60-year old (he bought us our Intellivision and I’m convinced that it being “for the kids” was never an excuse he had to use) but instant access to a library that size is a compelling reason for a great many people. (Found at a random blog)

I’ve been searching for the ultimate design tool for years. I’ve cycled between various software approaches (outliners, textfiles, wikis, diagrams, etc.) and through the many real-world alternatives. In the end, I’m more productive designing away from the machine.

Take my notebooks as an example. While they’re full of large sheets of paper, I don’t find them a useful place to think out design. They’re far too open, encouraging designs to grow prematurely. Blank sheets of paper are a bit better, as they allow for more rapid drafting (there is no need to rip out pages), but suffer from the same lack of constraint as notebook pages.

On the other side of scale, I’ve tried using different sizes of Post-its. They’re small, forcing a very productive economy of expression. They’re also handy for sticking to stuff, which allows the ideas to be moved about and related to each other (especially useful on a whiteboard). The greatest drawback to the Post-it is that they don’t archive well, making for a very temporary store.

Recipe cards, recently repopularized by the Hipster PDA meme, represent my ideal design form. I stopped using them several years ago in an attempt to go all-electronic (which crashed and burned), and am now getting back to their beautiful simplicity. They’re small, representing a sensibly-constrained, portable thought-space. They’re rugged, traveling well in my backpack, and can be tacked to a corkboard dozens of times before wearing out. They’re cheap, easy to find, and have many available forms of affordable long-term storage hardware. They also last for darn near forever, longer than even the average burned CDrom (in a format that’s always readable).

I still use electronic tools for tracking certain portions of design, just not for the early creative stages. I have to explored the design of a project in depth before I can start to document it with standard electronic tools, otherwise I just waste too much time mutating the design with inflexible tools.

Sliders are the new drop-downs
There are fifty states (proof: Clickable Map of US States.) This is a problem. If there were 5 states or 500 states, programmers would never have been tempted into forcing consumers to scroll through a pull down menu to enter their state when shopping online. This means everyone from Texas or New York or heaven forfend, West Virginia, has to scroll all the way down in order to buy something. … (via O’Rielly Radar)

Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags
What I think is coming instead are much more organic ways of organizing information than our current categorization schemes allow, based on two units — the link, which can point to anything, and the tag, which is a way of attaching labels to links. The strategy of tagging — free-form labeling, without regard to categorical constraints — seems like a recipe for disaster, but as the Web has shown us, you can extract a surprising amount of value from big messy data sets. (via shirky.com)

Longhorn arrives with a whimper
Does Longhorn have a versioned file system? No. I.e., you can’t ask the system to show you what a spreadsheet or document looked like two months ago. Probably the vast majority of user-created documents in a file system are there because of this lack of versioning in WinXP’s NTFS file system. You have “Whizco Contract”, “Whizco Contract pre-lawyers”, “Whizco Contract post-legal-review”, “Whizco Contract with comments from Whizco”, “Whizco Contract 20050510″, “Whizco Contract Final”, “Whizco Contract Final Signature Copy”, etc. If Longhorn had a versioned file system, as became available for commercial Unices in the early 1990s, there would only be perhaps 1/10th as many user-created documents on the typical system.