PLO Diaries

So I've posted in the past about what we do (and what we're working on) at DC labs. We're still hard at work on some of those performance improvements in the short-term (we've implemented a few, including the Cloudfront improvements - which seem to have gone off without a hitch) - but a lot of what I do is look at how other sites allocate technology and resources to keep their site scaling with demand, and how other sites approach information/design questions to make their site as usable as possible. Sometimes I get my answers to questions directly (how did X site approach Y problem?) and other times I just get inspired by using/reading cool things or talking to cool people.

I figured my blog would be as good of a place as any to catalog a few items in my library, to give a picture for what I read and follow both on a tech and non-tech level.

1. This one is a recent discovery - Jay Paroline's blog. For those who don't know, Jay Paroline is one of the lead devs at Grooveshark (if you've never checked out Grooveshark, do it now!). They've gone from 500k users a year ago to over 3.5million users today, and his blog catalogs a lot of the developments they go through to outpace demand and keep an awesome site up and running. It's not something that is updated super frequently, but the amount you can learn from reading it backwards is pretty impressive.
2. I use Twitter. A lot. I have a fair # of people I follow and interact with to an extent, but a lot of my indirect inspiration comes from reading posts made on twitter lists - most notably Dave McClure's Startup Metrics. Dave McClure is a VC/Geek/Entrepreneur from Silicon Valley. The posts on that list range from insanely informative to hugely inspirational, and I probably spend 30min each day browsing through it.
3. Jason Kottke's blog. This one is purely inspirational. Kottke's blog is basically a collection of everything cool on the internet that you should consider watching/looking at/reading. For a similar, but somewhat pithier, blog, I'd recommend taking a look at Daring Fireball.
4. code monkey island. This is the source of my inspiration for blogging about the behind the scenes of DC more frequently, with their "Ravelry Runs On" posts this year as well as in 2009 and 2008. It's very cool to see a site that runs on a similar architecture to ours (their site is MUCH larger in scale, obviously) that we can learn from.
5. Signal vs. Noise. We use 37signals products (Basecamp, Campfire) and they blog frequently about business. It's a huge source of inspiration for me.

There are definitely blogs here I'm forgetting - or blogs that I read sometimes, but I wouldn't consider part of my every day staples (Mark Cuban's blog, for example).

For those interested in twitter lists but not specifically in Startup Culture and technology, I'd recommend looking at Listorious. You can look around there to find well-curated lists in just about any subject you have an interest in.