Kathy Sierra and Jason Fried on deciding what customers really want. Clayton Christensen, Core Transformation, etc. (more)

How is this different from a Dynamic Language? Smells like a spin/branding that some folks (2003-04-14-PythonAgile) have come up with for Python to associate it with Agile Software Development. (more)

Kathy Sierra reviews Thirty7 Signals' apps in terms of their creation of Passion. Note: this review is not about the products themselves; it's about what they're doing to create Passionate users.

Susan Danziger, Publisher of DailyLit, will be speaking at OReilly's Tools Of Change For Publishing conference. So will Douglas Rushkoff, Dan Gillmor, Seth Godin, Ben Vershbow, Derek Powazek, Jeff Jarvis, TimOReilly, Kathy Sierra (pre-recorded hmph), Library Thing/Shelfari folks, Aaron Swartz, Mike Shatzkin, and many others... (more)

see Kick-Ass, Meaningful Life, Remarkable Life

Kathy Sierra on defining your purpose in doing some Technical Writing. Our advice to our authors is: "You must choose one, and you must commit body and soul and keyboard to doing that one single thing--either reference (data and information) or learning (knowledge and understanding), while letting go of the other. Accept that you can't meet both goals, and that most of your readers don't have both goals, and figure out the best way to satisfy that one goal." (DIKW)

I'm getting frustrated at what feels like a disconnect between the general/abstract recommendations in the Customer Development area, vs the "challenges" (Failure-s) I've experienced in a number of (both B2B and B2C) Start Up-s. See for instance Living Independently (which was both). The process I've experienced looks like: (more)

Robot guru (more)

Kathy Sierra on the trouble we have Educating Kids, especially in Exposing Young Kids To Science. If you studied math, science, or engineering (STEM) at a four-year college (College Education) in the US, much of what you learned is useless, forgotten, or obsolete. All that money, all that time, all that wasted talent. If all we lost were a few years, no big deal. But the really scary part is that we never learned what matters most to true experts in math, science, and engineering. We never really learned how to DO math, science, and engineering... And what do we do to try and improve things? We just do MORE of what's wrong. We redouble our efforts. We drill and test students even harder in facts and rote memorization. We work and test them even harder on using the tools for communication (e.g. code) rather than the tools for thought (e.g. intuition, visualization, etc.)... The WaterFall Model of education is failing like never before. We need Agile Learning.

Gary Stager gave a talk on "10 things to do with a Lap Top" (OLPC, Educational Technology). (more)

Mozilla Drumbeat is morphing into Mozilla Webmaker. (Maker) (more)

migration of people from rural to Urban areas (more)

pragmatic step toward being less sedentary (Exercise) (more)

BusinessToBusiness (more)

selling goods/services to Consumer rather than business

Andrew Chen says that for a B2C Internet Start Up, Business Model is no longer the issue: *Let’s ask a more important question: Could this product engage and retain 100s of millions of active users? (more)

monthly Hacker event (more)

Philadelphia Pa seems to be moving toward privatizing their entire Public School system. (more)

Planning is underway for the 5th Hack The Future event. (more)

Wired Mag profile of NeoPets. (more)