Business Bricks

Merry Christmas to you and yours.
The scan on the left is a card I received from my local curry takeaway, Usha (map).
They send a card every year, but I saved this one from two years ago because it filled me with Christmas cheer. If you can, give your computer and your work head a proper rest — i.e don’t be a martyr, be a partyr. (Thanks for the line, pmu!)

The best two things I’ve read this year —
Cut your site in half in 2006
Fuck everything, we’re doing five blades

Diverting debate on alarm clock design over at Mark Hurst’s thisisbroken.com.

Apparently there are several things wrong with the Timex Easy Set alarm clock — in particular the manual (see left. click the image to enlarge). A couple of notes [1] I don’t think an alarm clock should even need a manual especially (a) if it’s called Easy Set, and (b) if you want to sell in bulk to hotel chains. [2] Easy ? less buttons. Easy = less functions.

Joi Ito wants to close a loophole “that effectively enables a no-risk business” and stops legit businesses registering first-/ second-/ tenth- choice domain names.

He explains: “The trick is to sign up for millions of domain names; set up pages and run ads on them; after 1 day delete domains that have no traffic; after 3 days delete names that have some traffic; after 5 days delete pages with marginal traffic; keep the 1% of pages that have enough traffic to be worth keeping the domain. Because of the refund policy, the 99% of pages deleted before the 5 day grace period are refunded in full and the “monetiser” gets to keep the ad revenue generated over those 5 days. (This is called “domain tasting”.)”

Great reader written list compiled by Glen Whitman — “For every subject, there are only two things you really need to know. Everything else is the application of those two things, or just not important.” For example, the two things about boxing are 1. Hit. 2. Don’t get hit.

Sometimes you realise how important some applications and things are to getting your work done. These go up and down like hemlines, but at the moment I know I can’t function fully without [1] email [2] lavazza [3] del.icio.us [4] my text-editor app, text wrangler [5] my RSS feeds in bloglines [6] itunes. Most of which seem to have broken. We’re out of coffee, incoming email isn’t working, I can’t reach my bookmarks at del.icio.us, and bloglines has scheduled an outage later today. If you’ve sent me an email since Thursday pm, I’m sorry. Fingers crossed we’ll have it fixed shortly. UPDATE: fixed.

A slightly gratuitous link, but this — a sequence of photos of Lego-like figures acting out the website development process — is beautiful work, beautifully staged. The frame pictured left is Step 3: Wireframe. Any similarities between these figures and your own clients/ designers/ programmers are purely the product of your own troubled imagination. Tom Peters once wrote that we view design as merely a “finishing-off process”. We shouldn’t.

Nik Mitev emailed me last week — “I had a problem with my computer and my copies of Brick No32 and onwards have been lost. I didn’t see a link to the old archive on the new site.” — Good news Nik. I’ve just restored the old site archive (Brick Nos 1 to 160).

Footnotes:
[1] I’ve also put a permanent link to the archive on the writing page
[2] If you’re a newcomer, some background. Pre ten weeks ago, Business Bricks was a weekly/ twice-weekly email. The old site was just an archive of what we sent to your inbox
[3] If you’re looking for a good place to start reading, here are the best three Bricks (as voted by my inbox): Brick No148 | Keep Your Town Weird, Brick No131 | The Hot Or Not Rule, and Brick No87 | An open note to web designers
[4] We still send out an email mailing (about one every three weeks). You can sign up at the old site archive or on the writing page
[5] The proofing gets ropier the further back you go, and the march of time means there are a share of outdated links. If you spot something seriously broken, drop me an email.

Last week I was asked for my favourite website. It changes pretty often, but I said del.icio.us (a bookmark sharing site). Turns out Yahoo just bought it.

Dave Pell says: “Yahoo is buying tools, buying cool, buying the future and perhaps most important, buying teams.” Jason Kottke says: “There’s an interesting story in here somewhere about how Yahoo is hiring/buying the “alpha geeks” (hackers, tinkerers, accidental entrepreneurs) and Google seemingly isn’t (Ph.Ds, computer scientists) and what effect that could have on each company’s development.” It seems like Yahoo’s acquisition strategy might be to buy in teams that can change Yahoo, rather than to buy in teams to convert to the Yahoo way. i.e. takeunders not takeovers.

Gawker (bitchier than Popbitch if you know it) just launched a new site, The Consumerist.

Even though I’m a small business owner, and this site is for small business owners, I often write from the point of view of a shopper. It’s way more important to work out what makes shoppers shop (or not shop) than it is to learn more sales closes.

In Gawker’s own words, The Consumerist is -
the anti-shopping shopping site
our answer to the utter fuckitude of modern capitalism
[a guide] through the delinquencies of retail and service organizations
[like] Consumer Reports, if written by someone who’s been on hold for an hour with customer service in Bangalore

Me likey.

An otherwise unremarkable Small Biz 101 post over at Signals vs. Noise has this buried in the reader comments -

“FWIW, if you’re self-funded you’re wasting your time writing a business plan. If you can’t keep your “plan” in your head then your plan is too complex. Keep everything simple and you don’t need to write or remember as much: you can just build.”
JF, 06 Dec 05.

JF (Jason Fried to his friends) is right.

Seth Godin has a new book out (early next year here in the UK) called the Big Moo. It’s a collection of essays written by 33 people, although the book doesn’t tell you who wrote what. 100% of royalties go to charity. Word is that Microsoft has given Seth free homepage space to run an ad for the Big Moo, and that he’s running an open competition to design said ad. Amateurs are welcome to apply. Full deets: a high-profile competition.

Hewlett Packard garage birthplace restored. It doesn’t look any more salubrious than the kitchen from where I ply most of my trade - and at 12 ft by 18 ft has roughly the same dimensions. “The Packards slept on a foldout bed in the dining room, which doubled as the company office. The oven in the kitchen also pulled double duty; the engineers baked the paint on the oscillators there.” There’s hope for us all. (via Boing Boing.)