July, 2008


3
Jul 08

The Value of Email

Merlin Mann, in his regular elegant style, says “Organizing your email is about as useful as alphabetizing your recycling.”

He quotes the NY Times, who had a great infographic showing that a large part of your office time is lost to “Interruptions by things that aren’t urgent or important, like unnecessary e-mail messages” and Merlin then asks this question:

What does a company get out of its employees spending half their day using an email program?

He goes on to put a lot of thought into the question – and if some days you feel overwhelmed by your email, I highly recommend the read.


3
Jul 08

Use Amazon for Data

Amazon is leading the crowd with an expandable storage drive in cloud, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). 37signals shares their usage stats. Nice to see it works well, even at 12 terabytes. Myself, I use S3 with JungleDisk to automatically backup 70GB of data every week.

Amazon is also dabbling in other on-demand elastic computing. One recent offering, SimpleDB is an intriguing move from database servers (or server farms) to outsourcing the whole database service into the internet cloud.