The Next Big Thingd? Thingd (Thing Daemon) is building a structured database of every object in the world and then mapping those objects (and associated metadata) to people and to other objects. The concept is still in its early stages of being realized, but it is a big ambitious idea and one worth thinking more about.

The Read & Trust Story In January I launched a little side project of mine called Read & Trust. If you’re reading this on my site (as opposed to Instapaper or RSS), you might have noticed the badge off to the right and wondered what the story was. And I’m happy to oblige.

Getting beyond just pageviews: Philly.com’s seven-part equation for measuring online engagement As web analytics reports become a mainstay of news meetings, there’s a lot of nervousness about how attention to clicks will affect news coverage, and about the perceived incentives to produce high-trafficking junk news.

Haystack Blog » FeedMe: Understanding and Supporting Social Link Sharing on the Web Which approach do you take to managing information overload on the web? Do you unleash the firehose on yourself, subscribing to RSS feeds or relying on content aggregators to keep up with the news? Or do you take small sips from the stream of content, regularly checking a small set of websites to look for updates?

You know critique is a major part of any medium. Twitter is getting some meta critique love, but I can’t think of any awesome blog critique. I know things that I love, and I can start to break them down, but I am nowhere near as good as one would need to be to breakdown great writing, let along blog writing. The reason I started thinking about this was a tweet. http://twitter.com/#!/alexismadrigal/status/77076329362763777 If you love longreads, a curated stream of awesome articles on the web, and want to get better at writing your self there doesn’t seem to be a watering hole for those people. So, not sure how to rectify this, but I am going to start paying attention to some of the tweeters that responded to the call. - apantazi suggested gangrey which looks awesome. - New follow: nxthompson - New follow: eugenephoto - New follow: dylan20

Why I Don’t Use Flipboard, but My Dad Does — The Brooks Review — Matthew Ingram on GigaOm had this to say about Flipboard: But I wonder whether the flip-style interface for the app isn’t inherently contradictory to using it as a business or work tool - since it seems more like browsing as you flip through pages, does that make less appealing as a serious content consumption or information-intake tool?

Malcolm Gladwell Is #Wrong: Change Observer: Design Observer — Malcolm Gladwell’s take on social media is like a nun’s likely review of the Kama Sutra — self-righteous and misguided by virtue of voluntary self-exclusion from the subject. But while the nun’s stance reflects adherence to a moral code, Gladwell’s merely discloses a stubborn opinion based on little more than a bystander’s observations.

Curveship: Interactive Fiction + Interactive Narrating — Curveship is an interactive fiction system that provides a world model (of characters, objects, locations, and things that happen) while also modeling the narrative discourse, so that the narration and description of the simulated world can change.

A Smallcore Manifesto: Help Us Build a Better Teddy Bear | Development Seed — The largest underground “movement” in the Drupal community is the desire for a shift in goals, which has been labeled Smallcore. This movement has been rapidly growing among Drupal developers, who instinctively understand the need for and advantages of such an approach, but up until to now there has not been any concrete and constructive communication to the rest of the world about why we feel this approach has merit.

Why We Need Big Organizations - John Hagel III, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison - John Hagel III and John Seely Brown - Harvard Business Review — “Bye, bye, organization guy.” Those words start the first chapter in the estimable Daniel Pink’s Free Agent Nation, published in 2007. In that book, Pink observed how increasing numbers of people in the US are choosing to work as independent contractors, temps, and on a project-to-project basis.

Doc Searls Weblog · Building better markets. Not just better marketing. — The comment thread in my last post was lengthened by Seth Finkelstein‘s characterization of me as “basically a PR person”. I didn’t like that, and a helpful back-and-forth between the two of us (and others) followed. In the midst of the exchange I said I would unpack some of my points in a fresh post rather than branch off in the comment thread.

Bookfuturism | mapping the future of reading — All signs suggest punctuation is in flux. In particular, our signs that mark grammatical (and sometimes semantic) distinctions are waning, while those denoting tone and voice are waxing. Furthermore, signs with a slim graphical profile (the apostrophe and comma, especially) are having a rough go of it.

bpython interpreter — bpython is a fancy interface to the Python interpreter for Unix-like operating systems (I hear it works fine on OS X). It is released under the MIT License. It has the following features: For more, see our about-page or just skip right to the screenshots.

Continuing with my instapaper bankruptcy.

Talking with Eric Frank and Jon Williams about Flat World Knowledge, a commercial publisher of open textbooks « Jon Udell — My guests for this week’s Innovators show are the co-founder (Eric Frank) and CTO (Jon Williams) of Flat World Knowledge, a new textbook publishing company with a refreshingly disruptive business model. Like any other textbook publishing company, Flat World is building up a stable of authors with whom it has exclusive (or, in this case, semi-exclusive) relationships.

The new oral tradition « Jon Udell — Nowadays when people ask if I’ve read a book and I start to answer yes, I have to stop and think. Did I actually read the book? Or did I only hear the author discuss the book on a podcast?

Getting unicode right in Python - Nick’s Blog — Yup, I’m back from holidays! Apologies to everyone for the delayed return - it’s taking me a long while to catch up on everything that built up while I was away.

Social Journalism: Curate the Real-Time Web — I really want to know more about the publish2 platform, but you can’t really get in there unless you are a journalist. I think these guys are creating a lot of awesome tools, but its like feeling someone’s face in the dark.

I have way to many articles sitting in my too blog folder of instapaper. I am coping out and will just be posting large chunks of the list over the next few days. This is almost a year’s worth of reading. As I can remember, I will try to say why I thought it was worth blogging about.

Platforms as Tables, Tables as Platforms I am not entirely sure who Frank Chimero is, or even what he does, but when ever this dude sits down to write something I will stop, and read it. He just always has something useful to say.

CommonJS effort sets JavaScript on path for world domination This has been a big year for JavaScript. New, fast engines have tested their legs. Libraries have matured. With the ECMAScript 5 draft proposal, the language is growing. However, the language remains largely in exile, to only be used in Web browsers. This year has marked a resurgence of efforts to make JavaScript useful outside the browser.

Drupal or Django? A Guide for Decision Makers — scot hacker’s foobar blog - There’s a large body of technical information out there about content management systems and frameworks, but not much written specifically for decision-makers. Programmers will always have preferences, but it’s the product managers and supervisors of the world who often make the final decision about what platform on which to deploy a sophisticated site.

Inkling Prediction Market Solutions: News + Musings: 5 Whys Didn’t realize someone (Toyota) codified a technique like this. Inkling is a huge fan of spending the extra steps in root cause analysis of a problem. It’s hard to argue when you wouldn’t want to at least figure out what the root cause of a problem is, even if you decide to just treat a symptom.

Due to a nudge from a conference goer I created a screen cast of my talk. If your on a phone you can just click here http://vid.ly/5e3s2j(It’s mobile friendly).

Curators have a problem; we steal content. I know we don’t like to put it that way. It’s always nicer to think that we point people in the right place, or we frame content in a new light, but at the end of the day we don’t create anything that could be considered a primary source.While it’s not evil, or harmful it leads us to the biggest problem with curation, and content in general in the coming future: who’s going to create the content.

Who is going to create the content that I am going to curate. I never thought about asking that question until recently. Curation has always been a passing interest of mine even if I didn’t always know what to call it. Curation as a subject has grown in importance to me though. I try to read anything worthwhile that I can get my hands on to get my head in the game. That is how I ran across Curation Nation.

Curation Nation is a book about how curation has come out of nowhere to touch a million different fields. The book can find a way to turn almost any job into a job that requires some form of curation. The book really is a great one stop shop for a bird’s eye view at curation. I wouldn’t say that it has anything in it that you couldn’t figure out by reading bit’s and pieces on the web. In fact, the author, states many times that much of the book is based on interviews that he tapped, and then had transcribed. I would almost rather have access to those interviews then this the book. It seems to me almost a travesty of curation to not make them available.

Anyway, this book is kind of the beginning of a long curation ark. Before I even knew what curation was, or more pointedly before I thought curation applied to me, I was reading great stuff. The reason I had great stuff to read was due to curators. One of my favorites is Jason Kottke. Some how, meaning he spent almost a decade, unpaid, learning how to find good stuff online, he always found the best shit online, the shit that everyone was going to be talking about. For many this is where the train stops. Good stuff from Kottke, and I am done. I wanted more. I wanted to know where he got his stuff from. I wanted to be on the other side of his filter.

This is when you start to wade through the shit. The awesome curators, that get to you exactly what you wanted know, could also be called shit shovelers. I say shit, because you have to get through gobs of shit to get to the good stuff. I look fondly upon the shit, because every so often you find really good shit. If you want to be a curator you have to become a good shit shoveler. Okay enough shit, we can just call it crap. There are two kinds of crap behind the filter.

Crap makers, and crap content. Crap makers are people who get into content curation to create content farms. Many people out there create niche sites just to get ad revenue. Besides the crappy crap makers, there is just regular crap which is just all the other bit’s of content that you need to get through to find the good stuff. When I first tucked into Curation Nation, I was waiting for the take down. The moment where dude explained all about the crap, but he never did.

Some interviewees sure hated curators, he let there speaking work for him, but it was mostly all smiles about the crap makers. They are just affiliate advertisers in his parlance. This is the same problem I found with many “curation” blogs. They are mostly about marketing, and how to use curation to make money. Cool, awesome, whatever make your money, but that can’t be all that curators talk about. I am struck by the fact that so many of my goals as a curator, are expressed in blogs, and Curation Nation, but whats missing is soul I guess.

I share content on twitter because it made me smile, think for a moment, or even surprised me. I really want to find more people talking about curation because they love something, and less about people trying to figure out how to make more pennies on links.

So, going back to the content question. What does this book, and soul, a curation have to do with making content. Simple, it’s the open question now I think. Some people think curating is stealing, some think it’s unproductive. More still think it’s cool, but were missing a huge point. Journalists are running around waving there hands saying the industry is crashing down around us, and sure they are loosing there jobs, but we aren’t missing the bulk of what the news industry does.

When you look at what makes money in the news world much of it isn’t going away. We are going to have wire services, cable news, the evening news. We are still going to have puppies, and watermelon on the front page of news papers. What we are in trouble of loosing is investigative journalism, or really any attempt that takes months of shoveling shit, the worst kind, to make sure that world is running in an orderly fashion. Clay Shirkey explains this argument better then anyone.

Here we are yelling about the act of sharing information, when the biggest problem we face in the short term is loosing are ability to let the fourth estate do it’s job. Oh, and the book isn’t all that bad. If you need to talk to someone about curation, or get someone on board have them read it. And making money isn’t bad, I don’t want people to stop curating to make money i just want to hear more people talk about curation for the fun of it.

I saw Alexis Madrigal talking about using RSS on twitter today. He mentioned that he felt twitter was better at surfacing things that he wanted to write about then a RSS reader. I know nothing about how he uses a reader, or what he has in it, but I wondered how he was using his reader.

In my opinion, if you setup your reader correctly, it will always be better then twitter. Now, I don’t want to presume what correct is, but I have a system that works for me, and I have found more then one person that does it similarly. Since I have been talking about, talking about RSS, I figured this was a great opportunity to talk about RSS. (my Drupal con presentation) I like to use a triage system. I start by making sure I have my feeds in Google Reader. This is important because so many RSS readers now days use google reader as a sync system. I wish there was another, just so that there was competition, but it’s what we have. If you put everything in google reader you can make sure that all your devices are in sync. If you only use one device for feed reading this may not be as big of a deal for you. Now that everything is in a feed reader, I like to separate my feeds into a priority system. I like to use numbers, because they get sorted correctly as first in most places. I use a 1 - 10 system. 1 has the most important feeds. These feeds are something I can clean out in less then 20 minutes. 20 minutes is key. I have found that if in 20 minutes you can find something that makes you feel like 20 minutes was worthwhile your brain will fire some of those good chemicals, and you will start to create the checking blog habit. The habit is the key to a successful blog reading system. If you miss out on this habit part, blogs are going to feel like a big waste of time. This will invariably lead a no blog reading system. Here is my pro tip about choosing feeds to begin with. This will keep you from screwing up on your first step. Don’t subscribe to the New York Times, or CNN. Stop. Don’t. I mean it. You might think you care about general news, but you don’t. Very few people do. You should start with what you care about, and remember there won’t be anyone looking over your shoulder, so if you like TMZ, read TMZ. What’s great about the triage system is that once you have cleared out your first step you are reading. You won’t wan’t to stop reading. So you will start clearing out your second step. Once you have built the habit, you will find that you will start building out more blogs then you can read in 20 minutes. That is fine, but the second problem you are going to run in too is the it’s to much for me problem. Many people I have talked with feel bad about not reading everything. When they open up their reader, all they can see is a ton of stuff they haven’t read. Don’t do that, don’t feel like that. RSS feeds are a river, getting the good stuff is like fishing. Just create a good net, and let the rest flow by. If it’s important enough you will almost always pick it up in secondary systems like email, and twitter. The last step in the reading system is a read it later service. I use instapaper, but you can using anything you want. The goal is that as you come across something interesting throw it into instapaper, but keep reading your feeds. That is the only way you will read at any higher volume. I realize that if I was a person who was paid to report, I would have to time to follow a thread all the way to the bottom, but I think this is a system that would help most people. PS: here is my current set of feeds in opml format.

I gave a talk at the jQuery conference on sunday. I wanted to create one page were all the information about the talk could live. This is that page. Sources: - Phonegap - Backbone.js - HTML5 rocks offline - gMail Mobile application cache - Six Revisions - web development blog - Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript book - Lawnchair - jquery-offline

Details: - outline - gist of the talk - Slides - full slides with speaker notes