Reading List
Rob and I were talking about our reading lists expanding into good business and marketing blogs the other day, and I mentioned a few but didn't really come up anything concrete. So here it is, my current (short) daily reading list:
- programming.reddit.com - generally interesting, with lots of discussion of exotic language techniques and a great deal of material covering functional languages.
- codinghorror.com - interesting anecdotes, mainly about newer languages and the web.
- Raw Though - Aaron Swartz has always been the man.
- How to Change the World - Guy Kawasaki is an interesting guy, and he has been around technology through several bubbles. Regardless of his own pedigree, he is also a talented journalist and the interviews he conducts are unusually frank.
- Techquila Shots - Daily (but getting less frequent) web application ideas. Most aren't groundbreaking, but most of the ideas do at least get me thinking at nine in the morning.
- Get Rich Slowly - Sensible investment advice, with a technology slant. It's US-centric, but the majority of strategies apply in the UK equally effectively.
- Seth Godin's Blog - This blog isn't particularly original, it's the usual mix of marketing and meta-blogging which is done elsewhere, but Seth seems to understand the behaviour of groups so well that most of what he says is priceless.
- TechCrunch - Well, obviously. I actually feel slightly embarrassed for starting to read this so long after everyone else did.
And just for comparison, here are a few sites which I stopped reading recently:
- Digg - Even when combined with idiot removal scripts, recently Digg has become such bilge that I only glance at it once every few weeks. It is all very well trusting journalism to the wisdom of the crowd, but you have to remember that 95% of the crowd are morons.
- Lifehacker - This used to be a great site, but it is past its prime; I've not read anything notable on Lifehacker for months, maybe its readers need to stop tweaking their working practices and just do some damn work.
- Signal vs Noise - A good framework and great hype, very little substance. Unfortunately, the rule of simplicity cannot apply in all situations; I can't see their otherwise good web applications gaining traction until they accept that some business processes can be complex, and simplistic software cannot be justified in that scenario. Persistently dismissing this fact has made the blog difficult to read recently.
