Brad Rourke

Brad Rourke’s Blog

  • How To Think About Your Blog Like A TV Programmer

    The great promise of the Web, which was finally fulfilled by the pervasive existence of blogs, was that everyone would be a publisher. With cheap, easy tools, anyone can publish work that is immediately accessible across the globe.There is literally no fundamental barrier to the creation and distribution of your work. There is a new…

  • Four Tips For New Bloggers: Feed The Beast

    I’ve been blogging since before we had the word “blog” — with varying degrees of success. By “success” I don’t mean number of readers. I mean success in actually getting my blog posts completed and posted. There have been long dry stretches, where I could barely get anything written. I didn’t know what to write,…

  • Handling Distractions In The Distracted Workplace

    A recent article by essayist and venture capitalist Paul Graham has gained a lot of notice, and not just because Graham is a partner in startup boot-camp Y-Combinator. Graham’s piece describes what looks to be a fundamental difference in the work rhythms of two different sorts of people: managers and makers. Here’s how he puts…

  • Three Friends Teach Self Reliance

    I am not the kind of person who posts motivational quotes and aphorisms to my Facebook status or to my Twitter account. And when my friends do, I usually just skip over it, as those sorts of things are not why I hang out in online social spaces. But earlier this week, in very short…

  • Video Interview: Public Leadership Beyond Institutions

    John Creighton and I have been thinking a lot about a big shift that’s been happening over the last 20 years. It’s a shift that’s been happening everywhere, but it is having a big impact in our public life. This is the shift from a world ruled by institutions to a world where individual people…

  • Personal And Public Security — What's The Answer?

    By now, most users of Twitter know of what’s come to be called “Twitfail” — French hackers gained access to the personal email accounts and passwords of top executives at Twitter. To prove it, they emailed a large cache of internal strategy documents to the widely-read Silicon Valley blog TechCrunch. After agonizing over it for…

  • How Does The Current Economic Climate Benefit Civil Society?

    I got a note over the weekend: I’m student [at an Israeli university]. I’m doing a Seminar work about Civil society in USA. I’m trying find an answer for the question: What have happened to the civil society in USA through the financial crisis. Is the civil society is getting stronger or weaker from it?…

  • This Is What Leadership Looks Like

    Last week, a story was circulating through social media platforms that illuminated a real bonehead move by Amazon. It was deleting copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from people’s Kindles without their knowledge. Turns out the books being deleted from the popular e-readers were unauthorized editions, and in the Kindle terms of service…

  • Vibram Five Fingers Shoes — My Review

    Many of my friends (both in-person and on Facebook) know that a couple of months ago I bought the strangest looking shoes you can imagine: shoes with toes. They’re called Vibram Five Fingers. Before I told you what I thought of them, I wanted to wear them for a goodly period of time, to be…