Twitter Didn’t Invent Hilarious One-Liners

By Tim Berry

I just read The Rise of Comedy on Twitter on Mashable. The tweets they reproduce there make me jealous. I love Twitter, but I’m not funny on Twitter, or at least not on purpose. But then I’m not particularly funny off Twitter either. And then there’s also Top 7 Hilarious Fake Tweets on Huffington Post a... Read More »

The Problem With Crowd Sourcing is Crowds

By Tim Berry

Crowd sourcing sounds good to me, but then I remember, we humans are a difficult bunch. We like complaining more than praising. We post nasty, negative, and aggressively personal comments on blogs. We’re easily swayed by a few bad apples. Anonymity makes us really mean. Revenge makes us happy. And we behave particularly badly in... Read More »

5 Words You Probably Misuse in Business Writing

By Tim Berry

Did you ever look in a mirror after a business meeting and discover a glaringly obvious piece of food in your teeth? Or a coffee stain where you hadn’t seen it before? You know that embarrassing feeling you get at that moment? That’s how you look when you misuse the language. Yes, I know, many... Read More »

Zen Habits and the Art of Focus

By Tim Berry

Every so often I’m struck with the beauty and eloquence of simplicity. Like this blog, this post, this simple look and feel: I particularly liked this post, but it reminded me that the blog itself, zenhabits, is a wonderful example of how well focus actually works within a real business, small business, context. As the... Read More »

Say it Ain’t So Joel

By Tim Berry

This is disturbing on several levels. No, I don’t know Joel Spolsky but I feel like I do because I’ve been reading his work for years. He’s not just an expert on software development, he’s a very good writer and thinker. I’ve quoted him a lot. So what’s disturbing? In Let’s Take This Offline Joel’s... Read More »

Celebrities Save Which Endangered Species?

By Tim Berry

Much like global climate and habitat change threatens giant pandas and black rhinos, global socio-economic and technological change threatens writers. Print media outlets are slowly dying, literacy is gradually declining, and the book business is shrinking. Animals are threatened by global warming, and writers by global dumbing. So I guess I’m glad to see that... Read More »

The Best of the Best Lists

By Tim Berry

Of all the “best of” blog posts I’ve seen this month, Bob Sutton’s Work Matters: The Best of 2009 posts is the best. No coincidence, I suppose, that he writes very well and has a great blog, teaches at Stanford, and is author of several important books. But there are other great blogs around. What... Read More »

Missing the Spanish Phrase "Ni Modo"

By Tim Berry

I miss the phrase “ni modo.” It’s a wonderful Mexico City idiom meaning “oh well, this is not good, but it can’t be changed either, so we might as well accept it and deal with it.” They say few languages are as concise as English, and Spanish usually isn’t. But ni modo takes an English... Read More »