I just saw this on Merlin Mann’s twitter feed: The guy who worries people will “steal” his idea might better ponder why nobody “steals” his implementation. As I keep saying – ideas are cheap, and implementations are valuable. We need to find better ways to cycle through ideas rapidly. This reminds me of a post […]
Here’s our friend Andrew Stephen on getting ideas to spread through viral marketing: Everyone talks about how they need their ideas to go viral, and Andrew has a some excellent data on how to actually get this to happen. The key points – do something that is interesting enough that people actually want to talk […]
Sam & I had great meetings with a couple of our key research partners yesterday. I mentioned one of the key points that Nick raised in my last post, but two blog posts that I’ve read this morning have reminded me of his second outstanding point. We were discussing their successful implementation of a Communities […]
Derek Powazek has written a post that pretty thoroughly eviscerates the idea of search engine optimisation. He starts his final paragraph this way: Which brings us, finally, to the One True Way to get a lot of traffic on the web. It’s pretty simple, and I’m going to give it to you here, for free: […]
thereifixedit.com has many examples of bad ideas, which, probably, won’t spread… When I talked about Voodoo Histories by Aaronovitch the other day, I maybe stretched things a bit when I talked about Crocs as a bad idea that spread. In fact, several parts of that post weren’t very clear. I think a better description of […]
Another book that I read on my trip is Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History by David Aaronovitch. It looks at a number of conspiracy theories from around the start of the 20th Century up to the present time. Some of them have had deadly consequences (e.g. the myths […]
I’ve written about Lilia Efimova’s excellent PhD research before, and now she’s written another really good post. It’s structured around this table: This is a really nice taxonomy, and there’s not a whole lot that needs to be added to it. I suppose I take a bit more of an evolutionary view of academic blogging. […]
There’s an interesting post from the political blog The Monkey Cage, which describes a recent scandal with an open access academic journal. Here’s the key part of the story: Using pseudonyms, Philip Davis and Kent Anderson, claiming to be researchers at the Center for Research in Applied Phrenology (in case you don’t recall what phrenology […]
I generally hate blog posts about blogging, so I guess I’ll hate this one. Mainly, I just want to share this terrific article from American Scientist. The main point of the article is that researchers learn their craft better by writing about it, specifically, by explaining their work to people that don’t work in their […]
