Here’s a talk I gave at the Mashable Media Summit recently where I attempt to argue that everything you need to know about the real-time web you can learn from a Japanese automotive engineer who was born in 1912 and never saw a web page.

I’m in the unusual position of constantly looking for talent (chartbeat is hiring!) and yet hating to receive emails from recruiters. These are professionals who potentially have what I want, so much so that I’m willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for their services and yet their emails [...]

I’ve long been a fan of replacing Mac OSX’s Spotlight with other launchers, starting with QuickSilver and then moving to Launchbar when Quicksilver started to go downhill. A while ago, Joe Stump introduced me to Alfred and I downloaded it but didn’t get round to playing with it. Now I have [...]

There’s no reason on earth why I should listen to country music. I’m British, grew up in London and live in New York. I dislike music that panders to god or shallow patriotism and country music often does that in the same sentence. It frustrates me when people make a virtue of ignorance (‘a little [...]

One of the few consistently thought-provoking and enjoyable reads I have each week is Kortina’s weekly newsletter. This week he remarked on the English contingent of our office’s habit of not using umbrellas. In Betaworks, it serves as a clear demarcation between American men who find it incomprehensible to venture into the rain [...]

When stuck in a conversation with a fundamentalist who believes in the literal truth of the bible, it can occasionally be instructional to point out that there are actually more disputed versions of the bible than there are words in the bible. This is hardly unsurprising, given the multitude of different often conflicting sources that [...]

In ‘Amusing ourselves to Death’ Neil Postman wrote one of the great books necessary to understand the internet. All the more impressive a feat because he wrote it in 1985. His work foreshadows emergent problems as the web begins to define its language and our culture for the first time, and just possibly [...]

After reading Kortina’s great list of his resolutions, I was challenged to do my own. I’ve never really been serious about resolutions before, they were always spouted half-heartedly and swiftly discarded. This year I wanted to start to really set out some major goals for myself. The intent in this is as [...]

(Update: The awesome Ted Roden has just drawn my attention to Concentrate.app, which seems definitely worth a test drive.)

There’s a few different applications that really make a difference to my productivity at Betaworks. I thought I would share a few:

Partychat – Turning Gtalk into [...]

(via Ze Frank)

I would hate to be on the other side of the debate to this guy.

via Alastair Humphreys

Designing For Social Traction

View more documents from Joshua Porter.

You don’t want to get the calculations on this wrong…

Put it in HD and full screen. Let it buffer a little first…

Twas not while England’s sword unsheathed
Put half a world to flight,
Nor while their new-built cities breathed
Secure behind her might
Not while she poured from Pole to Line
Treasure and ships and men –
These worshippers at Freedom’s shrine,
They did not quit her then!

Not [...]