Wed 13 January 2010 | tags: academia, china, customers, dailylinks, earthquake, freespeech, google, gretchenrubin, hacking, haiti, happiness, journals, lists, publishing, science, secondlife, users, -- (permalink)

What I've been reading lately:

• Fourteen Tips for Getting More Sleep -- and Why It Matters.
  • Gretchen Rubin's Happiness Project blog has some great insights about how to live a happier life, but personally I could do without lists like this. They just remind me of all the things I don't have the mental energy to keep track of, which makes me stressed out, discouraged, and not particularly happy.
• When customers smother your product
  • In today's tech industry it's taken as an article of faith that you should listen closely to your users and let their feedback largely drive your product's direction. Tom Grant at Forrester Research explains how that can stop you from making your product attractive to new users, using Second Life as an example.
• Why Hasn’t Scientific Publishing Been Disrupted Already? « The Scholarly Kitchen
  • The internet has upended numerous industries that we never anticipated, but not the one it was designed for: academic publishing. Here's a good analysis of why that is. Bottom line: we need journals to tell us which articles are worth reading and which researchers deserve tenure.
• Marginal Revolution: Renaissance postponed (earthquake in Haiti)
  • What does it say about me that my Google Reader has tons of posts about Google's China announcement, and only this one about the Haiti earthquake?
• Google Defends Against Large Scale Chinese Cyber Attack: May Cease Chinese Operations
  • Google: still not evil. I wonder how the State Department feels about such significant international policymaking going on without them leading it.