"Operate as if you are in perpetual beta" Tim O'Reilly

Turned comments on today. Your thoughts are welcome.

Ten Steps to a Hugely Successful Web 2.0 Company is an excellent post by Charles O'Donnell...

1. Solve the smallest possible problem (that is still big enough to matter) for the user and know exactly what problem you're trying to solve. Google's first and primary job was very simple: Help people find stuff. They didn't start layering on everything else until much later. Brad calls this the "narrow point of the wedge." Its the easiest, simplest version of what you're trying to do... the smallest bite your users will ever have to chew--small enough to get hooked on very easily.

10. No one sucks. I hate it when someone says that a whole service sucks. Now, I say it myself, I'll admit, but what that does is it teaches you to discount and generalize, and probably miss a lot of small opportunities that add up. Now, I think Ofoto sucks versus Flickr, but people still use it. Why? There's got to be something there. AOL sucks... or does it? They still have 20 million users, so it can't entirely suck. You should look at every competitor and take the best of what they do right and do it yourself, even if that's only one thing and the rest of their service sucks.

Bravo Charles - well said. Read the entire post here

Bill Gates speaks at IAB's Engage in London...

He said the next challenge would be to take advantage of ubiquitous wireless, super-fast internet connections. Advances in computer hardware had been a "miracle" but high-speed internet connections would accelerate the pace of change even further. Computers would become almost invisible, he said, integrated into everything that we do. "In some ways the computer just disappears into the environment. All these devices will be hooked up to the internet and the internet will not have any speed limitations. And these devices will be a lot cheaper than they are today," he said.

Magazines and newspapers would eventually become redundant in their existing form, with interactive, personalised content delivered to handheld devices. "A lot of the reading that's taking place, the richness to be able to call up anything will take over," he said.

Read the full article via The Guardian here

Jay Rosen has done an outstanding job of covering the Judith Miller - New York Times debate, you may find a collection of his posts here

Corey Bergman offers up some fine coverage of ONA here, here, here and here. Thanks Corey. He does make two very good points "where are all the students?" "where are the local station people". My sense is this is a leadership issue; no good reason why both groups should not be attending and well represented.