Early retirement is a false idol
From 37Signals, Justin Bell writes that you shouldn’t sacrifice your entire life now for a shot at an early retirement. Enjoy life now, as you’re living it.

Dropping bombs in the newsroom
The newspaper industry really has to reinvent itself. More on this later.

Mom-and-Pop Multinationals
Interesting article from Business Week on how small business owners are taking advantage of global outsourcing. Many good ideas.

I’m thought about using some of these services since reading The Four-Hour Workweek. I’ll see if I can use any of them this fall as I’m going all-out towards launch.

How to analyze and improve the bounce rate for your website
Very good article on a very important topic. I’m trying to build a model for one of my clients on this.

25 reasons users stop using your product
Andrew Chen writes up some notes on why people give up on games and websites. I’m spending a lot of time working on Serendeputy’s out-of-the-box experience and customer lifecycle. I don’t have a ton of marketing dollars, so I need to make sure the product is keeping the customers engaged.

I’ll likely write a longer piece later about how I’m trying to incorporate the best ideas from game design to apply to more conventional websites.

Dissecting today’s Internet traffic spikes
Scaling doesn’t mean the same thing today that it did a few years ago. If I ever get to a point that this is a problem for me, I’ll likely have someone smarter than me thinking about it; still, this is really interesting information to know.

Nine steps to achieving flow
I love working from home now. It’s so much easier to get in the state of flow.

Programmer Competency Matrix
This is a smart grouping of competencies you want your programmers to have. Boy, do I have a long way to go before I’m even vaguely competent at programming.

15 questions to ask during a Ruby inteview
On the other hand, I aced this test, so I’m feeling a little bit better about my meager skills.

Alan interviewed
Alan is getting some incredible press with his Big Picture project. Here’s an interview by Andy Baio.

Tell the advertisers when their ads suck
This is one issue I’ve been beating for ages, but have never had the power to push through: There should be no ads on any page that aren’t immediately and obviously relevant to the person reading or the content being read. If advertising is actually reliably useful, then it’s content, not an irritation.

Don’t hash secrets
Ben Adida gives some good advice on how to secure usernames and passwords (among other things). I’ve just altered the spec…

Random thoughts about the Kindle
Seth Godin thinks about the Kindle. I’m very interested, because Serendeputy is targeted to women, and most of the tricks that work for geeks won’t be in play.

7 lessons from a product launch
Dharmesh Shah gives some good lessons on how to handle a product launch. I hope to be able to follow them myself (in a couple of months or so…)

How corporations constrain productivity
I set up my home office with the best tools I could afford. Life is so much better when you love your tools.

Murdoch has a plan. Zell doesn’t
Alan Mutter dissects recent newspaper purchases.

Patterns for designing a reputation system
Another good one from the Yahoo User Interface team. I’m wrestling with this in a couple of different contexts right now, so this is very timely.

It doesn’t have to be all or nothing with a start-up
David Hansson of 37 Signals writes (and I wholeheartedly agree) that running a start-up need not entirely take over your life. I’m spending a lot of time right now designing the application and the business model so that I can run the business in a reasonable way. It may not end up that way, but that’s where I’m steering.

Dan Dunn leaves HP
Dan’s golden hand with acquisitions continues.

Washington Post’s hyperlocal flop
The Wall Street Journal’s massive hit job on the Washington Post’s hyperlocal effort. Interesting things to think about for Boston.com’s hyperlocal project.

Cloud service architecture
The Amazon Web Services folks on the cloud services architecture.

Welcome to Linky Goodness. I’ll do my best to link out to interesting things I find on the web. I should post this every day or two.

How eBay scales
Excellent article about how eBay manages their systems. Their work on shifting to asynchronous processes wherever possible matches my thinking.

Adventures in Office Space
Joel Spolsky writes in Inc. Magazine about his adventures getting new Manhattan office space for his company. I entirely agree with his policy of spending money to make the developers happy and productive. (Note: beware of Inc’s horribly annoying popups. Luckily I don’t see any of that crap in Safari).

The Big Picture
Alan Taylor’s new project on Boston.com, in which he tells news stories using big, beautiful pictures. It’s really quite compelling.

Rating the top 25 newspaper websites
An interesting overview of the top 25 newspaper websites. Hooray for NYTimes.com getting an A, but I think Boston.com deserves better than a C.