Chao Lam

Brilliant use of google trends!

Amazing set of presentations from YCombinator’s Startup school - for anyone interested in doing a startup.

A colleague of mine and I are having an ongoing debate about how to market to advertisers for coolchaser.com. I spoke against the direct, hard sell and came across Mark Cuban’s post about advertiser’s shooting themselves in their collective feet.

At first glance, it seems to support my argument, but on another reflection, perhaps advertisers themselves “think differently”, and would like to be marketed to with a hardsell; is that why they consistently get it wrong with consumers?!

Still, I love Mark Cuban’s recommendation: TV advertisers should “Turn down the sound, maybe people will lean forward and listen !”

Wow, a web based IDE for Ruby on Rails, deployed on EC2 with a push of button!

Dogster has some free SEO tools to recommend

Venture Beat has an interesting interview with Google’s Marissa Mayer on Social Search

I can’t wait for Chris Anderson’s (aka Mr Long Tail) new book about FREE (businesses that give away stuff to build and sustain an audience/distribution). Meanwhile, he’s started a very insightful blog post around the multitude of business models centered around “a core of free or almost-free content”.

It’s a great list especially if you’re considering building consumer-oriented websites I only have one, perhaps tangential, contribution to the list:

What about crowd-sourcing? I’m thinking Threadless where they get users to submit T-shirt designs, users to vote (filter out) for the popular designs which they then actually produce. OK, some would say that T-shirts aren’t “media”, but I’d argue T-shirts are 20% clothing 80% self-expression (i.e. more blog and cotton)!

Looking forward to Ruby 1.9. Will it be 3 times faster?

Looks like a good article we can learn from.