The Kitchen Sink

After a nearly month-long blogging and twittering hiatus we’re back, fired up about the whole new year of possibilities that lies ahead. What better way to begin than a look at ten Top 10 lists for 2008 and 2009.

The Top 10 Everything of 2008
In a hurry? Read no further and start here with a no-holds-barred survey of the best of the best from Time magazine.

Top 10 Games Of The Year
Everything you want to know about Fallout, the World of Goo, Little Big Planet and more, as channeled by Gamasutra.

Top 10 Bushisms of 2008
“I’ll be long gone before some smart person ever figures out what happened inside this Oval Office.” –Washington, D.C., May 12, 2008  Did he really say that?

10 Best American Movies of All Time
This one looks back farther than the other top-10 lists here but hits many of the high notes. Bring it with you to the video store next time.

Top 10 New Restaurants in New York
Sorry, this only about restaurants in New York and I plan to eat my way through them this year (with July and August off for vacation). Care to join me?

FBI Top 10 Most Wanted
If you see one of these dudes on the street (and they are all dudes) and play your cards right you could retire.

Top 10 Spammers
Talk about the most wanted. Read two of what these people are sending and you’ll be longer lasting, taller, bigger, better, happier. Guaranteed. And if you believe that I have a bridge you’ll be interested in.

Top 10 iPhone Applications
OK, so the iPhone didn’t change the world, but it sure showed us what a phone can do besides making boring old voice calls.

Top 10 Videos of 2008
I don’t have to tell you user created (and non-user created) video is booming. Fortunately the editors at Wired work long hours to help us stay ahead of the curve — and save us countless hours viewing Numa Numa.

Top 10 Shirts to Get Arrested In
Last but not least here are 10 examples of what not to wear in the hoosegow. Rembember, your results may vary and do not practice this without adult supervision.

While waiting for the coffee to brew this morning I glanced at Twitter and the first post on my screen read “Wordpress 2.7 “Coltrane” released…” (props to ijafri for being first on my radar with the news). As the song playing in an endless loop in nearly every store in New York says, “It’s starting to look a lot like Christmas.”

Seriously, references to obnoxious holiday music aside, I’ve been waiting for v2.7 ever since I met the founding developer of WordPress Matthew Mullenweg who tipped his hand to what was in store and I’m excited it’s finally here.

The most obvious change is the redesigned Dashboard, which is almost endlessly customizable to your way of seeing and doing things. In the process, this reduces the number of clicks needed to do anything: post, edit, illustrate, prioritize, upgrade, moderate comments or assassinate comment spam… one click and it’s done right from the Dashboard. Nearly every other screen can also be customized to your liking, too. How cool is that? Here’s a video that shows what I’m talking about:

You can find out more about version 2.7 from Matt’s post on the WordPress.org blog.

If you’re running WordPress give me a shout about upgrading. And if you choose to do it yourself please make a backup of the database and all the files before you go for it. Though WP code has been thoroughly vetted by our global user community some elements of your site, particularly if its older or you haven’t upgraded in a while, may not be fully compatible. We can address these issues pretty easily but it will be a lot less stressful if we’re not working under the influence of a broken site.

I received an email this morning from a friend who paraphrased Monty Python’s Blue Parrot sketch to describe the financial meltdown:

This financial system is no more! It has ceased to be! ‘It’s expired and gone to meet its maker! ‘It’s a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If you hadn’t nailed ‘it to the tax payer’s perch it’d be pushing up the daisies! ‘Its metabolic processes are now ‘istory! ‘It’s off the twig! It’s kicked the bucket, it’s shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir indivisible!! THIS IS AN EX-FINANCIAL SYSTEM!!

It may be an ex-financial system for now but as with all cycles — natural or man-made — I’m confident of a turn-around. Soon I hope, at some point for sure. In that spirit let me turn the paraphrase around and back to the original. Enjoy, happy turkey (or tofurkey) to all and long live the parrot!

R. L. Burnside’s (1926—2005) timeless blues boogie “It’s Bad You Know” was the perfect setup for the adventures of Tony Soprano and his capos. Week by week we knew they were going to be so bad that it would be good, that Burnside would keep setting it up and that Tony seldom failed to deliver.

This morning when I received this reassuring (sic) email from CitiBank all I could think of was Burnside’s song and wish for those good, bad old days:

Good news! Citibank is participating in the FDIC’s Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program. Through December 31, 2009 2008, all of your non-interest and interest bearing checking deposit account balances are fully guaranteed by the FDIC for the entire amount in your account.

So the fact that Citibank is in a temporary liquidity program through the end of December is the good news? Let’s see, that gives me about five weeks to find a solvent financial institution before we have to round up the posse and march on Citibank’s vault.

If that’s good, it’s bad you know. At least we can still enjoy the music:

Click on the image twice for a full size view.

It’s Friday and time for an art attack. Whichever art you practice the act of making art means doing things because they feel right. Not from an intellectual construct, but a flow from idea to expression to idea to expression until you know the thing is done. At least that’s what came to mind when I saw this video (props to Ecks) and the mural (photo above) by the artist Blu. Enjoy the ride.

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

More Blu: http://www.blublu.org/
Even more Blu: http://www.vimeo.com/1958872

You pay local and (mostly) Federal taxes but where does it all go? Maybe you blow a tire on an interstate highway that’s full of potholes and needs fixing, lament the condition of your kid’s school, and shake your head as Dubya’ and his legions continue to divvy up the take to pay for their war agenda. But how much money is that taking off the table that could have been put to less destructive use? Perhaps not the best examples, but putting abstract numbers in perspective is difficult and that’s where Many Eyes and GapMinder come in.

For instance, this illustration showing the relative US Government spending since 2004 starts putting Fed spending in sharp focus. (Hint: the big blue circle is the 1,102 billion spend on the Department of Defense; the smaller circles are everything else.)

This chart (and illustrations from many other data sets) was generated by Many Eyes, a just-out-of-alpha experimental project at IBM. You can enter and chart your own data as well using more than 15 different visual models, like these Wordle charts that Wired used to parse the speeches at the Democratic National Convention.

Not that I’m trying to make a statement about the distorted, nay criminal, priorities of our country’s political leadership (sic). I do, however, gravitate to visualizing data so I can understand what’s going on.

Another source  outstanding data visualization toolset comes from GapMinder, a company that Google acquired last year. Though you can’t make your own charts — yet —  they’ve provided some pretty good examples. Like this interactive chart of real estate prices, sub-prime loans, unemployment and population from 2000 through 2006. If nothing else it paints a pretty picture of some grim numbers and in the process argues even more persuasively for regime change.

If you’ve noticed the right hand column of my site recently you know that sometime around the 4th of July I began tweeting on Twitter. Though I long eschewed it and still find it can be a time-sink, I’m beginning to see a place for microblogging: keeping up with friends; asking questions-to-the-universe that (sometimes) beget worthy answers; and it’s downright entertaining (the mad scientist — or micro novelist? — IngenBio comes to mind).

But now that I’m gettiing my tweet on, MIT Tech Review reports that Identi.ca has written an open source microblogging code base called Laconica that anyone can use. Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water.

Is this too much of a good thing? Will my peops migrate there, forcing me to follow if I want to keep up? Should I be running an instance of Laconica on my server, the way I do Wordpress, to foment my own microblogging network? These were my immediate questions but I realize the bigger meme is that everything on the Internet is mutable, no matter how original, no matter how well done. If you build it they may come, but you can count on someone else building it too. Maybe better. And they’ll try to eat your lunch. How’s an entrepreneur-developer-businessperson to cope?

Just as with bricks-and-morter businesses and tangible products — you know, the old fashioned kind you could touch or hold in your hands — the differentiator has to be design. One obvious example is Apple (a few stumbles notwithstanding) who have built design into the company’s DNA. Arguably Google, paragon of the lean interface, has too. Need some inspiration to get your design on? There are lots of places to turn for inspiration, but the thumb-worn copy of Tom Peter’s modest booklet Design (as modest as anything associated with Tom Peters can be, that is) that’s a fixture on my desk is one of my favorite places to start.

Designing software that could be used by people with differing abilities was a big part of building software for Pearson Education. Working there taught me a lot about Universal Design for Learning and making products accessible, so it’s refreshing to see this meme make its way into a game for the Wii — in this case a design that welcomes the visually impaired. [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/HmEF5LhhQtU" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
The game, called AudiOdyssey, simulates a deejay trying to build up a catchy tune and get people dancing. By swinging the remote-control device used by the Nintendo Wii, which senses motion, the player can set the rhythm and lay down one musical track after another, gradually building up a richer musical track. It was developed by MIT and Singaporean students to make it possible for visually impaired people to play the game on a level field with their sighted friends. Very cool. More info here..

Grockit, a San Francisco startup which raised $2.7m several years ago to seed their game project has taken down an $8m B-round according to Ed Tech Design’s Sari Follansbee, who brought this to my attention today, and the company’s own press release:

Integral Capital Partners lead the $8M round with Benchmark Capital, who lead their Series A, participating as well. Grockit is creating a MMOLG (Massively Multi Player Online Learning Game) where people can connect to learn from each other. The company was founded by Farbood Nivi, a long time teacher, and Michael Buffington, a well known Rails developer. Grockit will use the latest financing to expand their development team and they plan to launch their first product this fall.

Though they’re playing their cards very close to the vest they have disclosed an intention to build a virtual world learning community — what they call as MMOLG or Massive Multiplayer Online Learning Game — and obviously have their investors vote of confidence.

While conceptually this may not be far from Chris Dede’s River City (Harvard) or Sasha Barab’s Quest Atlantis (Indiana University), I suspect that as a commercial enterprise the tech will offer much more robust playability. And unlike these academic efforts, or Nt Etuk’s immersive Dimension, the investors and level of funding suggests Grockit intention is to be a full-on commercial MMOG for the educational market. If they launch in the fall as announced it’ll be a benchmark worth watching.

For more news — though not solid product information — there are posts on Tech Crunch as well as the company’s blog and Twitter feed that you may want to peruse. And if nothing else, they’ve clearly taken a clue from Steve Jobs’ play book whose lock-down in advance of Apple’s product releases is legend.

Social networking used to be so simple, a forum to say or discuss what’s on your mind and meet others who are on the same page. However as more people get on the bandwagon — students, moms, bosses, clients, recruiters, HR departments — the rules are changing and like most rules you ignore them at your peril.

Should you Super Poke a colleague on Facebook or write a blow-by-blow account of Friday night’s pub crawl on their wall? What’s the right way to respond to unkind comments on your blog? Do virtual cards for birthdays and other personal events count or do you have suck up and make a trip the card store and — gasp! — the post office for the occasion?

Even Debretts, Great Britain’s venerable “authority on all matters etiquette, taste and achievement,” has weighed in on etiquette for the social media generation:

1. You don’t have to make friends with people you don’t know. Think before you poke.
2. Wait 24 hours before accepting or removing someone as a friend. The delay will help you gather your thoughts.
3. Birthdays, engagements and weddings are not “virtual” events. Always send cards or phone friends when there is an important event.
4. Think before posting a friend’s photo what you would feel like if it was you.
5. Think carefully about your profile picture. Would you want it to be appearing in your local newspaper?

Blogher.com’s recent post on social media manners polled their readers and came up with more:

1. Be Nice.
2. Be open & honest.
3. Be respectful of the writer and the community.
4. Respect the relationship.
5. Don’t rant -> always be respectful.
6. Social media implies and requires civility.
7. If you wouldn’t say it to someone in person, don’t say it online.
8. Courtesy matters.
9. Remember what your mama taught you: Don’t lie. Don’t cheat. Don’t bully. Play nicely together.

And LifeHack.com has posted a few tips too:

1. Give attention if you want attention.
2. Don’t overwhelm your connections.
3. Be as clear as possible.
4. Keep private information private.
5. Don’t contribute to information overload.
6. Avoid anonymity.

But they’re all seemingly common sense so what’s the big deal? Simple: the Web has a long memory and a lot of people seem to forget that.

So if you’re using a blog or Twitter or Facebook or MySpace or Mebo or countless other sites/services for social, professional or business networking — and who isn’t these days — paying attention to what you say/write/post and how you say or illustrate it can make or break your next deal, contract, job or relationship. Remember: the gig you save may be your own.