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Keith Olbermann Thinks I'm an Idiot 11 Apr 2012 | 04:59 pm
This story ends with Keith Olbermann dismissing me as "another idiot" on national television, but it begins on a Monday morning with me sitting on my brown leather IKEA couch in Palo Alto, two blocks ...
Getting Ahead: A Letter to Myself 4 Apr 2012 | 05:58 am
All the pulses of the world, Falling in they beat for us, with the Western movement beat, Holding single or together, steady moving to the front, all for us, Pioneers! O pioneers! I moved to Silic...
The Value of a Social Commerce Referral 22 Aug 2011 | 11:44 pm
At Everlane we recently shut down a side-project of ours, Indie Cases, where we were selling some pretty sweet iPhone cases. Over the month and a half that the store was live we saw some good traffic ...
Click Hacking for Fun and Profit 23 Apr 2011 | 04:12 am
A friend IMed me the other day, asking, "You know how to make people click on things. I'm submitting something to Reddit — can you help me title the post?" A stark description of my skills, certainly,...
Speed vs. Certainty in A/B Testing 25 May 2009 | 10:00 pm
A/B testing is a great tactical tool for studying customer behavior on the web. But like any randomized trial there's some chance that the improvement we measure is just statistical noise. How worrie...
8 Tips for Crafting Metrics That Matter 12 May 2009 | 10:00 pm
Metrics are the marketer's microscope. They show him what his customers are actually doing, as opposed to what they say they are doing or intend to do. With proper metrics he can make decisions faster...
Building a Social Network, Island by Island 11 May 2009 | 08:30 pm
A necessary condition for building a self-sustaining social network is density. We understand this intuitively. After all, a network of one person is hardly a "network" at all. Metcalfe's Law, which ...
What Verna Taught Me 6 May 2009 | 08:30 pm
When I was student at the University of Chicago I worked for Residential Computing, or ResCom. ResCom was responsible for maintaining all the computer labs and IT systems in the residential dorms. I ...
Notification Strategies for Social Networks 5 May 2009 | 09:00 pm
You've built a social application and launched a new feature. The number of notifications you can send out is constrained. Which set of users should you notify to guarantee the most people start using...
Why hi5 Might Have an Edge on Facebook 28 Apr 2009 | 10:50 pm
Facebook has been trying hard to find a business model. Their Beacon advertising product is probably the most infamous example. So far they've been left empty handed and have been forced to look outsi...
