Month: February 2014

Handling Freemium Customer Support. How Justin Williams approaches support for Glassboard.

Twitter’s Root Injustice:

You can design a social media platform that is more fair to new users just as you can design a government that is more fair to its less privileged citizens.

The drug revolution that no one can stop. Designing narcotics online skirts the edges of legality while making overdose treatments more difficult. Super thorough article from Matter.

The Pleasure and Pain of Speed. Nautilus article that looks at whether there are biological thresholds to how fast our brain can process information. Toward the end it considers whether these thresholds are static or whether we’re adapting to faster processing speeds over time.

Buckets and Vessels:

Notions of authority are not eroding. People will continue to seek out and reward expert opinion. No one is storming the proverbial gates, and there are still plenty of people who want to get inside them. What is happening instead is the creation of a de facto, rather than de jure, culture of curation to deal with a world that has become more of an abundant present than a considered past.

A Lonely Quest for Facts on Genetically Modified Crops. Long feature from the New York Times about a Hawaii councilman’s attempt to dig at the truth around GMO crops.

The qualities of a great WordPress contributor. A fantastic post from Andrew Nacin about the values, processes, and mindsets that go in to crafting WordPress. There’s a lot in the post and perhaps my favorite bit is:

What does describe WordPress well is that it’s more communication than code. I think this is also incredibly healthy. Communication and collaboration are the lifeblood for an open source project.

Nacin’s post is a testament to that, I think.

Not the Monk I Used to Be. Great episode of Back To Work about the importance of sleep.