Success as an indicator

For those not keeping score at home, I've fairly recently become something of a fan of author and blogger John Scalzi. Every once in a while, Scalzi runs this feature he calls "Big Idea," which is basically posting an essay by some other author publicizing their work and talking about where they got their inspiration. (This is soon to become a standalone website, by the way, at bigideaauthors.com, not yet in full swing.) At any rate, the latest "Big Idea" post is one from Julia Angwin, Senior Technology Editor at WSJ.com, about her new book Stealing MySpace. In this essay, she goes into a little bit of the history of MySpace and its founders. Essentially, they were Internet scammers. :) She ponders a bit how the explosion in availability and ease-of-use of Web technology allowed the greatest successes to not come no longer from engineers, but from marketers -- or "hucksters" in Angwin's own words. Then she wonders if maybe it was always that way.

I found it a pretty cool read, even if just a teaser, and it definitely makes me more than a bit interested in the book itself. So in lieu of an actual blog post by me, I present today's recommended reading: The Big Idea: Julia Angwin.

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If you want something on the lighter side, but still from Scalzi's blog, I instead direct you here. It's...well, I can't really explain it. Just take a peek.

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I've been...not exactly busy, but just not in a big posting mood. I'm way behind on my video game movie writeups, for example. ;) I'm trying to make today a nice stay-at-home day, though, so maybe I can crank out some posts and junk later on. At the moment, I'm boiling the hell out a lot of pinto beans, so lemme go make sure that that's not getting out of control. Later, everybody.