ReadWriteWeb

As a PR person, product developer, CEO or whatever, you're probably more interested in getting noticed by the media than developing a relationship with a particular writer.

That's one way to go about it.

Then there's that old-fashioned "building a relationship with a real person not a robot" idea. You know, treating people like people and taking the time to get to know them. Oh right, yeah, forgot about that.

Writers, like artists, are sensitive to ideas and people. But not every writer will get you or your product - and in the tech world as in any world, each writer has their own specialization. If the match is right, I guarantee they will want to get to know you and your ideas.

There's no better way to learn than by making mistakes. Just ask Kevin Montrose from Stack Exchange. Montrose is going a post-mortem on the first generation Stack Exchange API, with coverage of its history and mistakes made in its design.

Cloudera VP Customer Solutions, Omer Trajman, presented a talk on HBase Dos and Don'ts to the Los Angeles Hadoop Users Group earlier this month.

The full video is available after the jump.

There are any number of places where first-time entrepreneurs can go to ask questions from others - Hacker News, StackOverflow, Quora, for example. As useful as Q&A sites can be, it's also helpful to have resources gathered together in one place.

That's what Songkick's Ian Hogarth did by creating a Startup Tools Wiki. Built to save others from "re-inventing the wheel," says Hogarth, the wiki gathers useful tools that startups have found and come to rely on. The wiki is meant to gather these resources in one place so companies that are getting started have a wiki to reference.

Programmer Ted Dziuba suggests an alternative to traditional program that he called "Taco Bell Programming." The Taco Bell chain creates multiple menu items from about eight different ingredients. Dziuba wants to be able to be able to create many applications with combinations of about eight different shell commands.

As one of the lucky recipients of the Cr-48 Chrome OS test notebook, I've been experimenting with how well I can unwire to live "in the cloud," as they say. If you're unfamiliar, the Cr-48 notebook computers are being used in Google's Pilot program for its new browser-based computer operating system named for its Web browser, Google Chrome.

Built on top of Linux, the feel of Chrome OS is that of just using a Web browser running on a small notebook computer. This leads to some obvious limitations, of course. For example, how do you transfer files from a USB device to Google Chrome OS? The short answer: you don't. But I found an exception just the other day - I managed to access photos on a USB Flash drive in a surprising way.

Peter Wayner lays out the "dirty dozen" most common programming mistakes in an article at InfoWorld. The mistakes come in pairs. For example: "closing the source" and "assuming openness is a cure-all."

What would you add to or subtract from the list? Which of these pitfalls trips you up the most often? Do you have any strategies for avoiding these pitfalls?

As you probably know, Google recently rolled out its Instant Previews feature. The new feature involves quite a lot of client-side JavaScript, yet doesn't slow the search engine down for most of us. The Google Code Blog has a post on how the development team managed to add the new feature without noticeably impacting performance.

Today Google released mod_pagespeed, an Apache module that automates many of Google's Page Speed optimization recommendations. The mod currently offers 18 configurable filters. You'll probably need root access to install this on your server, but Google is working with GoDaddy to bring this to shared hosting customers. Hopefully, other hosts will follow. Google is also working with CDN provider Contendo to bring mod_pagespeed to its service. If you use WordPress and want to implement some of these fixes without root access, you can try the W3 Total Cache plugin (which is still in pre-1.0 release).

Dunbar's Number, the theory that most people can maintain at most 150 stable interpersonal relationships, faces an unusual challenge in the time of social media. You may have more people than that add you as a follower on Twitter every month, week or maybe, every day. Half or more are robots, spammers or robot spammers.

What do you do when someone starts following you on Twitter? Do you follow them back? Let's say you'd like the people you follow to follow you back - how are these decisions made? Egyptian marketing consultant John Antonios has drawn up a useful flow chart explaining his thought process for evaluating new people on Twitter. I thought it was well articulated and could prove useful to other readers, so you can find it below. Yes, if you're comfortable using Twitter already this may not seem terribly novel to you, but please bear with us: I think having these thoughts clearly articulated could be very useful for many people.