I have followed the discussion around curation on twitter for a couple of weeks, and the volume has been manageable, but in the last two days the volume of traffic on twitter about curation has been huge. I checked out topsy, and it confirmed my suspicion that curation has seen a huge surge in traffic in the last two days. Probably due to these couple of stories all coming out at the same time. The volume may not stay here forever but curation tools are coming out at a scary pace. I hopefully have some more research to publish here about curation soon. - Twitter Curation Grows Up: Storify Becomes Blog & SEO Friendly - Feast Your Eyes On Recipe Curation Site Gojee - Percolate: The Microblogging Platform Where Tumblr And Twitter Go To Hang Out

I use google reader and I use have a google alert for my name. Most of the time I learn a lot about a high school basketball player in kentucky, ie not me, Today though I was alerted about a story I shared in may, about Childish Gambino, but instead of it being a google reader share it was a google+ share. I don’t mind that my google reader stuff is on google plus, but I am sure that some people might be concerned that that didn’t purposefully choose to share things like google reader on google+.

I am going to leave the breakdown of weighty subjects to other people, and hopefully I am biting off a small chunk of this pie, but I want to try my hand at figuring out why something is so good. I am going to start with blogs as a whole. I have become entranced by blogs in the last few years, they have seriously started to become important voices in their own right. They aren’t deriving their awesomeness from any other medium, they are bloggers through and through. At least the blogs that I love to read. The blog that has come to define blogging for me is The Awl. The Awl was created by Choire Sicha, and in there own words they were created to “encourage a daily discussion of the issues of the day—news, politics, culture (and TV!)—during sensible hours of the working week.” (source Yesterday I saw the title of a a post of there’s, it was titled “Hurley Killed Rosie Larsen”. When I clicked through I found this. First for context. This is a blog post playing on a recent TV show called The Killing. The Killing was really good a building suspense, just like another infamous TV show Lost, and just like Lost they built the entire season up, and then didn’t give satisfactory answers, I still think it’s a good TV show, and I think anyone else who likes TV would think it’s a good TV show as well. If we look at who The Awl is trying to serve you can see already they are hitting their core market TV enthusiasts. Which I am one of so already one big hash mark on the big board. The more subtle reason that this blog post is awesome, this very small blog post, is indicative of the medium that its written in. Blogs have this ability to cary on a relationship with the reader like nothing before. Maybe it’s a time and place kind of thing, but I think it’s different. Blog’s, good blog’s at least, are built on people, and tone. You the reader come to expect a certain ebb, and flow from a blog. Not only can you fall in love with tone, but blogs can last for years. Who knows now long blogs will last for, can you imagine seeing the tag line ‘worlds oldest blog’, but The Awl has been going on since 2009. Other blogs I read have been going on longer. So, on a multi-daily basis I am getting updates from a real person. There ideas a permeating my life. Finally, thing that makes my stomach turn, in a good way, like this in a life changing way, is that it made me laugh out loud, it literally made me LOL. I can’t imagine reading something in a newspaper like this blog post. It’s more like a friend who had a really good one liner, and he said it at a party. This the most amazing part, blogs are broadcast. Somehow blogs have figured out how to cross the broadcast/personal barrier. This wasn’t the first time I felt The Awl was just killing it, and I realize that the main reason that I think The Awl is so good is because I like the Awl, but that I think is the trick here. This one post only makes sense if you have a long-standing relationship with the blog. This personalization of broadcast mediums is what makes The Awl, and this one post so good.

Okay, so it’s not so much blog critique, but it’s good critique of writing. I asked about blog critique a couple weeks ago. The question was prompted by Alexis Madrigal, and guess what he has answered his own question. Here is his critique of a Truman Capote article. It’s not a blog post, but this is what I am talking about. He is looking at a technique used by a writer to engage the reader. I don’t know why this has been missing from my education, but these kinds of breakdowns are how I learned how to program better. We need more of these, maybe I should try my hand at one.

Invisible Inkling | Ryan Sholin on the future of news. And other stuff. Social Memories: an Infographic Book of your Facebook Activity: Your very own Feltron report, if you don’t mind that it’s limited to all the information it can get from your Facebook account. Workshop: Advanced WordPress with NYU’s Studio20: Daniel Bachhuber’s notes from a workshop with Jay Rosen’s students.

shaver » because no respectable MBA programme would admit me I read (and talk) a lot about various “management topics”. I’ve been doing this since long before I managed anything more significant than my own clothing choices, because part of my brain was swollen in a childhood bicycle accident; it deprives other parts of my brain of blood and nutrients, explaining in part why I know a lot about how decision-making processes can fall apart, but usually can’t remember to have lunch.

Crowdsourced document analysis and MP expenses As you may have heard, the UK government released a fresh batch of MP expenses documents a week ago on Thursday. I spent that week working with a small team at Guardian HQ to prepare for the release.

Unlearning | Derek Sivers When I would speak on panels at music conferences, I’d always find it funny how all of the panelists’ opinions were completely tainted by their own self-interest. Someone would always ask us, “What’s the future of the music business?” The guy whose company sells MP3s would say, “MP3s are the future.

The Customer Development Manifesto: Reasons for the Revolution (part 1) « Steve Blank This post makes more sense if you read the previous post - The Leading Cause of Startup Death: The Product Development Diagram. After 20 years of working in startups, I decided to take a step back and look at the product development model I had been following and see why it usually failed to provide useful guidance in activities outside the building - sales, marketing and business development.

Last year I wrote a post about how having two kids in two years focused my work. I still think this is true, and today I read a post by Aaron Mahnke about almost the same topic. > My 60-90 minutes of write time needs to be the most productive, most > efficient time I can manage. But because it comes at the end of the > day, my ability to retain fine details is rapidly deteriorating. Add > in a finger or two of whiskey, and it’s a miracle that I get anything > written at all.

Wireframing My Fiction is about how Aaron focuses the small amount of time he has each day to focus on personal projects. I feel like we both have the same idea with slightly different frames. > So I have developed a technique over time that I like to call > wireframing. If you are familiar with the process most web developers > use for the creation of websites, then my process will feel familiar. > Wireframing is all about putting the bare essentials on paper to gain > a complete picture of the website, but without all the decorative and > functional elements. It’s the skeleton that will be built upon, like > that wire figure in your college art class that you would have to mash > clay onto in some vain attempt to build a human body.

I don’t write fiction. I write blog posts, and make websites. My ideas usually come to me in the weirdest places, so I write them down in simplenote the best I can, and then I put the idea like on the wall in my head. I will then continue to think about it until I can’t think about it anymore. Then it others spews into a post, or into some code, and I’m done. Keeping the notes is key. Without them I would forget some of the finer points of my thoughts.

To Work Better, Try Working Less It was 4 p.m. on a recent Friday-a time of the week when I usually relax and leave the rest of my to-do list to finish over the weekend. But as this recent weekend approached, I kept pushing myself, heart pumping, to get to the bottom of my list of planned tasks for the week. The ReportingOn Blog In 2008, I was awarded a Knight News Challenge grant to build ReportingOn, a backchannel for beat reporters to share ideas, information, and sources. The goal of the project was to provide journalists of all stripes with a place to talk about content, not craft, or process, or skillset. Slammer - Designer’s Geometry Box Slammer overlays any grid you want, anywhere you want. Typographic Grids, Golden Sections, Fibonacci series or Rule of Thirds. Slammer also has Rulers, Crosshairs, Magnifier, Measurements & Screenshots. Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store > Robin Sloan Thanks to Mor­BCN for the CC-licensed source image. This story is also avail­able on the Kin­dle! And if you like it, you should also check out my novella Annabel Scheme. IT’S 2:02 A.M. ON A COLD SUMMER NIGHT. I’m sit­ting in a book store next to a strip club.

Eleven Things I’d Do If I Ran a News Organization UPDATED You may have noticed – you could hardly miss it – the current blizzard of one-year anniversary stories about the fall of Lehman Brothers, an event that helped spark last fall’s financial meltdown. The coverage mainly reminds me that journalists failed to do their jobs before last fall’s crisis emerged, and have continued to fail si …

Risk Mismanagement Mon Apr. 19, 2010 3:00 AM PDT About a decade ago, Miguel Torres planted 104 hectares of pinot noir grapes in the Spanish Pyrenees, 3,300 feet above sea level. It’s cold up there and not much good for grapes-at least not these days.

The Myth of Campaign Finance Reform > Publications > National Affairs FROM ISSUE NUMBER 2 \~ WINTER 2010 GO TO TABLE OF CONTENTS March 24, 2009, may go down as a turning point in the history of the campaign-finance reform debate in America. On that day, in the course of oral argument before the Supreme Court in the case of Citizens United v.

Hacker News | Ask HN: Who are the top UI designers on the web today? “When you’re forced to be simple, you’re forced to face the real problem. When you can’t deliver ornament, you have to deliver substance.” – PG http://www.metalabdesign.com/about-us/ is full of “cake decoration”. Other than that it is nice work. I’m not sure what you’re getting at here.

joshua’s blog: blogging tools I haven’t really written anything for this blog in a while. There are a variety of reasons for this, but I’m generally pretty sensitive to my tools, and I haven’t been thrilled with either what I am currently using or what I might use in the future.

kickingbear» Blog Archive » Software Sea Change Over the week covering this past Christmas Day a piece of software I had contributed to was downloaded two million times. I’ve been writing Pop Software for my entire professional career.

+1 for knowing your history - Laughing Meme “+1″ is a convention that arose on the Apache Software Foundation mailing lists. The ASF still has the best, most functional process for mailing list based collaboration which has ever been evolved of which -1/0/+1 is only the thin wedge.

Why You Learn More Effectively by Writing Than Typing Patrick E. McLean’s defense of writing longhand is a poetic dissertation on the subject; words can rush out in their raw, feral state when the pen is your tool. Technology, meanwhile, can be too distracting and distancing.

Who are you, really? The value of incorrect response in challenge-response style authentication. « Hype Cycles Service providers (electricity, cable, wireless phone, POTS telephone, newspaper, banks, credit card companies) are regularly faced with the challenge of identifying and validating the identity of the individual who has called customer service. They have come up with elaborate schemes involving the last four digits of your social security number, your mailing address, your mother’s maiden name, your date of birth and so on.

Dabblers and Blowhards About two years ago, the Lisp programmer and dot-com millionaire Paul Graham wrote an essay entitled Hackers and Painters, in which he argues that his approach to computer programming is better described by analogies to the visual arts than by the phrase “computer science”. When this essay came out, I was working as a computer programmer, and since I had also spent a few years as a full-time oil painter, everybody who read the article and knew me sent along the hyperlink. I didn’t particularly enjoy the essay — I thought the overall tone was glib, and I found the parallel to painting unconvincing — but it didn’t seem like anything worth getting worked up about. Just another programmer writing about what made him tick.

Citizen Journalism Expert Jay Rosen Answers Your Questions - Slashdot We posted Jay Rosen’s Call for Questions on September 25. Here are his answers, into which he’s obviously put plenty of time and thought. This is a “must read” for anyone interested in the growing “citizen journalism” movement either as a writer/editor or as an audience member – and please note tha…

A Simulation of Angel Investing In angel investing, it’s the extreme distribution of payoffs that keeps things interesting. If anything, it resembles buying a deep out-of-the-money call option, but with nonlinearity. If you win big you might find yourself in on the ground floor of the next Google or Facebook. That’s incredibly unlikely, but still possible.