taylorbarstow.com

Here are some observations I’ve made over the past week. Most of these have been true for a long time and will continue to be true for a long time. Nonetheless, I just learned (or re-learned) them recently. What lessons have you learned recently?

These people are getting a lesson in making personal connections.

1. Put yourself out there. Success is still (and always will be) about personal connections. Actively seek out new connections. Go to meet ups and conferences. Don’t be shy. People are the world’s greatest resource: they are your sounding board, your marketing firm, your user base. Embrace them.
2. Keep It Simple, Stupid (aka, “The KISS Protocol”). Your next great idea is probably too big—simplify it, get it out there, generate feedback (see #1), and iterate. Getting something out there and starting a conversation will always be more valuable than weeks of brainstorming all holed up in your apartment, wild-eyed and crazy-haired.
3. Trampoline off the efforts of others: seek out and make use of the wealth of data- and service-related APIs on the web. (This also gets back to #2 and helps you keep in simple.)
4. Finally, follow your nose and have fun! Make something you think is cool. For one thing, this will help you when it comes to promotion: genuine enthusiasm on your part will probably get other people interested too. For another, this will enable you to create a better product: when it’s your baby and you love it, you are going to do your best to make it look and feel great.

(See also: Getting Real, by 37signals.)

I’ve made some minor changes to NYT Explorer over the past two days:

• added spelling suggestions using the YAHOO! BOSS spelling suggestion API
• added thumbnails where available
• added a feedback forum; if you have any questions, comments, or ideas, I’d love to hear them
• modified layout slightly to be more flexible; I think it’s more attractive now too

Enjoy!

Yesterday’s Times Open event was a huge success. For a developer program in its infancy, turnout was excellent—140 attendees out of about 400 total applicants, according to Derek Gottfrid, the MC and principal organizer. Topics ranged from APIs to widgets to business models, but the message was clear: The New York Times is, suddenly, a platform company.

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UPDATE: I decided to just do this for the keynote. Too much to do it all day! Apologies to twitter peeps coming here this afternoon looking for a liveblog. The keynote was very good though, so I encourage you to read on…

I’ll update this as much as possible throughout the talk. Enjoy!

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Launched a new site today! Check out nytexplorer.com, a simple search engine for articles from The New York Times.

nytexplorer is built on top of the Times’ new Article Search API. This is a really interesting API. There is a ton of data behind it, and the data is super clean and easy to work with. Lots of possibilities here.

This has been a really fun project to work on. If you have any feedback, please post it here for now. I will setup a proper feedback forum (I’m thinking UserVoice) soon.