Do you like Bacn?

Not the bacon we eat. Although I do enjoy that too, just not as much as Denis Leary on Letterman! Email Bacn is what I am talking about.

[Non-Geeks: Right, so for those who dont know bacn is a form of email that you really want to read (solicited / subscribed to), but are not time critical, actionable emails (read: work related).]

So once a week I try and grab some time and catch up on my Bacn, essentially subscriptions to Wall Street Journal, Economist, TechCrunch, WebWare, MIT Tech Report, Garr Reynolds Presentation Zen, et. al. All really edifying stuff.

So here is some stuff I learned in my weekly bacn session:

1. "The Medium is the Message" - relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived, ie, the form of the medium embeds itself in the message. This is really interesting when you consider the new forms of medium we use to communicate, not least of which is Twitter.

The above was coined by Marshall McLuhan, who also coined the interesting term "global village", describing how the world has contracted due to electric technology.


2. Milton Friedman (Economic God and one of my personal heroes) said this about government institutions: "If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand."




3. Read this really interesting piece on Y-Combinator (Paul Graham incubator): http://www.newsweek.com/id/34734/output/print

4. Quote from Paul Buchheit (founder of Gmail, Google's "do no evil", FriendFeed), regarding start-ups: "it's better to make a few people really happy than to make a lot of people semi-happy"

5. Joe Kraus (founder Excite): "Merely measuring something has an uncanny tendency to improve it"