Digging In

I really like smart, polite people who mean well. I've heard the phrase from a number of smart polite people that they believe in the phrase, "strong views (or opinions), weakly held."  When I first heard that I nodded in agreement and considered its wisdom. It implies a willingness to cooperate, to not be blinded by your own beliefs to the detriment of progress.  And I'm sure it works in certain groups---collaborators working on improving the status quo--in certain situations. And yet it can sound like "yeah I have a strong opinion about this, but I don't really care that much about the outcome."  There's another group of people--a smaller group, I'd bet. These people have strong opinions, strongly held.  Steve Jobs didn't hold his strong opinions weakly. Nor did MLK. Nor did Sara Blakely, the now-billionaire founder of Spanx. Nor did John Lennon, or Basquiat, or Miles Davis.  Weakly held opinions lead to weak outcomes, the

I've been using DuckDuckGo.com (DDG) for search recently instead of Google because of its privacy features--it doesn't track you or store your searches. And generally I find it to be useful, delivering relevant content better than or equal to Google's relatively commercial content. When I want to shop for something, I go to Google because it's a strong engine for that--it's a commerce discovery platform when it comes down to it. Or Amazon. DDG doesn't track anything, which is meaningful these days when every site and likely every agency tracks what you're doing. I still think there's a space for curated search, which is what I attempted to do with the unfortunately named Jawaya, a social search or curated search engine of sorts. And I've been building a similar tool for myself as a side project that will approximate that. It's much more powerful with a network of people curating search results. So I might open it up at some point to see if