A violin from the inside (via the Behance Network)
Month: March 2012
The myth of the overnight success
The myth of the overnight success
Chris Dixon:
You tend to hear about startups when they are successful but not when they are struggling. This creates a systematically distorted perception that companies succeed overnight. Almost always, when you learn the backstory, you find that behind every “overnight success” is a story of entrepreneurs toiling away for years, with very few people except themselves and perhaps a few friends, users, and investors supporting them.
John Gruber on the new iPad
John Gruber’s review of the new iPad is enough to make anyone start checking their credit limit to see if they can afford the latest toy from Apple.
Pixels pixels pixels. Battery battery battery. Speed speed speed.
That’s the new iPad, a.k.a. (for comparison’s sake) the iPad 3. The retina display, significantly faster graphics, and the potential for startlingly fast cellular networking — all with the same renowned battery life (and standby time) as the original iPad and iPad 2.
I will not buy the new iPad any time soon, but won’t let that stop me dreaming.
Stop Calling it Curation
langer:
Imagine, if you will, a world in which Richard Seaver or Robert Gottlieb had stomped their feet and huffed and puffed every time John Leonard forgot to give them their proper “↬”. Or rather, as I joked on Twitter over the weekend about the new “Curator’s Code,” if Goethe had lived long enough to chide Mann for writing about Faust and giving a “ᔥ” to Marlowe but forgetting to give a “↬” to Goethe.
How could we have missed this? The characters from Captain Planet are just the kids from The Magic School Bus as teenagers.
Posterous acquired by Twitter
Tumblr better not be next.
10 Tips on Writing from the original Mad Man
Maria Popova shared 10 tips on writing from advertizing legend David Ogilvy.
1. Read the Roman-Raphaelson book on writing. Read it three times.
2. Write the way you talk. Naturally.
3. Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.
4. Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.
5. Never write more than two pages on any subject.
6. Check your quotations.
7. Never send a letter or a memo on the day you write it. Read it aloud the next morning — and then edit it.
8. If it is something important, get a colleague to improve it.
9. Before you send your letter or your memo, make sure it is crystal clear what you want the recipient to do.
10. If you want ACTION, don’t write. Go and tell the guy what you want.
These are good tips from a man who knew how to get his way with words. Kenneth Roman, writing in Strategy+Business observed that good writing was part of the culture Ogilvy nurtured around him.
“It did not escape our notice that everyone in the upper levels of Ogilvy knew how to write — and write very well,” said the head of an agency newly acquired by Ogilvy. Discipline in writing was a mark of the culture. Ogilvy considered himself an advertising writer, nothing more. “If I were a really creative writer, like my cousin and great friend Rebecca West, I would probably prefer to seek fame as an author — instead of devoting my pen to the services of Rinso,” he said.
Being edited by Ogilvy was like being operated on by a great surgeon who could put his hand on the only tender organ in your body. You could feel him put his finger on the wrong word, the soft phrase, the incomplete thought.