Bill Rice

Tagged: dave winer RSS

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  Bill Rice 1:19 pm on November 23, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: blogs (2), chris brogan (2), dave winer, inspiration (3), jason fried, joel spolsky (3), Matt Mullenweg, Philosophy, rss (4)   

  People and Blogs I Get Inspiration From 

  Dave Winer (Scripting.com)-I tune into Dave’s thoughts everyday. This can be challenging at times since our politics are so far apart. When a cross-post to Huffington Posts hits Scripting.com I often want to hit the unsubscribe button on my RSS reader.

  I don’t because that would only make me dumb.

  I most admire his simplicity. His writing style, his projects, and his thoughts are always a quest for simple clarity and elegance. I frequently point our engineers to his blog posts for guidance.

  Favorite Winer ideas: Outliners, Rebooting the News, Editorial tools, Future-safe archives, 2, 3.

  Jason Fried (37signals.com/svn)-Jason has always been a virtual mentor to me. His company is a super successful Micro-ISV.

  I admire his demonstration of scale using the magic of keeping it simple. I guess I like simple, huh? I also like the fact that he writes all his own Web copy.

  Favorite Fried ideas: UI design and feature minimalism

  Matt Mullenweg (Ma.tt)-How could you not pay attention to Matt? His platform and software jujitsu literally seems to power the Internet.

  Favorite Mullenweg ideas: Community building, How he works/managing a virtual company

  Chris Brogan (ChrisBrogan.com)-Chris is another one that I tune into daily. There are lots of things to like about Chris, but mostly he is just a genuine, nice guy (I have met him in person a couple of times).

  I most admire Chris’ way of asking questions and generating open thinking. His power as a community leader is impressive. This is what draws me to read him for inspiration. I often get more value from the discussion he generates than his own daily post(s).

  Favorite Brogan ideas: Trust Agents, Fish Where the Fish Are, Giving Ideas Handles (I am specifically working on getting better at this)

  Joel Spolsky (JoelOnSoftware.com)-Joel is someone I first plugged into via his book (Joel on Software), not his blog. Although, his blog preceded the book by about four years. I subscribed to his software management philosophy long before I bought his software, Fogbugz.

  We have used it at Kaleidico from day one.

  Favorite Spolsky ideas: How to write specs, Paper prototyping, UI Designing, 2

  Interestingly enough there are no sales gurus here. Why? Simple, few sales gurus are as successful as these guys. Sales is only one facet of a much larger business success strategy.

  The point is when you are looking for business ideas and inspiration look for examples, not advice. Each of these people have common trend to their core philosophies–an intense focused on people (users).

  Who inspires you? Who do you follow daily?

  

   

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  Bill Rice 10:48 am on July 31, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: dave winer, Social Media (3), Software (13), twitter (10), users, Web 2.0   

  Software Engineers Learning to Listen to Users 

  

  Image via Wikipedia

  Another software gem from Dave Winer–be a user and listen to users. Hopefully, he will continue to build out this advice, but I thought it was valuable to pull it out and highlight here:

  1. Be a user. Develop apps you yourself have a use for. If you don’t have a feeling for what it’s like to be a user, you’ll never know how to evolve the products, and the stuff you learn in #2 will never make sense.

  2. Listen to users. Learning how to code is straightforward, it takes time to perfect your skills, but it’s relatively easy compared to the skill of listening. I recently suggested to a VC friend that we start a company whose sole differentiator is that it strives to perfect the art of listening to users.

  I think social media and Web 2.0 are making it easier for us to listen to users–trying to use our software as well as get things done. Unfortunately, we often don’t put the effort into making it easy to hear and listen for our users.

  We just added GetSatisfaction.com and the Feedback tab (widget) into all of our applications. Hopefully, that will make it easier for them to talk to us. In addition, we are becoming more active in energizing and engaging our user community.

  Still, the methodology for listening is not perfected. More thought and innovation is needed…

  Ideas? What are you doing to listen better to your users?

  

   
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  Bill Rice 9:17 am on April 11, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: bill rice (5), chris brogan (2), dave winer, inspiration (3), joel spolsky (3), seth godin (2), stowe boyd (2), twitter (10)   

  Who Inspires You? 

  I have been running hard this week. Early wake-ups and late shut-downs. Running out of gas…

  So, I popped open my RSS feedreader looking for inspiration (I suppose).

  And, I found it in Chris Brogan’s “Inspiration and Origins“:

  My big point: none of us are originals. It’s okay. And I’ve DEFINITELY done it myself, where I’ve thought something WAS my thought, only to find out that I was synthesizing something I read a few days back, or a conversation I had (Did that famously badly once, to a friend I love, and had to rescind). But if you KNOW you’re going to riff off someone, give a little link love and be done with it. Fair?

  This is who inspires me:

  • Dave Winer: I hate his politics. I often hate the way he treats past or non-friends. But, he has an amazing genius to him. I read every word. I love his pictures on Flickr. He seeds thought and software. He gets user-first design. I wish I knew him better.
  • Stowe Boyd: I love his brevity. Master of 140 character poetry.
  • Seth Godin: A storyteller. Creates simple, short stories that if absorbed yield big results.
  • Joel Spolsky: Hero of the ISV (Independent Software Vendor). Master of effective software development methodology.
  • Twitter: I find more who inspire me everyday.

  Who inspires you?

   
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  Bill Rice 11:56 am on November 25, 2005 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: dave winer, editor, opml, wordpress   

  Dave Winer’s New OPML Editor Wordpress Tool 

  This is a post using Dave’s new Wordpress tool for his OPML Editor. I had to use Cori Schlegel’s xmlrpc.php hack, but after that it work splendidly.

  I also decided to load and run the OPML Editor from a memory stick, which also worked. I am increasingly trying to free my data and my applications from a single computer. This solves to potential issues: data security (protecting my various clients’ information) and ubiquity/mobility (protecting my sanity from worrying about what computer I am using).

  I am doing a similar thing with TiddlyWiki.

   
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  Bill Rice 8:48 am on December 21, 2004 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: dave winer   

  Dave Winer This is Not Thoughtful Argument 

  I promised in my our last Two Rights podcast that we would put people to task for their statements. Let me also further state that this outrageous post by Dave Winer is exactly why we, as conservatives, got into podcasting. So here we go.

  First, let’s look at Winer’s argument. First, he asserts the premises that Lisa Montgomery was from a red state and was a church-goer. Then goes to highlight the obvious horrific murder that Montgomery committed on a pregnant woman to take her unborn child. Then comes the outrageous part. Winer seems to find a logical consequent between moral values and religious faith as conservative/Republican platform principles and this deranged woman committing a grisly murder.

  Perhaps Dave in your, hopefully brief, lapse of intellgence you do not also think that this same argument is reinforced by the 2000 murder Montgomery obviously copycatted in her sickening act.

  Now it is time to task. Hopefully, this was a brief lapse in judgment Dave because I enjoy and agree with many things you say and prize some of your intellectual musings. If you are, as you have stated in the past, looking to have intelligent discussions about ideas and issues this is not the way to gain credibility. I would hope that if I made such a groundless obsurd statement someone would put me to task.

  This is not about any party taking the moral high-ground and holier-than-thou approach. This is about preserving the ability to have thoughtful discussions and arguments on real issues.

  Finally, in the spirit of truly wanting to have a reasonable discussion I will concede that I am not entirely proud of who represents our Christian Evangelical political block, the Jerry Falwell’s of the world, but I am trying to do something about it, not just point out their flaws. This is the way it should work. I am trying to encourage more appropriate role-models and representatives of these ideals to become more politically active, not merely cast out the good ideas with the poor spokesmen that have seize our issues for public relations opportunities.

  I think you should respond and even retract your statement on this issue. I await your comments and/or public response.

  I note for some reason you did not enable comments on this particular post so you should feel free to comment here or with a trackback.

  Let’s talk Dave.