<story><title>How to win friends and influence people with an iPad in a coffee shop</title><url>http://raganwald.posterous.com/how-to-win-friends-and-influence-people-with</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>neilc</author><text>&lt;i&gt;If I was writing a book, I&apos;d do a terrible job, because my nose for what people want is broken. When I write essays, I don&apos;t care, I write everything and I let Hacker News and Twitter sort out the wheat from my chaff.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Personally I think this is a bad idea, because what is popular on HN rarely correlates with what I consider to be quality writing. If your goal is just to get an article on HN, that can be done pretty easily: give it a provocative title, discuss one of a handful of topics (e.g., node.js, Clojure, Scala, Rails, Apple/iOS, etc.), and make it easily skimmable within 30-45 seconds.&lt;p&gt;If HN popularity was a reliable metric for quality, TechCrunch would deserve a Pulitzer. If you want to write short pieces that attract the interest of a programmer while their code compiles, HN is a decent metric. If you want to write something with lasting meaning or value, it is not.&lt;p&gt;(Obviously, that isn&apos;t to say that &lt;i&gt;nothing&lt;/i&gt; on HN has lasting meaning or value -- just that the correlation between lasting quality and HN popularity is weak, at best.)</text></comment>
<story><title>How to win friends and influence people with an iPad in a coffee shop</title><url>http://raganwald.posterous.com/how-to-win-friends-and-influence-people-with</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gojomo</author><text>Love this pair of observations about how books get judged by their worst parts, but collections of online posts for their best:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Another problem with a book is that it&apos;s One Big Thing. Very few book reviews say &quot;Chapter two is a gem, buy the book for this and ignore chapter six, the author is confused.&quot; Most just say &quot;He&apos;s an idiot, chapter six is proof of that.&quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;...versus...&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Thanks to Twitter and Hacker News and whatever else, if you write a good thing, it gets judged on its own. You can write 99 failures but you are judged by your best work, not your worst. &lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Microcontent (and even decontextualization) for the win.</text></comment>