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This weekend, venture capitalist and avid blogger Fred Wilson pointed out an interesting blog post written by Stack Overflow co-founder Jeff Atwood. In the article, Atwood explains how his company takes advice from Charles de Mar - a character in the 1985 movie Better Off Dead - who rather bluntly tells a first time skier to "go that way, really fast." Atwood says his company has focused mainly on speed, and believes speed of iteration is more valuable than quality.

One of the topics we touch on from time to time here at ReadWriteStart is the importance of solid design aesthetics for Internet startups. One of the key elements in creating a user-friendly design is A/B testing - a process by which two or more variations of a design element are tested with different groups of users. A/B testing, however, doesn't apply strictly to the visuals of a site; it can also be a useful tool for startups hoping to learn what their users like best.

Every entrepreneur will tell you that recruiting the right candidate is important. While startups are constantly trying to find programmers that mesh well with their culture, team and work-style, one article suggests that companies still struggle finding candidates that know how to program at all. Jeff Atwood published a post this morning entitled, The Non-Programming Programmer with a stunning look at how many interviewees misrepresent their abilities.

Picture if you will, a collaborative site that runs on two servers, is managed by four people, and has attracted a third of its target demographic within six months of launch. A site that has had 800,000 posts submitted by its users in its short lifetime and has 16 million pageviews/month - and growing.

This is the story of Stack Overflow, a free question and answer site built by developers for developers that has fostered a strong and committed online community in under one year. How? Easy, according to founder Joel Spolsky; all it takes is an understanding of anthropology and a lot of determination.

U.S. government agencies can now officially use YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo, and blip.tv, using special service agreements that comply with federal terms and conditions. Today, the General Services Administration (GSA) announced that, after nine months of negotiations, the government has signed agreements with these companies that will allow federal agencies to officially post content to these sites. The GSA is also negotiating special terms and conditions with MySpace and Facebook, and it has already determined that Twitter's service agreement is in line with federal requirements.

Google has announced that the company now offers a secure way for third party websites to access any user's list of friends, with their permission, and based on a proposed new industry standard. No more giving away your GMail password and then having random services you want to try go into your account and scrape the information there.

Called Portable Contacts, the technical spec offers a standard, interoperable way for social networks to serve up your friends lists to anyone you give permission to access them. This should allow application developers to innovate on top of your social connections much more efficiently.

YouTube launched a handy new page last night that aggregates all the videos from more than 100 institutions of higher education around the US. YouTube.com/edu now serves up campus tours, free lectures, research and other college news all in one place. Search queries can be limited to the Edu part of the site as well.

This is a great idea and we expect that young people who discover it will appreciate it. At first glance it looks better to us than iTunes University. This could genuinely help young people make more informed decisions about what schools to apply to. There's also a lot of great content on the site for anyone to learn from.