Delicious

An illustrated guide to some of the best Bloody Mary's in San Francisco

Guess what, there's no magic bullet to building a successful startup!

A fantastic post with which I couldn't agree more about how getting customers to relate to the people behind the product can be a competitive advantage.

"PERSONALITY MAKE PRODUCT FRIEND. YOU HELP FRIEND. YOU FORGIVE WHEN FRIEND NOT PERFECT. YOU WANT FRIEND WIN."

A pretty astute analysis consistent with my experience dealing with employee equity grants post Series A funding.

One of my biggest concerns with online activism is that it can be seen as a substitute for real action when in fact it can often achieve little more than self-satisfaction within an existing echo chamber.

This post sums up my sentiments nicely (if snarkily), especially with this parting shot:
"Fauxtivism is worse than nothing—it trivializes the issue, mistakes gesture for action—and makes you feel good when you haven't accomplished a thing."

One of my elementary school classmates moved to Rio de Janeiro several years back and has become a local ghetto rap star. Nuts!

A handy tool to convert IP addresses among their various forms, including the pesky Decimal or Long form ones. Also optionally does hostname lookups in the same process.

A handy tool for translating a user-agent string into it's component attributes.

My favorite whois lookup tool

An in-depth post from Union Square Ventures associate Christina Cacioppo who synthesizes 2 trends from the 160+ accelerator/incubator graduate companies she saw this fall: the componentization of software; and the fragmentation of labor (or the componentization of work). Parallel trends enabled by the scale and geographic agnosticism of the Internet. I'm happy to be building a company that's consistent with at least one of these macro trends :-)

A great post by Andy Baio on how the current intellectual property regime is anathema to the generation that grew up on YouTube and social media and think remixing and sharing is totally legal.

A great presentation by SEOmoz's @randfish on Inbound Marketing (i.e. marketing you don't pay for) and how to do it with a focus on performance.

A very poignant and self-aware account of the true story behind the iPhone 4 prototype fiasco.

The video of Steve Jobs's Stanford Commencement speech given shortly after being diagnosed with cancer.

A very powerful story about overcoming adversity and the power of will and a positive attitude. This is the kind of thing you have to remember when you start feeling sorry for yourself because you think your life is so hard.

"If Republicans have perfected a new form of politics that is successful electorally at the same time that it unleashes major policy disasters, it means twilight both for the democratic process and America's status as the world's leading power."

A comprehensive list of the individuals running social marketing efforts at large brands by sector.

The main reason I started awe.sm was so that I wouldn't regret not striking out on my own. It is one of the most empowering and frightening things one can do professionally, and I think Dixon captures that very succinctly in this post.

An astute and approachable summary of the state of the consumer internet business from the perspective of someone who exists outside of the Silicon Valley startup bubble. Will be interesting to see what of this comes to fruition in the next 5 years.

Some charts and stats that relate social media marketing to commerce.