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June 30, 2005

LinkedIn Introduction

I want to tell you a little about LinkedIn, since it’s been leading to some interesting developments for me.

About LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a business networking tool. It operates on a modified version of the “six degrees of separation” theory. [Six degrees of separation is the theory that anyone on the planet can be connected to any other person on the planet through a chain of acquaintances that has no more than five intermediaries. The theory was first proposed in 1929 by the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy in a short story called "Chains".]

How it Works

You put in your own profile information, and invite people to "connect" to you on LinkedIn. LinkedIn tracks your connections, and shows you the connections of your connections, and so on up to four degrees away.

Your email address is only exposed to those people to whom you are directly connected. And since they emailed you to invite them to join LinkedIn, or vice versa, they already have it! Any other requests get routed through your connections, and if those requests are routed through you, you have the option not to forward them on if you believe your friend might find it annoying, or if it could be considered spam, or even if you just don’t like the tone.

You have the ability to enter as much or as little information about yourself in your description as you choose. You can enter your full resume and job history, or simply enter your name. The tradeoff is the balance between privacy and fact that the more information you enter the easier it is for others – including friends and former colleagues – to find you. You can search LinkedIn for specific names, or for specific companies, keywords or interests. The catch is the search is not a search of all LinkedIn users - you will only find those users within four degrees of you. This has the potential to be somewhat misleading, since when you first sign up you only have a few connections, and the network looks quite limited.

You can also only see the connections of those to whom you are directly connected. Again, if you only have a couple of contacts, not that interesting. Once your network expands, however, you begin to see the possibilities. It is sometimes very good to know who knows who. And it is sometimes very good to be able to broker introductions to people that ought to know each other, but through some whim of fate simply never connected. And it is very, very good to know something of the background and connections of your business associates, partners and customers. And your boss. [Did you know he not only graduated from Georgia Tech, but he chairs the alumni association and his screen name is rambling_wreck?]

What Got Me Excited

LinkedIn has been around for several years, and I signed up when I received an invitation, but never really paid much attention to it. But when Oracle absorbed Peoplesoft and laid off tens of thousands of people, the service started to exponentially expand. “Connect via LinkedIn?” was in my inbox every day for awhile. And my network started to grow. Today, I have over 300 connections. They, collectively, have over 65,000 connections. And so on, until my 4 degrees network is over 2,000,000 people.

Now searches start to get interesting. Searching for John Smith? I have 88 John Smiths in my network. Looking for current or former employees of Oracle? I have 30,718 current or former Oracle employees in my network. Looking for CEOs? I have 9.485 people in my network with the current job title of CEO. Looking for fellow skydivers? I have 293 in my network. This week's news included Sun Microsystems buying SeeBeyond, an enterprise application integration company. I might want to hire some of those people if they're looking around for new jobs after the acquisition. Who do I know at SeeBeyond? Well, I can reach 199 people by name and title.

Example of How LinkedIn Helps

I’m working on a project with a friend of mine whose company specializes in field programmable gate arrays, basically computer chips that can be programmed on the fly. He’s interested in exploring using them for mathematics, particularly some of the really time-consuming derivatives evaluations that use techniques like Monte Carlo simulation. He knows I know finance, so he calls me. We kick it around and decide to initially focus on Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) a form of derivative that has grown in use by 800% in the past year, and is heinously difficult to model. We want to vet our ideas with industry experts, so I go to my LinkedIn network and search on the compound term “derivatives AND CDOs”. Voila! In my network are 31 users whose current jobs entail modeling, structuring and trading CDOs.

That’s the power of an extensive network. No matter how small, how esoteric, how specialized your questions might be, odds are somebody out there has the answer. And maybe even 31 somebodies have the answer! As Vincent Wright points out in his excellent post:

If we say that Linkedin is a networking environment for business professionals and then say that the average Linkedin member has 10 years of experience and then say that there are now 2.5 million users, that’s a total of 25 MILLION YEARS OF WORK EXPERIENCE!

Sitting there.

Sort of like oil fields, or goldmines, or spice islands, or “acres of diamonds”.

LinkedIn Manages Business Contacts

People move around a lot more these days. Myself included. I never envisioned having as many jobs as I have had in my career, but by the standards of most of the resumes that come across my desk I’ve had pretty stable employment. One side effect of this increased mobility is that contact information gets lost. Somehow, when Jill is two doors down the hall, it never occurs to you to get her home email address. After all, you can always reach her at work. Until you come in and see that her office is cleaned out. She’s gone. You might even know where she’s gone, but that doesn’t mean you can reach her. If she’s working at ABC Computing, her new email address could be jsmith@abccomputing.com or jill.smith or jill.h.smith or jillsmith or just jill. It could be abccomputing.com, abccomp.com, abc-comp.com or abccomputinginc.com. There’s no Internet email address directory. To make life even more difficult, Google doesn’t search on special characters like the “@” sign!

The advantage of LinkedIn is that every user maintains their own entry. If you change jobs, you might not remember to change your LinkedIn profile, but sooner or later that connection request will come, or a request to contact one of your connections will come, and you’ll go to the LinkedIn website and see your out-of-date profile. (Once you update it, LinkedIn has a button you can push that will send an email to all your contacts letting them know that your profile has been updated.) Now, if I send an email to a friend and it bounces, I can go to LinkedIn and check the email address.

LinkedIn has enabled me to refresh dozens of old friendships with co-workers from as long ago as 15 years (!!!), and has alerted me to the fact that friends had changed jobs. It's gotten me at least a dozen free lunches, catching up with old friends.

Personal Opinion Note: Other free services such as Plaxo offer the same advantage of having each user keep their own contact information up to date, and the service distributes that information. But Plaxo gives me the creeps. Although many critics have softened their stance toward Plaxo given the departure of the original Napster founder, when I installed it there was so much traffic hitting the router with Internet polling requests that I was alarmed. It was like spyware. Plus I did not like – and still do not like – the spam from the service asking me to update my contact information. No thanks. LinkedIn does not spam users. At all. It will issue an email reminder notice to you if you have a request to forward or an invitation to respond to, but it only does this once or twice and then it lets you ignore them. Or you can hit the “Decide Later” button and make it not remind you. Nice.

LinkedIn Expands Your Horizons

I wasn’t looking for a job. I have a great job. But since my network has grown, I’m averaging 3-4 inquiries each week from headhunters looking for financial services specialists or enterprise software executives to fill their searches. I had good contacts for finding jobs before. Now I have great contacts. Were I to lose my job, I seriously doubt I would be out of work more than few weeks. That’s a safety net that is worth a lot in this uncertain economy.

Plus, as a job hunting tool, LinkedIn is superb. Through a recent alliance agreement, the LinkedIn job networking system uses the power of SimplyHired's database of 4,000,000+ job openings and the social networking (really a misnomer, since LinkedIn is business networking, but "social networking" is the big VC buzz word) of LinkedIn to produce a powerful and fascinating hybrid.

As Josh Elman of LinkedIn describes it:

"We have launched a partnership with our friends at SimplyHired so that users can find over four million jobs now on LinkedIn. With each job, we'll show you how you are connected to the company."

Finally consider this scenario: You're interviewing for a new job. It sounds like your dream job but you don't really know much about the company. Go to your vast LinkedIn network, though, and you will likely find a few - or more than a few - people who work there now or have in the past. Reach out and touch someone. Walk into that job interview knowing the company inside and out, familiar with the major projects you might be working on, knowing the key players and their roles. Your odds of getting the official offer probably just went up 1000%.

Just this week, I got a call from a CEO of a company interested in hiring a former co-worker of mine. He found me on LinkedIn, and realized that I worked with her, so he contacted me (through a mutual connection) to conduct a "back door" reference check. I was pleased to give her a glowing report, and he mentioned that it gave him a lot of confidence since my name was not one that she had provided!

How to Build Your Network

When I made my first serious push to build my LinkedIn network, I invited close friends and trusted associates. I got about 40 connections with an extended network of about 400,000 connections. Not bad. But a couple of people that I know are exceptional networkers. While I got them started on LinkedIn, they quickly passed me up! 100 connections, 200, 300 and more. This aroused the competitive beast within me.

I am not an executive recruiter. If I were, or had a job like that in which networking was the central characteristic of success, I would have been even more diligent in coming up with ways to expand my network. I am a LinkedIn dilettante in comparison to some of the heavy hitters on the service. And that’s OK, since my goal is not gross numbers of connections. Nevertheless, I have devoted a grand total of about 6 hours to expanding my LinkedIn network, with great success.

Here then, are a few useful tips that will help you do the same thing:

1.

LinkedIn has a tool called the “LinkedIn Contact Importer” which will scan your Outlook contacts for email addresses and present them to you, ready to be invited. Use it. All the scanned contacts remain locally on your own machine; nothing is stored at LinkedIn. You select from the list which contacts to invite. Be sure to see #5 below before launching your invitations.

Note: LinkedIn will compare the email addresses it finds with the LinkedIn user base, and let you know which users are already LinkedIn members. They show up with a small LinkedIn icon next to them. These are the easiest. You probably have the correct email address, since LinkedIn recognized it (barring only those cases where someone has changed jobs or changed emails, and not updated their profile on LinkedIn). In my experience, since these people already know how LinkedIn works you can just send them a standard invitation and they will accept over 90% of the time.

2.

LinkedIn provides a tool called the LinkedIn Outlook Toolbar, which will scan your emails and extract email addresses – even if you didn’t add them to your Outlook contacts. If you have a lot of email in your Inbox, or if you’ve archived your email or created backup PST files in Outlook, this is a huge timesaver. I did this before LinkedIn introduced the tool, and I used the $19 Email Address Extractor from Mazepath. Now LinkedIn provides a tool that does it for free. I recommend that you save them in a separate subdirectory under your Inbox (for scrubbing later, so you can add them to your contacts if you want to. Part of the exercise in really utilizing LinkedIn to its full potential is organizing your contacts lists. Just think how much easier Christmas cards are going to be this year!).

Run LinkedIn Contact Importer again; it will find the contacts in subdirectories if you have multiple Contact Lists in Outlook. Don’t scrub those “found” contacts now, just let LinkedIn send emails to all of them. (And not to beat a dead horse, but read tip #5 first and customize the message!) And don’t worry, LinkedIn won’t let you send duplicate invitations. It politely notifies you that a contact has already been invited.

3.

Scan your contacts’ contacts. It’s very common to find a lot of people that you know and have the emails addresses for, but did not think of inviting. But, says you, if I am already connected to them through my contact, I don’t need to connect directly. Au contraire, says I, because of the four degrees of separation limitation. That link to your contact adds one layer of relationship, effectively cutting you off from the last - and usually largest - circle of connections through your friend. If you know them and consider them to be a suitable addition to your network, invite them to connect directly.

4.

Use the “Find People” feature on LinkedIn. Search past companies and groups of interest. The search engine on LinkedIn is not that smart, so employ your searching best practices at all times. [For example, searching my network for “Siebel Systems” in the company box returns 2,500 names. Searching just on “Siebel” returns over 3,000 names. Uncheck the button below the company name that says “Current companies only”, since people may have left the company and you just don’t know it yet!

5.

Customize your email invitation. Don’t let anyone write your correspondence for you. When I send out generic invitations (the default LinkedIn invite email subject line is “Join my network on LinkedIn”, I get about a 20% response rate. When I customize the email, even something as small as having the subject line on the email say “Hi, Joe!”, the response rate goes up to about 80%.

6.

Strike while the iron is hot. When you have a productive business interaction with others, and you would like to have that experience repeated in the future, send them a LinkedIn invitation. It is a statement about your commitment to productive professional networking, and given that the contact is fresh in their mind, likely to be accepted.

7.

Locate the super-networkers and plug in. There are a growing number of people on LinkedIn who have thousands of connections, and connecting to them will expand your network in a meaningful way. I don’t for one second believe that they actually know all those people well enough to provide personal referrals for them, but that isn’t the point. LinkedIn is about networking and that means extending your circle of contacts into new areas, and forging relationships with people that you currently do not know.

The quickest way to find those people on LinkedIn is to browse the connections of your connections. Among my connections, Ron Bates is the gold medal winner with 8,838 connections. Christian Mayoud is the silver medalist with 7,738. Adding these guys to your network will probably extend your 3rd and 4th degree connection count by 500,000 or so.

8.

Join some groups. These fall into two basic categories, LinkedIn for Groups and Groups About LinkedIn. New ones are getting started every day.

LinkedIn for Groups is made up of groups that are officially recognized by LinkedIn, and among other things allow you post a group logo in your profile. Some groups are public and everyone can see the logo on your profile, and some groups are private and only visible to other people who are in the same group. In all cases, you have to be invited to join the group. Groups differ on how easy or difficult this may be - some are open and you simply have to ask, others have strict logical requirements, e.g. Duke MBA graduates, or ex-Oracle employees. LinkedIn has a page that explains how their groups work under the FAQs.

Groups about LinkedIn are springing up everywhere, and have different reasons for their existence. Some are focused on using LinkedIn for recruiting, some are users trading tips and tricks on getting the most out of the service, and so on.

Two of the best are Yahoo groups, called MyLinkedInPowerForum and LinkedIn Innovators. Members of these groups post thoughts, ideas, questions, papers, links to interesting new tools - everything you need to make you a LinkedIn Expert in the shortest possible time. Plus they are just good people - generous with their time and ideas to help newbies get up to speed quickly.

Since I am a blogger, I'm also a member of LinkedInBloggers. Find the groups you would be most interested in participating in, or where you can add to the discussion in a meaningful way, or even where you might learn something!

I highly recommend joining the forums and reading through the past entries, where you'll find useful tips on how to write a good profile on LinkedIn, good keywords to include to make yourself findable, how to write a good endorsement for someone, and all kinds of great third party add-on tools for making LinkedIn more powerful.

9.

Get endorsed. Search results are sorted by degrees-away-from-you, then by the number of contacts, and finally by the number of endorsements each person has. Since it's last in the criteria list it doesn't really help much in the search arena. it does, however, add credibility to your qualifications.

Personal opinion note: Everyone has a personal style, and mine is such that I don't want to go overboard on endorsements, so I haven't asked anyone for one. As a result, I only have one right now. And that's OK. I'd like to get that up to 3-5, but not 20+ like some people have. To me, that just smells like someone solicting friends and family for endorsements.

10.

Modify your profile to maximize reach. LinkedIn is a give and take environment. If you want to take advantage of the power of a robust business network, you have to put out some information about yourself. Definitely include all your previous places of employment, since your former co-workers may be looking for you! I would also recommend that you include your education, and your geographic location. There are a lot more things you can do to maximize the impact of your LinkedIn presence, so join one of those forums and read up on it.

11.

After your network has expanded, go back and repeat step 4. You will now find more connections based on your wider network.

12.

Consider modifying your email signature line to include your LinkedIn profile (e.g. mine is https://www.linkedin.com/profile?viewProfile=&key=728615. If that’s too cumbersome or looks too complicated, take it to TinyURL and turn it into a shorter URL). You can also include a connection invitation in the sig line if you want. Large corporations may frown on this (mine would), but at a minimum you can modify your personal email sig line.

13.

LinkedIn has recently introduced a vCard for each connected user, which you can optionally download and save to your Outlook contacts. Aside from the obvious benefits of redundancy and having the contact info available even when you’re offline, this is a really helpful way to fight contact rot in your Outlook contact database. Put it on a schedule – like every couple of months – to go through and systematically download the vCards from your LinkedIn contacts and save them.

14.

Get creative with the LinkedIn search engine. We mentioned in #4 using it to find people by specific criteria like previous employers. But you can also do some other interesting things with it. Increasingly, users who are aggressively trying to expand their network are putting their email addresses in their profile, thereby inviting you to invite them to join your network. Based on the number of connections these people have, it's working. If you are looking to expand your network you can find those people quickly.

Personal opinion note: It's that style thing again. This is not an approach I would use myself, since I don't plan to make a career out of managing referral requests. Some of those "super-networkers" get more than a dozen LinkedIn requests a day to forward connection requests, and I don't want that. I get a couple a week, and that's fine. On the other hand, if I were an executive recruiter or a business development person, I'd strongly consider that approach.

Doing a keyword search for those public emails on Linkedin - e.g. searching for "*@*.com" - reveals "66,704 users in your network matching these criteria". Similarly, a search on "*@*.net" shows "22,987 users in your network matching these criteria". Finally, the people who are most actively using LinkedIn to build networks often mention that fact in their profiles. A search on "LinkedIn" reveals "925 users in your network matching these criteria". Even if there's 20% overlap between these lists, that's still 60,000 potential connections that ought to be relatively easy to get. Your results will vary, of course, depending on the size of your network.

15.

Use it wisely, grasshopper. The whole LinkedIn scene is growing rapidly, with blogs and user groups dedicated to all aspects of networking. One way to get plugged into the latest thinking pretty quickly is to go to Technorati and plug in the term "LinkedIn". You will most likely find the most recent 20+ articles and blogs on the service and its various benefits and pitfalls. Happy reading and Happy linking!

By the way, if you want to get a fast start on your network, send me a LinkedIn request (the email is at the top of the right sidebar) to connect, and I'll hook you up. If you're a Keelhauling reader, that's good enough for me!

Posted by John at 09:50 PM | Comments (5)

Your daily physics lesson

Dive into the practical, Newtonian physics behind bikinis and bubbles. Sort of. This is weirdly hypnotic, and when she gets up a fair amount of velocity you just cringe when she hits a bubble. If she gets stuck, just use your mouse to drag her free.

Mesmerizing and creepy. When I was done, I just found her a comfortable bubble couch and propped her up and left her there while I closed the browser. I hope she's resting.

[[[6/30/05 update: Link above appears to be broken, try this instead.]]]

Posted by John at 12:16 AM | Comments (0)

June 29, 2005

Enough with the PPT Already!

Here's a link you can send to your co-workers who abuse PowerPoint, using it for everything from meeting notes to project plans. Always remember the mantra of truly senior business executives:
Power corrupts, but PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.

Herewith, the Gettysburg address in PowerPoint. One of the many enjoyable links at EXCITING LINKS FOR BORING DAYS IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER. [via MeFi]

Posted by John at 11:51 PM | Comments (0)

King Kong: The Movie

Travis showed me the trailer for the new King Kong movie coming out, directed by Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings). Looks promising!

Posted by John at 07:35 AM | Comments (0)

Google Earth

Google adds new functionality with a free downloadable utility called Google Earth, which they are billing as "A 3D interface to the planet." Among the featured functionality is the ability to virtually fly from space directly to your neighborhood. Type in an address and zoom right in. You can also tilt and rotate the view to see 3D terrain and buildings. Google Earth is basically a satellite imagery-based mapping product that combines 3D buildings and terrain with mapping cability and Google search.

It is based on Keyhole technology, and uses broadband streaming and 3D graphics to allow for interactive terrain exploration. Check out the Top Ten Sites for viewing.

I was reading an article the other day that had a description of Google that I liked, they called it "the command line of the Internet." For those dinosaurs out there (like me) that harken back to the days of MS-DOS, it's a description that fits. What would the Internet be without Google? Something different and poorer and harder to use, surely.

Meanwhile the stock has tripled from it's $100 offering price last September, crossing the $300 per share mark yesterday. What's waiting in the wings? Truly Pesonalized Search.

[[[3:00pm update - Google has temporarily halted downloads. See comments below.]]]

Posted by John at 07:24 AM | Comments (1)

June 27, 2005

Take the survey, make some science

One of the interesting things highlighted for me by this survey was that while I know a lot of people in a lot of different professions, and I communicate with them online all the time, I met almost none of them online. We'll see what the final report has to say about it.

Posted by John at 05:42 PM | Comments (1)

June 16, 2005

Wheelsurfing

"Honey, I'm going down to the store to pick up some milk. Back in a few."

Now this certainly isn't radical new technology - it's basically a chainsaw engine and a chair on bearings inside a big bicycle wheel. And I'm not sure how practical it would be - that little trip to the grocery store might start out with you buying some milk, but it would likely be butter by the time you got it home. Plus it doesn't look all that easy... imagine the emergency stop scenario.

Still, the cool factor is a 10. And the website has a movie!

Posted by John at 05:09 AM | Comments (0)

Old dog learns new trick

How did I not know this? This is VERY useful. [Props to Metafilter poster zenzizi for this tip!).

In Firefox, when you encounter a search box (e.g. on eBay, Amazon, Wikipedia or the like), if you right-click your mouse while the cursor is on the search box, one of the menu items is "Add a keyword for this search...". Give the search box a name, and then you can type that name directly into the browser address bar along with your search term, and it takes you right there!

Example:

Go to www.amazon.com using Firefox as your browser.
Right click on the search box at the top,
and pick "Add a keyword for this search..."
Enter a name (e.g. Amazon) and a keyword (e.g. Amazon).

NOW go to any another web page, just to test it.
If you ever want to search Amazon, like say you were looking for CDs by KT Tunstall, just enter "amazon tunstall" (without the quotes) in your browser address bar, and you're there!

Posted by John at 04:19 AM | Comments (2)

June 14, 2005

SOW: Week of 06-14-05

Song: Another Place to Fall
Artist: KT Tunstall
Album: Eye to the Telescope
You will like this if you like: Sheryl Crow, Dido, Martha Wainwright, Texas, Nora Jones, The Waifs, Kathleen Edwards

This week we’re visiting with KT Tunstall. This young Scottish lass sings with a mature voice that belies the photo on her album cover. She’s a standout in a swarm of female singer-songwriters that have come on the scene this year, and it’s that extra edge of gravel in her voice that gives her character to spare.

If Tunstall’s voice is her hook, then her songwriting is solid backup. The music is easy to listen to without being "easy listening", and swings back and forth between lazy ballads that are reminiscent of Dido or Martha Wainwright to folk-rockabilly numbers that get your toes tapping. This week’s Song of the Week, Another Place to Fall, is one of the latter. Also worthy of a round of applause are the signature single, “Black Horse and a Cherry Tree” and the rocking “Suddenly I See”. Unfortunately, this album is currently only available here in the U.S. as an IMPORT, which is a Scottish word meaning "heinously expensive".

Technically, I was very impressed with this album as a debut work – the sound is big, open and obviously well produced, which lends it professionalism. There’s an interesting light dusting of electronica throughout the album, keeping the mixes interesting and current. All in all, an excellent first effort. This girl is going places.

Posted by John at 06:48 PM | Comments (0)

"Computer, compute pi to the last digit."

We're getting closer to having Star Trek computer functionality, meaning the ability to simply ask your question of a ubiquitous computer "presence", no matter where you are and no matter what the question, and get an answer. This wierd looking rectangular contraption from Phillips Electronics is purported to be able to "recognize facial expressions and body language" as well, and respond accordingly.

I have my doubts.

But I can't wait until computers get to the point that it's fun to confuse them.

Obligatory old Star Trek quote:
Dr. Crusher: Computer... read the entire crew roster for The Enterprise.
Computer: Dr. Beverly Crusher.
Dr. Crusher: Have I always been the only member of the crew on the Starship Enterprise?
Computer: Affirmative.
Dr. Crusher: If this were a bad dream, would you tell me?
Computer: That is not a valid question.
Dr. Crusher: [sarcastic] Like hell it isn't. What is the primary mission of the Starship Enterprise?
Computer: To explore the galaxy.
Dr. Crusher: Do I have the necessary skills to complete that mission alone?
Computer: Negative.
Dr. Crusher: Then WHY am I the only crew member?
Computer: (beep, squeak, crackle)
Dr. Crusher: Uh-huh. Got you, there.

Posted by John at 07:03 AM | Comments (0)

June 12, 2005

Congratulations, Nick!

The Silver Medal at Nationals!

Wow. The Marin Rowing Association's Junior Men's Lightweight 4 boat took second place at the USRowing Nationals in Cincinnati, OH. Nick is the Lightweight team captain, and was the stroke in the
Lt 4 Men's boat! What an awesome achievement, Nick!!

Congratulations to the whole MRA team, who continue year after year to demonstrate a high level of effort and dedication in pursuit of excellence in rowing!

Posted by John at 08:57 PM | Comments (0)

June 08, 2005

Thinking Machine 4

Colin is quite a good chess player at age 11. This link is for him.

Try a game against the visible machine. This is good for understanding how chess programs work. You can actually see the moves laid out with pulses of light as the machine checks its available moves. Check out the image gallery for examples of how the computer analyzes moves. It's also interesting that the machine is not programmed to use conventional openings, so you get some unexpected early games.

Posted by John at 11:43 PM | Comments (0)

Gahoo!Yoogle

Interesting side-by-site comparison of results from the two leading search engines. [Click on the screenshot below.]

Posted by John at 11:36 PM | Comments (0)

Architect Studio 3D

Matthew wants to be an architect. This link is for him.

Design a House with Frank Lloyd Wright

When designing a house
   you must consider two things:
      the needs of people
         and the particulars of space.
            Satisfy these needs
               and you're an architect!

Posted by John at 11:26 PM | Comments (0)

Harvard Classics

When your iBook gets here, your content will be ready. Harvard University has a collection of 100 classics available for download. The books are divided into three "collections": The Harvard Classics, The Shelf of Fiction and The Century Collection.

Posted by John at 11:22 PM | Comments (0)

Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Hosted by the University of Tennessee, the Encyclopedia of Philosophy features letters, articles and biographies of the great thinkers and their resulting schools of thought.

Posted by John at 11:19 PM | Comments (0)

Howard Hughes Medical Institute

The HHMI website is an awesome resource for learning about cutting edge biology. They've gone to great lengths to make this science interesting and accessible. This is one of those sites I willc ome back to again and again until I've read it all! [via MeFi]

Posted by John at 11:15 PM | Comments (0)

June 01, 2005

Google's Amazing Search Architecture

Google has posted a bunch of research papers that provide architecture details and insight into their technologies.

Posted by John at 06:35 AM | Comments (0)