Month: January 2011

Recession and homelessness: Et in Arcadia ego. Unemployment and poverty rates are rising the fastest in some unlikely places. It’s no longer cities like Detroit that are facing the largest jumps in unemployment.

Status

Really been enjoying Milkman recently. Nothing like good mashups to power through a Monday. (h/t to Daniel for motivating me to post statuses here now that I’ve gone silent on Twitter.)

Back to the Future. Peter Thiel believes education is the next bubble to pop and that college serves as a way to defer thinking about your life.

Science Proves You’re Stupid. Terrific article about the human brain. Wonderful little nuggets like “The feeling of knowing is just that, a sensation.”

Seven ways to think like the web. Jon Udell writes about principles people apply when working well together online. Filled with links to related posts as well.

On standardized post formats. Andrew Nacin details core reasons behind the post format support coming in WordPress 3.1. It’s a pretty sweet feature and part of why this site is running Release Candidate 3.

Heavy Analytics for BuddyPress. Pretty cool looking plugin in development to display detailed stats about users in a WordPress multi-site installation. Hat tip to Stephane Daury.

LongReply – When you care more than 140 characters. Interesting tool MailChimp has developed for custom support via Twitter. The keyword analysis and hourly email summaries look nifty.

Question

Why doesn’t every news organization include a help section for new users? If I’m unfamiliar with reading news online where do I go to learn about the information a publication offers as well as how to make the most of it?

A corollary to this is that at some point we’re going to have to stop assuming people intuitively understand how to consume journalistic content. We must build structures that encourage our users to explore and play.

Cavaliers At Nets? Priceless (Almost). Want to treat 21 friends to an NBA game? Tonight’s game between the Cleveland Cavaliers and New Jersey Nets would have set you back a whole $2.42…for 22 tickets! (via Dave Winer)