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Gordon Segal, founder and CEO of Crate and Barrel, says lack of wisdom is the reason his store got off the ground.

“We didn’t know anything about retail,” Segal recalled. “I had grown up in the restaurant business, so I knew about service but not about retail. We didn’t know a market from a markdown. We didn’t know anything about importing. In fact, if we weren’t 23 and totally lacking wisdom, we would never have done this. You just go ahead with your passions, and you rush forward without a great deal of thought,” Segal reflected…

“We were truly a counter-culture story of the 1960s,” Segal said. “We literally turned over packing crates, stacked up the merchandise and went into business. We just thought that was nothing special. Of course, everyone walked in and was amazed that these two young kids were starting this business, that we could find French pottery and Swedish glass and Danish flatware and bring it to a small, little street in Chicago called Old Town. It was really crazy, when I think back, that we felt that we could import product into a little 1,700 sq. ft. store.”

Makes you wonder: How many others have succeeded because they didn’t know the rules? Because they didn’t realize that they were doing things they weren’t supposed to be doing?

We’re always taught to look before we leap, but it’s interesting to hear about the Segals of the world — those who succeed by rushing forward without thinking.

But doesn’t wisdom lead to success? Sure, it often does. But sometimes the winners are those who don’t have a lot of wisdom. Look at NFL quarterbacks. Routinely the best ones aren’t the brightest.

All quarterbacks drafted into the pros are required to take an I.Q. test—the Wonderlic Personnel Test…Of the five quarterbacks taken in round one of the 1999 draft, Donovan McNabb, the only one of the five with a shot at the Hall of Fame, had the lowest Wonderlic score. And who else had I.Q. scores in the same range as McNabb? Dan Marino and Terry Bradshaw, two of the greatest quarterbacks ever to play the game.

Maybe these quarterbacks succeed in part because they don’t have the highest IQs. Maybe they go with their gut instead of overanalyzing things.

Now, I don’t want to sound like I’m celebrating ignorance. Leaping before you look isn’t the best way to, say, invade a foreign country. But if you’re doing something with a little less downside — like starting a business — maybe you’re better off ignoring all the naysayers who tell you that you need to spend tons of time and money on planning, researching, testing, educating yourself, studying the competition, etc. Sometimes there’s real value in not worrying about what you don’t know and just putting something out into the world.

Sharding is a database technique where you break up a big database into many smaller ones. Instead of having 1 million customers on a single, big iron machine, you perhaps have 100,000 customers on 10 different, smaller machines.

The general advise on sharding is that you don’t until you have to. It’s similar to Martin Fowler’s First Law of Distributed Object Design: Don’t distribute your objects! Sharding is still relatively hard, has relatively poor tool support, and will definitely complicate your setup.

Now I always knew that the inevitable day would come where we would have no choice. We would simply have to shard because there was no more vertical scaling to be done. But that day seems to get pushed further and further into the future.

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FeedBurner's email service began delivering updates in April, 2006. The launch was just weeks after scientists determined email and feeds could be safely combined in a laboratory setting. Our public service has since delivered millions of messages on behalf of thousands of publishers, making sure that publishers who want to get the word out can reach the broadest audience possible — including many site visitors who don't already embrace feeds (or feed readers, like Google Reader), but who trust their email inboxes to be the best way to have content that matters most delivered to them.

As part of our move to Google infrastructure, FeedBurner has added some new features for email publishers. Most of these are of the under-the-hood variety, but a new set of subscriber list management features will be especially beneficial for publishers with dozens, hundreds, and even thousands of existing email subscribers. Here are features live today for all feeds managed through a Google account:

• Added reliability and delivery scale, thanks to Google infrastructure. The same systems that handle Gmail and other, large-scale public email communications traffic now deliver FeedBurner email subscriptions, too.
  


• Robust subscriber list search and pagination. Instead of loading your entire subscriber list, which is too much for some browsers to handle if that list is really big, the new service displays just the 150 most recent subscribers. You can search for specific addresses or general domains (e.g., "hotmail.com" will return a list and total count of your subscribers with "hotmail.com" in their addresses.) This list is now paginated to allow you to scroll through its contents easily.
  


• Complete subscriber list export. Want to view the whole shebang offline? Download a CSV-formatted text file of your entire subscriber list.

These new features are in addition to FeedBurner's classic email capabilities. As always, you may:

• Customize delivery time frame and time zone
• Write your own welcome/activation email text
• Choose from multiple custom font, size, and color combinations
  
• Incorporate a custom graphic logo in your HTML message header
  

Also, new subscribers are still required to confirm their requests (to minimize potential abuse).

Want to use the free email delivery service with your feed? Using the latest improvements to email requires moving your existing feedburner.com account to Google (if you haven't done so already). If you use AdSense, any feeds you set up to use AdSense for feeds will also include ads in emails delivered with this service. Sign in to your AdSense account, click AdSense Setup, then Manage Ads, and then locate an AdSense for feeds unit you have created. Click the "View Feed Stats" link next to this unit to reach your feed's Analyze page. Click the Publicize tab, then Email Subscriptions to view and set up service options. Email subscriptions will be delivered, using your settings, starting with your feed's next update. (If your Google account is already set up to use FeedBurner, you can also get to the "Email Subscriptions" service setup area by signing directly in to feedburner.google.com, clicking your feed's title on My Feeds, and then visiting Publicize > Email Subscriptions.)

Posted by Matt Shobe, User Experience Designer, AdSense for Feeds

Last week I took you through the Highrise signup chart redesign.

This week I want to talk about part of the Highrise home page redesign that we’ve already redesigned. The design is alive – we’re making a lot of small tweaks post launch.

Original: In the cards

When we launched the new Highrise site, we had a block in the middle of the page that looked like this:

Three “cards” as we call them. Each card highlighting a major feature of Highrise. The idea was to rotate these cards every once in a while. They looked good and gave the page a nice splash of color, but they didn’t communicate very well. We were using 163,566 pixels, but we weren’t really saying anything.

Redesigned: In the icons

So we decided to make a change. Instead of using all that space to advertise three features, we thought we’d try using it to communicate eight benefits instead. So in a couple hours we came up with this:

Eight benefits, concisely explained, each with an icon for some color and identity. Now that block says something. There’s more to swallow, but it’s easy going down. And it’s only 98 pixels taller than the cards design. Here’s the overlay (the red is the extra height):

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