Spent the evening with my Kindle, a few cups of tea, and my most recent items from Instapaper. The highlights of my reading list for the night:
I thought this chart from The Verge was terrific. Focus and restraint breed quality. (via Shawn Blanc)
Evangelism is word-of-mouth marketing. It’s the best kind of marketing because it’s honest and personal. We don’t pay attention to television commercials and magazine ads because we don’t trust them. We do, however, trust our friends recommending something to us.
And so, companies want their customers to tell their friends about the product. But try as you may, you can’t force people to talk about your product, which means that the next best thing is to try and get people to at least use it.
Shawn Blanc – You Can’t Buy Word of Mouth.
Steve said that each of the three user interfaces made possible a revolutionary new type of product. The mouse enabled the Macintosh. The click wheel enabled the iPod. Multi-touch enabled the iPhone. What will Siri enable?
Shawn Blanc – Apple’s Fourth Interface
How many people are subscribers to The New Yorker iPad app that don’t actually read for whatever reason? If the app were easier to use and quicker to access, then you’d have users, not just subscribers. And users tell their friends about the recent article they read; users read the app in front of their co-workers during lunch break; users actually get invested in the app. If you can garner the attention of your subscriber base, and not just their money, then your road to growth gets significantly easier.
Shawn Blanc – We just want to read.
Put another way, writing a weblog full time is not unlike farming. Lots of chores and lots of busy work that take up time every single day, but the fruit of that labor is seasonal.
Shawn Blanc – An Ode to Software.
Beginning. Shawn Blanc is turning his site into a full-time gig. A $3 monthly membership fee is part of how he’ll make the financial side of things work.
Excerpted from an interview with Shawn Blanc on Bridging the Nerd Gap. Pretty cool anecdotes throughout.
I hate to just waste away an hour especially as a daily habit just vegging out for no reason. Writing is entertainment for me, although sometimes it takes on the shape of grueling and frustrating entertainment. So if I can’t get myself to focus on writing then I am likely to read or just go to bed.
A useful-sounding idea from Shawn Blanc for what would be close to my ideal task manager:
And my next wish? A cloud-based service like Instapaper, but for to-do items. I want it to be available in apps like Tweetie, Reeder, and more, so when I click on “Do Later” it sends the link or item of note into a running to-do list that syncs with Things, of course.
