In the comments on Chris's blog (great post today about search and social graphs) -- Sean O'Rourke mapped out some interesting points regarding Social Graphs when used for Search, and I think he's nailed the numbers:

My friend Todd Lappin sent the following about his new program with the Market Street Railway:

Which vampire franchise is for me? - make thousands more decisions on Hunch.com

I am reading The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis and came across one of my favorites, which I had forgotten, Happiest Moment:

Monsieur Proust is the account of Proust's final decade, as told by Celeste Albaret, his servant and confidante. He lived his final days, as is well known, in a cork-lined room with the curtains drawn, awake mostly at night, writing his masterpiece. Albaret kept to his strange hours, fixed all his meals, took his clothes to be laundered, and sat and listened to his accounts of his childhood, his social life and the many people he had known. After Proust's death, Albaret lived for 50 years in obscurity, refusing any inquiries for interviews from journalists and biographers. She finally agreed to narrate this account in her 80s, just to correct the many myths and inaccuracies that had grown up around Proust, to tell his story as best she could. It's quite an engaging read, and I was deeply impressed by Albaret's devotion to and love for Proust. Halfway through the book, I flipped to the back cover, and was a bit taken aback by the review by Angus Wilson printed there:

"Suicidal" "monstrous" "cold-blood" "revulsion" "deforming" "madman" -- wow. I was reading it as a study in devotion, service and sacrifice. I tried to figure out where such revulsion had come from, and it seemed to me that people in Western society have a horror of selflessness, and what they perceive of as subordination and subservience. In some ways this book was a perfect and remarkable complement and contrast to the expendable warrior theme of my prior post on Dogfights and Gameness with their triumphs and heroics -- here was a quiet, modest life, lived in the service of another. She took pleasure in warming Proust's bathwater to the perfect temperature, fixing his coffee just so, and knowing exactly which hat he wore on which occasion.

From Malcolm Gladwell's most recent article in the New Yorker, "Offensive Play"

Or, as Mark Twain said, "It's not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog."

Today Matt Gattis, one of my co-founders at Hunch released Magnum PY, an open source web server, which is possibly the first multithreaded event-driven webserver.

My friend Emily pointed out a great quote in this week's New Yorker, in an article about the painter Luc Tuymans, who describes how he creates his work: "It's like I don't know what I'm doing but I know how to do it." Peter Schjeldahl, the article's author, notes that "uncertain ends, confident means is about as good a general definition of creativity as I know."

I've seen a lot of hard working entrepreneurs fail, and I've come to the conclusion that working hard, while never a bad thing, is not really the magic thing that leads to great inventions or successful outcomes. Edison, of the "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration" quote, tried thousands of materials looking for the right filament for the electric bulb. That might have been hard work, and the fact that he persisted through many failures is key to making something work, but he was also working on the right problem. So often people are working hard at the wrong thing. Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard.

When we were building Flickr, we worked very hard. We worked all waking hours, we didn't stop. My Hunch cofounder Chris Dixon and I were talking about how hard we worked on our first startups, his being Site Advisor, acquired by McAfee -- 14-18 hours a day. We agreed that a lot of what we then considered "working hard" was actually "freaking out". Freaking out included panicking, working on things just to be working on something, not knowing what we were doing, fearing failure, worrying about things we needn't have worried about, thinking about fund raising rather than product building, building too many features, getting distracted by competitors, being at the office since just being there seemed productive even if it wasn't -- and other time-consuming activities. This time around we have eliminated a lot of freaking out time. We seem to be working less hard this time, even making it home in time for dinner.

Watson and Crick, who discovered the structure of DNA, are described in Richard Ogle's book Smart World:

In a recent article from the Wall Street Journal, David Byrne, front man of The Talking Heads and a resident of New York, talks about the perfect cities, and in one section says:

There is a lot of truth to that, and I think cities have a lot to do with creativity and invention, but acceptance of failure is not the whole story.

The Romantics believed that genius came from an individual, that they were inspired by a divine spark within them, had been granted a superior mind or vision and were able to see things that mere mortals could not. More recently we've come to believe that genius is really the result of hard work, "99 percent perspiration" as it were, which I wrote about recently as well. But it may be that creativity and invention are more dependent on the networks in which the creator participates than their individual genius or their willingness to put in the hours. As we've so often seen, great ideas occur where there is a confluence of ideas taken from the environment surrounding the creator or creators. Thus, Silicon Valley. Even people designing office spaces have discovered that creating little meeting spaces and sitting areas at the junctures between hallways increase communication between different departments in an organization and increase cross-fertilization of ideas and intra company relationships.

And the networks=genius idea explains why that idiot made $10 million dot com dollars -- he was very literally in the right place at the right time.

My Hunch co-founder Chris Dixon has recently been talking about how New York is poised for a tech revival, and I think he makes some very good points. He says:

On the Berg Blog, Matt Webb summarized the learnings from Justin's post about the evolution of GameLayers and what they've learned in the process of moving from their 'passively multiplayers online game' to Dictator Wars on Facebook. These are great observations for anyone trying to build any kind of product and company, be it a game, web site or potato peeler:

• Be selective with your innovation. Keep as much of your product predictable, so people can find their way to the gem of awesome that you have pioneered.
• Serious Business. If you want to actually hire people to work with you, pay kickass artists to make content for your game, and afford to buy new shoes, figure out what people would want to pay for if they were using your software.
• First Five Minutes. If someone can't figure out what to do in the first five minutes of your interactive experience, you are hosed.

One of the best days of my life was May 30 of this year when I received an Honorary Doctorate from RISD. I've always had tremendous respect for John Maeda from his time at Media Lab, and he is now the President of RISD. Amazing students have emerged from those schools, and I admire their approach to creativity and education.

The speaker at commencement was another honorary degree recipient, Ken Robinson, whose work I was not familiar with, and so I looked him up and found this talk that he had given at TED, which was profound, thought-provoking, inspiring -- and funny!:

I'm quoted today Today's CNN article on Wikipedia

That's not what I said....online communities are NOT evolving or finding new ways to promote "the culture of generosity" -- I would posit that in fact nothing has changed, that the rules of civilization and good public behavior have been around since the Ten Commandments, Hammurabi or the Polis.

When I was talking on the phone with John about sites that have that "army of community management martinets" I was saying that was a bad thing and describing corporate sites that do not permit communities to express themselves -- NOT UGC sites such as Wikipedia. Taken out of context he seems to imply that I was recommending that kind of control. I was not. What I was actually saying was that sites like Wikipedia are managed by *the community itself* and that there is no "us" and "them", no overlords, no army.

What the press refuses to understand is that Wikipedia is MORE open as a result of the recent changes. Headline should be: Wikipedia unlocks thousands of topics to user contribution.