Aaron Gerdes

The server my blog was running on suffered a catastrophic crash after the host (obviously not Rocket Dog Creative) had removed it temporarily from the backup routine. I’ve been able to piece most of it together from a few old backups and my RSS feed, which was cached by FeedBurner and Bloglines . I’m very glad I’m using both of those tools.

The hosting firm has been very accommodating getting things up and running again. A good case study in disaster management.

So, please be patient.. still need to fill in a few posts, then we’ll be back to regularly scheduled programming.

I’m not referring to the fact that you’re outnumbered by them.

Church of the Customer runs a great quote from Jake Nickell (co-founder of Threadless, a site where users submit designs for shirts and vote on their favorites): “Our community could destroy us if they wanted to.” Understanding that our customers have ultimate control of our business keeps us entrepreneurs from just being folks with very stressful hobbies.

The whole post goes on to show how Threadless applied this awareness in a crisis and contrasts that with Facebook’s recent controversial feature roll-out.

Prolific designer Michael Bierut blogs honestly about a common unease among designers:

The iterative process, the role of improvisation, the adjustments that are made in response to audience feedback, all of these elements are a part of any design process. And, in a way, they’ve always been the ones that have vaguely unnerving to me.

I’ve mentioned some fear wrapped up in my own process in an earlier post.

Firms tend to market processes as a proof that we’ll be able to replicate past victories — to show prospects our success hasn’t only been through luck. Yet sometimes we break process. I’ve done it over constraints, at the client’s request, and because sometimes the first concept out of the gate is the right one (and all the stakeholders agree). If you’re too rigid in those situations, you interfere with natural momentum.

This is why I’m an advocate of less formality and less bulk in a process.

Om Malik of GigaOM fame has started up a new blog (several other authors seem to be involved) called WebWorker Daily. Promising content for those of us working in the “bedouin” lifestyle, as they put it.

A brief post worth looking at is 10 Tips for Managing Virtual Workers. Great advice. Having a bit of experience working on virtual teams, I can attest that these are critical things when considering virtual workers, whether contractors working from home or offshoring work through a management firm.

This article in BusinessWeek reports on the spread of Firefox, a browser which has grabbed to 10% of the market from Internet Explorer in two years (I switched a while back from Safari).

Several colleagues have happily switched to Firefox from Internet Explorer at the behest of a tech-savvy friend, vendor, or relative. None have looked back.

Don’t miss the Firefox crop circle created on the OSU campus.

That’s a passionate group of users.