(via david)

Okay, cats gotta win.

rickwebb:

Mood: highly productive monkey (via Buster Benson)

Whenever I see these I can’t help but think it’d be a lot easier to use some sort of Xerox’d template. ;)

That’s sort of the point.  I have been so focused on building tools for reporting my mental state that I’ve lost track of what exact things I should really be tracking.  So I took a short tool-building break from it and decided to go super manual so I could change any aspect of the report from day to day if I chose to.  I have added a spirit animal to each profile now and I think I’m gonna stop using the boring “producer”, “consumer”, “tinkerer” profile names.  Animals are a lot more fun to be assigned to, and there’s a system for the animal assignments behind the scenes anyway.  So… long story short, I think I’m going to move this into something else soon.  Actually, I already have but I just haven’t linked to it yet.

birdfeed:

Excited to learn this morning that the Birdfeed app icon is featured prominently on the phone screen in a new iPhone TV ad (and right next to another one of our favorite apps, Locavore, no less)! Thanks again, Apple! (via Sophie Teutschler and Dominik Wagner)

Hey this is pretty neat!  Carinna said she saw it on Comedy Central last night.  That’s perfect for the locavore demographic I think.

tedroden:

I hear a lot of talk about how we’ll consume the news in the future. People say, if it’s important it will find me. While monitoring twitter, facebook, tumblr and other social networks, the big news will just rise to the top and you’ll be certain to know the big stories. I personally know several people who tell me this is pretty much the only way they find news these days.

So while I’ve been in Texas for the past week, with my only lifeline to the Internet via my iPhone, I’ve made it a point to stay away from news sites. I’ve only read twitter and tumblr. I’d like to say that facebook played a part, but I honestly don’t think I’ve checked it the entire time.

Here are my results. I’ve listed three stories below, these aren’t just the top three stories, these are the only three that I can remember seeing while staying away from both mainstream news and newsy blogs.

1. Someone from the Washington Post claimed Gawker ripped him off by posting all of the good bits of his story with minimal credit/linkage. Most people felt like he just didn’t get it. Then some twitter user named nicknotned said “bloggers should chill” and everybody seemed to respect his wishes. Nobody seemed to care what the original article was about.
2. A cultural event of epic proportions happened. This was a colossal event. I saw several weather reports, pictures of bands and pictures of crowds. I only gathered this much of the setlists: Jay-Z opened with No Sleep ‘Til Brooklyn. Also, nobody on the west coast cared about it.
3. Eric Schmidt left the board of Apple. Just by reading twitter, I wasn’t able to figure out why this was a big deal, but I was able to figure out that EVERYONE saw this coming. I’m pretty sure the majority of the tweets or started with the word DUH.

Story of honorable mention: Serendipity is dead on the web, nobody on the internet agrees.

So… what did I miss? Because I won’t have a reliable Internet connection for another 24 hours, you’ll have to tell me via twitter.

This is pretty funny.  It’s true that many of us deal with news in terms of extreme overload and are merely left with managing the LOUDEST news.  Which isn’t the same of course as the most important news.  But, perhaps, the fact that the loudest news is filtered through your social network rather than whatever the television stations think will get the most viewers, this is a tiny step in the right direction.

Ted, the only other thing that happened as far as I know is that a bunch of us heard a rumor that Sarah Palin was getting divorced, and it turned out to be untrue.

See Locavore in there?  Thanks for the free advertising, AT&T!

Why is the “Send to Twitter” checkbox checked automatically when I’m re-blogging a post but not when I’m simply posting from scratch?

sciencevsromance:

rickwebb:

The New York Times > Opinion > Image > Music Sales

Everyone’s posting this graphic; maybe it somehow speaks for itself. But what I think is the most startling is how big the CD slice is right now, even at this headline-grabbing crisis-level current low relative to pretty much anything ever except for its own crazy, “hey, let’s repurchase everything all over again” high.

Also notable is that it accompanies an analysis-light gloom-and-doom article by a guy who says he hasn’t purchased a “truly great CD” since 1999. [nyt]

More than anything else, I just like the format of the graphic.  I haven’t seen this kind of pixelated whale graph before, and it does a really nice job of communicating the information.

I think Tumblr is the only place where I follow a lot of people that I don’t know.  I used to do that in LiveJournal, and then with RSS feeds, but maybe it’s because each new place on the Interweb evolves from a playground into more of a patio and then into a living room as time goes on and friends are made and people are met.

I like the newly updated Tumblr iPhone app dashboard.

superamit:

I frequently come across blogs (maybe once a week) that I find interesting, look for the follow button in the top-right corner, and am disappointed when it’s missing. (And then don’t follow the blog at all.)

I’m sick of Net News Wire and Google Reader. I want to read more things in the Tumblr dashboard.

Here’s the blog I found today. Not followed. Will probably never see again. :(

This is what happens when we outsource our brains too much.  Which, I can totally relate too.  My brain hasn’t had to remember anything for years!

junesix:

Whenever possible, I try to eat foods in season. Trends aside, I think it just makes sense from all standpoints. Seasonal food tastes better, is more nutritious, requires less energy to produce and transport, and forces me to think more consciously about what I eat.

So I’m really excited that Buster McLeod’s Locavore iPhone app is now available. It converts the seasonal eating calendars (vegetables, fruits) I reference into a “What’s fresh now” list. Buster also focused on providing regional information and listings of local markets which, while interesting, is less useful to me. Most people don’t travel more than a few miles to buy produce so I question the actual utility of being able to browse seasonal produce in various US regions. Nevertheless, I’m excited to use the app the next time I’m at the market.

The local market stuff only shows you markets near you, rather than anywhere in the country.  I generally agree that it’s only useful to know the markets near you.  That said, I learned that there are a lot more markets near me than I knew about.

Also, I love the theme of this Tumblr.

enjoysthings:

An enjoysthin.gs user who just launched his own iPhone app wrote to me and asked “What have you found to be the most rewarding ways to engage with users? … Any tips for a person that’s not very good at self-promotion but who simply wants to be a good creator of interesting things?” I emailed him back a response that quickly became an unrelated rant. I don’t know if it’s interesting, but I’d love to hear people’s opinions on some of this stuff. Here’s a slightly modified version of that response:

It’s actually been tough to measure the success of some of the things I’ve done. A lot of the time, I feel like I’m having a one way conversation. I’ll write blog posts, send email, mail stickers and never hear back about anything.  Sometimes they’ll tweet about it or post pics to flickr, but most of the time… nothing.

Although I’d like to see some more responses, I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing. I’ve come to realize that people do appreciate the personal email/postal-mail and things like that, they just don’t always have a cause or avenue to respond. Sure, sometimes people have nothing to say, but I think it’s hard for people to understand that I (more or less a business) am ready and willing to have an actual conversation with them. That I’m not looking for a marketing/sales/biz-dev/sleaze opportunity. For enjoysthin.gs, I want to be better about giving people ‘next steps’ with some of that stuff.

That said, the response has been great. People send email, messages, tweets and write blog posts fairly often saying very nice things and expressing surprise that I’m willing to do things other than sit around and collect money. I can’t single out any one thing, I think it’s the sum of all the parts.

One thing that I think has been important when engaging users has been that I don’t pretend to be a big company. I don’t ever say “we,” it’s always I. This is actually something I’ve received a lot of feedback about. Some people are extremely turned off by it, while others like it. For me, I just want to be honest about it. After all, it is just me.

I recently spoke with some VC people who gave me some “advice” which I promptly tossed in the garbage (along with any business cards exchanged). They said that I needed to say ‘we’ so that I could “seem bigger … like a real company.” I don’t get that at all, but I think it comes down to this: Many people confuse looking like a serious company with being a serious business. I’m firmly in the latter, which is exactly where I want to be.

Fun conversation via email with the maker of enjoysthin.gs in relation to the best way to be a human that builds things that are interesting and which the builder wants to promote without being an asshole. (paraphrased)

alicetiara:

spangley:

…that women have a higher propensity for anxiety? and do you think it’s generational? i feel like way more of my lady friends have anxiety issues (including myself) than in my parent’s generation. or maybe we’re just more willing to talk about it openly.

i feel like it’s more prevalent in our generation though - maybe because we have more pronounced internal & external pressures to be successful, to have a career, a family. to be awesome. to be awesomenly single. to be badasses. but i hardly ever hear my male friends talk about anxiousness. or maybe they just smoke too much pot. (kidding.) (sort of.)

*this break from musical & comical posts brought to you by my anxiety attack at 4:30 am last night/this morning. and overthinking.

I do have a lot of girlfriends with anxiety issues (including myself) and I can’t think of any guys I know. That’s such an interesting point. I do think women have higher pressure to be perfect— I think men worry about being all sorts of other things, but I don’t think they worry about being perfect.

I found http://www.healthywomen.org/healthreport/march2008/pg2.html here that women are 2-3x more likely than men to have an anxiety disorder, but men are more likely to self-medicate with alcohol.

Finally, I think women are socialized to spend lots of time thinking about other people and taking care of others and situations. Which gives us more to worry about. I have rarely met a man who will worry, at a gathering at his house, whether everyone has a drink, is comfortably seated, etc. but I’ve seen women get super hyper tense over the same thing. I think we wannabe-superwomen could use a big dose of male entitlement and, for want of a better word, laziness.

If you two have anxiety issues then so do I.