Tom Nixon

Can you help us find a new director?

Will and I have decided that it's time to get a new director on board who can help us to manage and develop the business. At first, this new director will be focussing on the production area of the business, so it's a process-oriented operations person that we're looking for. If you know anyone who might be suitable then please point them at the job ad.

Why you should give away your knowledge for free

For years, knowledge was power. Now the Internet has made knowledge cheap. You can barely click a mouse button without bumping into some knowledge.

If you are an expert in your field, the best thing you can do is give away your knowledge for free.

But why isn't this selling yourself short? Because the thing that you're not giving away (and nobody can easily copy) is your experience in applying that knowledge to your customer's needs, and your time to actually help them with their problems.

Seth Godin writes:

I don't know about you, but when I hire someone, or go to the doctor or the architect or an engineer, I could care less about how good they are at memorizing or looking up facts. I want them to be great at synthesizing ideas, the faster and more insightfully, the better.

Knowledge is cheap. It's what you can do with it that counts.

Google buys Jaiku

Competition is going to seriously heat up in the microblogging space now that Google has assimilated Jaiku.

With its rival Twitter also well-funded there should be some real progress in this area over the coming year. Personally I'll be happy when Twitter sort out their scaling issues and make the service reliable.

I think it was Fred Wilson (VC from Union Square Ventures who backed Twitter) who said that he thinks these services are interesting not so much as websites, but as 'plumbing' - a layer of infrastructure on the web upon which all sorts of services can be built. Interesting thought.

Growth

Jason Calacanis posted this to Twitter just now:

[celebrations] today at Mahalo in celebration of 100%+ growth month to month from August to September... way to go team!

I'd be interested to know which metric grew by 100%: Number of pages? Revenue? Profit? Employees Inbound links?

OK, it was only a Twitter post so he didn't have much space to fully explain.

I really like 37signal's perspective of growth though, check it out.