I always tell people to send me physical things by email as attachments. The pause while they work out whether this is possible or not is a moment of great mechanical wheel turning beauty and highlights a cultural acceptance of the possibility of technological magic.
- srboisvert in a Metafilter thread about the UK postcode system
Don’t make something unless it is both necessary and useful; but if it is both necessary and useful, don’t hesitate to make it beautiful.
- Shaker design philosophy
(via Joshua Porter)
Matt Haughey points out the obvious flaw in the logic of bandwagon marketeers and companies who just don’t get it.
So maybe instead of getting your company on twitter, paying marketers to mention you are on twitter, and paying people to blog about your company, forget all that and just make awesome stuff that gets people excited about your products, hire people that represent the company well, and when your stuff is so awesome that friends share it with other friends, you may not even need “social media marketing” after all.
Concentrate on what you do well, give great service, and people will talk about you and evangelise you. Do it badly or try to game the system and people will still talk, but for all the wrong reasons.
(And while I’m on the subject, if one more account with the phrase “social media expert” in their description tries to follow me on Twitter heads are going to roll. Seriously, just piss off will you.)
I can’t believe we still have to link to The Cluetrain Manifesto 10 years after it was first published.
The coolest thing about a waterfall process is that it allows me personally to succeed, to demonstrate skill and competence, while the end result of the process is a dismal failure. Cleverly built into a waterfall process are a variety of scapegoating mechanisms that allow us to blame other people, or outside influences for failure.
- Jeff Patton.
Religion has convinced people that there’s an invisible man… living in the sky. Who watches everything you do every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a list of ten specific things he doesn’t want you to do. And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special place, of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish for you to live forever, and suffer, and burn, and scream, until the end of time. But he loves you. He loves you. He loves you and he needs money.
- George Denis Patrick Carlin (12 May 1937 — 22 June 2008)