A link to Paul Graham’s Essays was emailed to me by a friend a couple of days ago. I can’t remember the last time that I was so hooked on reading something. I spent all of last night reading about 15 of the essays - they are truly magic stuff.

If you are passionate about the internet, efficiency and starting a company, then these essays are a must read. There is some really fundamental meat and potatoes stuff in there. Just about everything I read slotted perfectly inline with my own thinking and feelings. It was really great to have the thoughts that are buzzing around my head pretty much all day every day totally reinforced by someone who has made it doing the hard yards and doing something he loves.

Paul suggests to select the more difficult choice whenever you come to a decision point in life. Your next difficult decision may well be “Should I read 15 of Paul Graham’s essays or should I just watch TV?”.

Definitely read the essays.

You know that something is spreading or that a new trend has arrived when you discover handy tools for generating commonly needed objects.

I found ajaxload out of the need to get my hands on some nifty ajax-style anim gifs. Check it out.

Well done to designer Kath who created this handy tool.

Last week Scevak and the HomeThinking clan launched sister site www.realestatevoices.com.

The site is a user-controlled list of Real Estate related news snippets. Similar sites in different topic areas have recently surfaced, with Digg being the most prominent.

I love the simplicity and relevance of community-driven content. Users of the site can trust the placement of the content - anything that makes it to the top must be worthy, because a lot of people think so.

But the most important thing to get a community site like this off the ground is to give it a rolling start. I have started thriving community sites in the past. The reality is that people don’t want to find an empty skeleton and be the first person to submit content. You need to create a handful of deliberate helper accounts and fill the site up full of user-submitted goodness. In reality, no community site is thriving with activity from day one. But if potential users think it is, they feel more inclined to contribute to something that already appears to have value or placement.

Once your community site gathers momentum, you will never need to login with those fake starter accounts again!