Jason's presentation was focused on the "10 Things Every CEO Needs to Know About Product Design and User Experience". The full presentation is available at the bottom of the post but here are the key highlights: Design can change businesses: little things can have a great impact. A simple example: the difference between "I am on Twitter" and "You should follow me on Twitter here" increased the registration rate by 173%! Design is more than pretty picture: it is all about the user experience and the brand you are trying to build Talk benefits not features: It is much better... | Continue »

Recipe adapted from directions and shopping hints from Molly at Farmer's Market. Molly's October squash soup Ingredients: onion garlic ginger winter squash, peeled and diced (I used butternut and delicata) Saute onion, garlic, and ginger in olive or coconut oil.... | Continue »

Twitter needs tags. Twitter doesn't have tags right now. It does have names, and if you precede a name by an @, you can follow that name. Sometimes you want to share a conversation but not create an ID. For... | Continue »

I’m here in Detroit to participate in a film directed by Paolo Sorrentino (Il Divo). The other day we performed the song “This Must Be The Place” with band and string section while the camera made a complicated move and... | Continue »

From the Fake Steve Jobs column in June about problems with iPhone reception, an insight into Anatomy of a Murder: I said, Young acolyte, have you ever heard of a novel called Anatomy of a Murder? If not, you should, because (a) it’s a good read, and (b) it contains... | Continue »

Writing is like talking to the page, says my eldest son; and thus blogging is like talking to the net. You might hope that your words would sound good enough to read out loud to an attentive audience around the globe. At the very least they should sound like you when you read them aloud to yourself before hitting the "publish" button. Blogging is a way to jot down some ideas that you've been chewing over. The chance to put words in writing is not about writing formally for publication, but instead a way to write on screen for others... | Continue »

in some extremely silly world, here are practical ways to get dressed for Halloween as a vacuum cleaner with attachments. From "coolest homemade costumes dot com" in their home appliances section: My husband started with an empty box, free from... | Continue »

The conventional wisdom about blogs is that it's all about popularity - more page views, more hits, more subscribers, more more more. With that comes a manifest obligation to measure all of the inputs and outputs of the system and to construct pages that attract the maximum number of viewers. The entire population of inexpert "pro bloggers", with their teaser headlines and pointless numbered lists pulled straight from Cosmopolitan, live in this world of ever-declining ad revenues measured in pennies per thousand pages. If you are an expert, however, you are not after explanations that cater to the masses, and... | Continue »

When I got started blogging, it wasn't clear how many blogs one person could manage to maintain. I ended up with one main one (Vacuum) and a bunch of tiny little ones on specific subjects that got abandoned when my interest waned. At one point one of those side interests (libraries from a patron's point of view) got enough traffic and specific readership that I forked a series of posts into their own blog (Superpatron), which now has 4x the subscriber reach of Vacuum but really not much more actual readership traffic. This didn't start from scratch - there was... | Continue »

Missy Caulk is doing a seminar at Keller Williams about blogging in real estate in the Ann Arbor market. Some impressionistic notes. "Google likes fresh content" - static content with 10 years worth of stuff that is mostly the same.... | Continue »

Can we not agree after the complete commodification of social game awards that if you're not committing to building a whole experience around rewards to make them feel intrinsic to your activity they're just so much syrupy fructose glazed across your service, intended to sweeten and make your site “sticky”... | Continue »

And sadness hangs in the air. Our last full day | Continue »

Reading Mena's and Mie's posts today really touched a nerve in me, particularly combined with our office move to San Francisco. Mena's packed-up boxes. It's been 18 months now that we've been in the San Mateo office(s), and it's incredible... | Continue »

Some conference organisers will say "we didn't get any submissions from women" to explain the lack of women on their stages. As of two years ago, the Ohio LinuxFest was in that category. With a little outreach effort, and embracing... | Continue »

There I was, working from home on a day where our office had no water nor internet, planning new features for a fine blogging platform, when, all of a sudden, my droopy dream pop beats were interrupted by my landlord... | Continue »

For the past few weeks we've been testing a new, blogside toolbar with our [Beta] members. On Thursday we'll be releasing this great feature to all TypePad bloggers. The blogside toolbar is a great reader... | Continue »

The TypePad team has been hard at work delivering great discovery, distribution and community tools to our bloggers. If you haven't had a chance to keep up with all the changes, here's a recap of... | Continue »

Half life of culture is down to a week. via kellan@twitter.com I agree, but how could we lengthen the half life, instead of shortening it? Or is that a problem unique to trending topics on twitter? | Continue »

Just realized the TypePad "Quick Compose" box is basically useless to me because it doesn't accept HTML, e.g. to put a link into a post. *sigh* | Continue »