Month: August 2012

Not sure when they launched but the topic pages that Evening Edition added are interesting. Syria’s one example I dug up. They seek to answer three questions: What’s happening? Why you should know about this? and What now?

At the bottom there’s then a list of related stories sorted chronologically. Cool to see some real-world experimentation with explainers. It’s probably a lot of editorial work to craft those summaries but the payoff is worth it, I think.

App.net just added annotations to its API. Opens up a lot of doors for some pretty killer client application uses.

I think I might use App.net primarily and push those posts to Twitter once there’s a good iOS client that’s released. There are a few out there now in-development but they’re in closed betas.

California’s clever opt-out retirement idea. Neat proposal in-progress in California’s legislature. Pretty sure there’s no way that becomes law but it would be interesting if it did.

Ilya Lichtenstein on the Fear of Money:

Their fear is justified, because the second you start charging for a product, all of the bubbly bullshit falls away. The market is cold, rational, and effective. It doesn’t care about your lean startup methods, your rockstar team, or your fawning tech press. All of your assumptions, vision, business plans and pitches are irrelevant.

You’ve either built something worth paying money for, or you haven’t.

There’s a Lift for that. I’m excited to see Lift launch today. I’ve been using the beta for a couple weeks now and it’s really fantastic. The social features are neat, but the key is having a simple way to be mindful about taking daily action toward a goal.

Brazil 9000, these guys are insane in the very best of ways:

In early September 2012 we (Aaron and Gareth) will return to Brazil and attempt to become the first people ever to complete a voyage from the country’s most northern point at Caburaí, to its southern extreme at Chuí, covering a distance of over 9000km (5500miles) by foot, paddle and pedal.

Status

I finally picked up a new pair of running shoes and am giving a barefoot pair a shot. Went with the Merrell Trail Glove. First run this afternoon in them was great. Related protip, don’t go 14 months between running shoe purchases.

Hiking on Mt. Hood

I spent this weekend at a cabin outside of Welches, OR near Mt. Hood. We headed out there Friday afternoon and stuck around through Sunday afternoon. Saturday and Sunday were hiking-filled days.

On Saturday we headed out Lolo Pass Road and hiked toward McNeil Point. The weather was flat out amazing. Blue skies, warm temperatures, and no wind. Perfect. On Sunday we took a far more well-traveled route out to Mirror Lake. (more…)

Stijn Debrouwere on the (mis)use of metrics:

Instead of thinking about metrics, think about projects and goals.

Good way of phrasing that.

Professors without borders. Interesting overview of mass, distributed, web-based teaching tools. Things like Coursera and Udacity are neat but they’re really just an alpha. They take the same model of education as traditional colleges and shift it online. The revolution will come when someone sets the goal of building a web-native tool for learning. Then it will get interesting.