If you start from successful startups, you find they often behaved like nonprofits. And if you start from ideas for nonprofits, you find they’d often make good startups.
–from a Paul Graham classic that’s worth reading in its entirety, repeatedly, and keeping handy in your Instapaper account.
Posts by Sean Flannagan
04 Sep 2011
Consider the Albatross: Foraging and Activity Feeds
14 Aug 2011
I came across this post on Quora on “Lévy-flight personalization” and optimizing Quora’s activity feed for novelty-seeking users. Its inspiration is the albatross, a long-range ocean forager that’s larger than you think.
Lévy flights are seen in the behavior of many animals. It’s the pattern that emerges when an animal darts around randomly ..
The Library of Radiant Optimism for Applying Hippie Knowledge to Web Product Development
14 Jan 2011
I admit it: I collect hippie books. Optimistic books about making things published by very small presses in the 1970s.
But I only recently realized that I can download PDFs of many of these books from the Library of Radiant Optimism for Let’s Remake the World, and I’m so glad I did. Because ..
The Timeless Way of Designing for Play
27 Dec 2010
“The more living patterns there are in a place—a room, a building, or a town—the more it comes to life as an entirety, the more it glows, the more it has that self-maintaining fire which is the quality without a name.
“This quality in buildings and in towns cannot be made, but only generated, ..
Transit Map Matters
16 Jun 2010
Jake Berman makes better transit maps. I found this beautiful late-night subway service map of his on the New York City Subway Wikipedia article.
It reminded me of the famous 1972 Massimo Vignelli map which hangs in my kitchen, but turns out it’s primarily influenced by the relatively obscure 1966 system map. That ..
The Sun Rises in the East
24 Apr 2010
Etsy’s Treasury is something I’ve long been fascinated by. It’s an ever-changing, member-curated shopping gallery with some unique constraints. Treasury lists only live for 48 hours. Each list has a limit of 42 comments. You can only create a list if the total number of lists falls below 333 (shorthand for
Reading List
16 Feb 2010
Books follow me around and accumulate in stacks: by my desks, bed, coffee table, couch. If I could have the current active lot organized into a single stack based on pages viewed, notes taken and ideas generated, it would look like this:
1.
A few months ago I started picking up books on architecture, ..
The Providence Curse
14 Dec 2009
The European Street Team, an Etsy Team, asked for a photo tour of a favorite place. You’ll never guess which place I chose.
