"Deficit-worriers portray a future in which we’re impoverished by the need to pay back money we’ve been borrowing. They see America as being like a family that took out too large a mortgage, and will have a hard time making the monthly payments.

This is, however, a really bad analogy in at least two ways."

"Paragraphs, headings, blockquotes, articles, ordered and unordered lists, and so on, all emerged from age-old ways of working with text. Now new cowpaths are being paved on the web itself, and we need the people who love the text the most to get involved in where we go. We need you."

"More importantly, advocacy is one of the ways in which a publisher remains relevant in a world where the only obstacles to publishing are a reasonably fast internet connection and skill with a keyboard. By filtering and developing the best content—with an eye to how it benefits your readers—a publisher can simultaneously spread ideas both within and without a community. You can strengthen your readers’ ties with one another, and improve their lot in the rest of the world all at once. Think about that, and you can begin to see a much more compelling vision of the publisher of the future: not a gateway, but a representative."

In the context of professional journalism, this amounts to asking what unanswered questions are most pressing to the community served by a newsroom. One could devise systems of asking the audience (like Quora and StackExchange) or analyze search logs (ala Demand Media.) That newsrooms don’t frequently do these things is, I think, an artifact of industrial history — and an unfilled niche in the current ecosystem. Search engines know where the gaps between supply and demand lie, but they’re not in the business of researching new answers. Newsrooms can produce the supply, but they don’t have an understanding of the demand. Today, these two sides of the industry do not work together to close this loop. Some symbiotic hybrid of Google and The Associated Press might be an uncannily good system for answering civic questions.

Solid summary with some interface feedback about Twitter for iOS.

Solid description of the challenges facing news organizations.

"It often costs more, but I’ve found it to be the most worthwhile investment you can make. There’s nothing better for your work and your life than a quiet, focused mind."

Fantastic look at how the American military and government assigns color to objects.

Great advice about how and what to open source.

"This is why I say priorities can only be observed. In my book, a priority is not simply a good idea; it’s a condition of reality that, when observed, causes you to reject every other thing in the universe — real, imagined, or prospective — in order to ensure that things related to the priority stay alive."

Facebook's tactics are the same as other sites which browser makers mark as malware. Time to mark Facebook as such.

"I expected a lot of things when I started traveling, and most of them ended up being accurate. One thing which I didn’t expect, or plan for in any capacity, was just how drastically my general outlook on the world would change following the removal of material possessions. I don’t know why I didn’t expect it, really, cause it’s something that’s written about frequently. Prior to departure I’d absorbed countless articles discussing the sense of freedom from giving up all one owns. But I’ve never really been that attached to “stuff” – and I had no reservations about giving up mine – so I didn’t really see it as a big deal.

The shift in perspective doesn’t really have much to do with the things you own owning you, as such. It’s a state of mind. Whilst living a “normal” life, even as a relatively non-materialistic person, I was always thinking about the next “thing” to buy, or pay for, or do. I had absolutely no appreciation for how much time my mind spent locked into this rut of: earn money, buy something, do cool things with it, earn a bit more money, buy another thing."

"Man-machine symbiosis isn’t just about knowledge retrieval, it’s also about knowledge creation. Our computers have no intelligence without us, but they accelerate our collective intelligence at a speed that has never been seen before."

Good summary piece about the lobbyist-driven changes to the school lunch program.

Great post about the benefits and downsides to working from home.

Cool ideas from Mark Cuban about how the financial industry can change.

"But by imitating the best journalism of yesterday without a full understanding of why that journalism was great and what made it so powerful, our industry is slowly amassing an unsettling amount of cargo cult behaviors: we’re imitating a 20th-century writing style and ethical code without the first idea about how these contribute to journalism that is informative, engaging and fair."

Rands shares some tips for making your presentations the best they can be.

Anil Dash shares his views on creating a large research university in New York.

Fantastic test to gauge how healthy your company and team are.

"The antidote is people. It’s not the physical infrastructure of Silicon Valley that makes it work, or the weather, or anything like that. Those helped get it started, but now that the reaction is self-sustaining what drives it is the people."

Rands writes about the different types of conferences. It's always about the people.

David Carr at the New York Times questions the future of WikiLeaks.

The Times doesn’t have an exclusive on intellect. Their readers have quite a bit of it, and can get the information they want even if the Times doesn’t want to provide it. The Times is on much more precarious ground than internet leaking is.

Cool notes from Carlos about what he's working on at the Union Bulletin.

Jeff Atwood explains the motivation behind game elements in the Stack Exchange model.

Shawn Blanc's observations about what's new and what that means in iOS 5.

"If I’m not paying for the product, I am the product. As is true for many free services on the web today, I have no contractual relationship with IFTTT. I pay for the service it provides by surrendering access to my data. OAuth helps me negotiate how much access, but if I give up none then IFTTT is powerless."

"So the next time you’re tempted to write off the latest hot company: Instagram, Pintrest, Tumblr, Spotify, AirBnB, or whatever – in stead of being envious or dismissive be “dissecting.” Find out what you think in their product is working and what you don’t think matters. Understand why they’re getting user adoption and what you could learn from that."

Fantastic Portland-based maker of furniture and other things.

"The journalism of makers aligns itself with the tiny hotbeds of knowledge and practice where great things emerge, the nascent communities of change. Its aim is a deep understanding of the complex systems of the real world, so that plans for a better world may constructed one piece at a time by people who really know what they’re talking about. It never takes itself too seriously, because it knows that play is necessary for exploration and that a better understanding will come along tomorrow. It serves the talent pools that give rise to our future civic planners, economists, judges, scientists, and leaders — regardless of where in society these people may be found, and whether or not they are already within existing systems of power."

"Learning management systems, authoring tools, and personal learning environments don’t quite get the “it’s the platform, stupid” aspect of the internet. Most of the tools we have available today in education allow us to create content within a system. What a platform enables is very different; it enables the extension of a system."

"There are so many productivity tools and philosophies out there, but it ultimately comes down to our own inner compass and ability to stay on track with whatever we are doing. And the key to that is the ability to be aware."

A tour through the early years of the rap industry.

What will happen to large, incumbent brands as they struggle with finding software engineers to solve their most critical problems.

" I’ve heard people say that it’s embarassing that it wasn’t a newspaper that invented Craigslist. I disagree. If we had, Craig Newmark still would have kicked our ass and still would have stolen our classifieds. Again: if you bundle things, prepare to get unbundled."

Solid exploration of the challenges facing authors and publishers.

"One decline-believer, Jonathan Schooler “recommends the establishment of an open-source database, in which researchers are required to outline their planned investigations and document all their results.” In other words, state what the experiment is before hand, and then publish the results no matter what. Most results will be negative, which may mean that any positive result will be more durable, more robust to future experiments."

"Yet we are terrified that in the digital age, people are constantly distracted. That they’re shallower, lazier, more dazzled. If they are, then the text is not speaking clearly enough. We are not speaking clearly enough. Like over-stuffed attendees at a dull banquet, the mind wanders. We are terrified that people are dumbing down, and so we provide them with ever dumber entertainment. We sell them ever greater distractions, hoping to dazzle them further."

It's the compromises that make a product great.

"And so, companies want their customers to tell their friends about the product. But try as you may, you can’t force people to talk about your product, which means that the next best thing is to try and get people to at least use it."

Fascinating profile of the months leading up to Che's death.

Really great article about the challenges and approaches to learning code.

Really great piece about the structure of news.

"But now I write code with the absolute certain knowledge that it will end up in somebody else’s hands. I could be wrong, yes, but I’ve learned that it helps me write better and more-maintainable code if I just assume from the start that somebody else, most likely a friend, will end up working on that code base."

"I’m not against having a touchscreen on an ebook reader. Tapping on a book to open it makes perfect sense, even if it does mean that the screen gets dirty. But having a touchscreen doesn’t preclude you from also adding a hardware button that makes the one single thing people do the most often with your device as easy and seamless as possible."

Fantastic article on the downsides to not getting enough sleep.

Cool article about journalist flocking to Twitter while being so hesitant about blogging.

Interesting experiment around a news cafe.

Perhaps one monitor is all you really need.

Terrific essay about good customer service.

An intro into the basics of Finland schooling.

Great insight into an off-site by Rands.

Some solid questioning of the New Yorker article about the Osama raid.

"Noticing is important, but what’s more important is sharing what one observes to define the edges of the experiences we share. This overlap bonds us, and the best part of paying attention is that it reminds us that we are occupying the same space at the same time as others. We are a part of the world, even in those in-between spaces.

All that’s required is to stop for a moment."

Interesting background on the election of Pirate Party candidates in Germany.

A breakdown of the actions and gestures surrounding news.

What happens when a 9.0 earthquake hits off the northwest coast.

Fantastic thoughts on firing an executive.

A fantastic guide company offering tours through North Korea. Pretty reasonable prices as well.

"Do I want to save my favorite indie bookstores? Indeed I do. Should we save them (must we save them)? I throw that question to the ether."

"When are universities going to give us a major like that, one that teaches us about the role information has in our society and that enables us to handle bucketloads of data responsibly, using whatever mix of disciplines may help us in that quest? Philosophers with those skills are philosophers the world could use. Instead, we’re churning out experts in Kantian phenomenology and grue and bleen."

"I side with the makers, the creators, and the inventors, and it’s about time that the pack of clamoring would-be politicians be put on the defensive for attacking the values of those of us on this side."

Jason Fried writes about how 37signals manages conflict.

Vignette about leaving Kicrosoft Word for better tools.

"I tell myself that it’s not possible, anyway, to shelve the advance of technology, and that history is filled with examples of beautiful things being supplanted by more efficient versions of those things. Ultimately, you’re never going to win an argument against convenience, no matter how much you love the anachronistic, heavy, unwieldy, and beautiful thing you want to save."

Fascinating feature story from the New Yorker

A quick explanation as to the why of Markdown.

An intriguing peak inside the most wealthy percentage of the population.

Densely packed urban cores lead to less traffic fatalities, lower rates of foreclosure and are generally safer.

Really fantastic looking clothing and watch catalog site.

"The greatest things you make and do are the ones that get your full attention. It’s helpful to take an inventory of what you’re doing and then ask yourself where you’re spending your best attention. You can fill your time, but you have to spend your attention. How you spend it is probably a better measure of priority than anything else."

A story of what happens when you denounce the sitting president of the United States 4 days into a war.

Terrific interview with Jimmy Carter about his presidency and what he's done since then.

"Our problem is not that we don't have enough stuff -- it's that we don't have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff."

"Our current system of teaching kids to sit in straight rows and obey instructions isn't a coincidence--it was an investment in our economic future. The plan: trade short-term child labor wages for longer-term productivity by giving kids a head start in doing what they're told.

Large-scale education was never about teaching kids or creating scholars. It was invented to churn out adults who worked well within the system."

"The current surface forms for digital books are far from perfect, but they work and are getting better with each device and software iteration. So, in my opinion, many of the critical future questions digital books designers will have to address don’t directly involve pure content layout. Future-book design is not merely about font sizes and leading. Instead, our hardest (and possibly most rewarding) problems will involve the intermingling of content and data."

"In short, by blogging the right things, and connecting the links together when a conversation gets going, we can really make things happen. That's still exciting."

"The future of simplicity and usability in technology means connectedness. It means hardware devices that don’t operate as silos independent of our documents and media and communication channels. But that future is now upon us. Apple’s version has always been the most delightful, but now it is one of the more affordable offerings as well."

"Tablets are not only a massive shift because of low-CPU powered computing and touch interfaces. They are shifting the balance of power back to the user.

Tablets are giving the user a viable choice for how they want to view any given set of data the screen will show. Tablets are actually more malleable to the task at hand."