Hacking and Tracking the Conversation
Andy Baio announced on his blog today that he is joining the web technology think tank Expert Labs, along with Director and blogging forefather Anil Dash and Gina Trapani, former founding-editor of mega-blog LifeHacker.
Baio says the group's goal is "to help government make better decisions about policy by listening to citizens in the places they already are: social networks like Twitter and Facebook."
Trapani built an open source software product called ThinkUp, which collects and analyzes responses to questions posted on social networks. Dash brought it to Washington, partnering with the Obama Administration early this year. Now Baio will hack on ThinkUp, the social media conversation and Washington.
"There's tons to do," he wrote this morning, "but I'm particularly excited to tackle ThinkUp's ability to separate signal from noise, making it easier to derive meaning from hundreds or thousands of responses, using visualization, clustering, sentiment analysis, and robotic hamsters. I'm planning on building some fun hacks on top of ThinkUp, as well as keeping an eye open for other vectors to tackle our core mission."
In making the move, Baio will leave his spot as CTO of the fast-growing and innovative crowdsourced funding platform KickStarter. KickStarter announced last month that more than 250,000 people have now pledged over $20 million to fund home-recorded music projects, independent films and books and many other creative projects, in just 18 months since the site launched. "Kickstarter's leading an indie-culture revolution," Baio writes. He'll stay on in an advisory capacity.
Baio says he rarely feels engaged enough to write about his political opinions, but he believes technology could be key to solving the country's biggest problems. "To tackle our most serious national issues, we need better communication between government and citizens," he says. "I want my son to grow up in a world where he doesn't feel disconnected and disillusioned by government, and I want government to meet the needs of the people, rather than favoring those with the most money or the loudest voices."
Look out Washington, Baio is already among your ranks. It's sure to be interesting.
Audio Interview: Andy Baio - A Master of Crowdsourcing
Next time you hear an economist or denizen of Wall Street talk about how the "American economy" is doing these days, watch your wallet.
There are two American economies. One is on the mend. The other is still coming apart.
The one that's mending is America's Big Money economy. It's comprised of Wall Street traders, big investors, and top professionals and corporate executives.
The Big Money economy is doing well these days. That's partly thanks to Ben Bernanke, whose Fed is keeping interest rates near zero by printing money as fast as it dare. It's essentially free money to America's Big Money economy.
Free money can almost always be put to uses that create more of it. Big corporations are buying back their shares of stock, thereby boosting corporate earnings. They're merging and acquiring other companies.
And they're going abroad in search of customers.
Thanks to fast-growing China, India, and Brazil, giant American corporations are racking up sales. They're selling Asian and Latin American consumers everything from cars and cell phones to fancy Internet software and iPads. Forty percent of the S&P 500 biggest corporations are now doing more than 60 percent of their business abroad. And America's biggest investors are also going abroad to get a nice return on their money.
So don't worry about America's Big Money economy. According to a Wall Street Journal survey released Thursday, overall compensation in financial services will rise 5 percent this year, and employees in some businesses like asset management will get increases of 15 percent.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average is back to where it was before the Lehman bankruptcy filing triggered the financial collapse. And profits at America's largest corporations are heading upward.
But there's another American economy, and it's not on the mend. Call it the Average Worker economy.
Last Friday's jobs report showed 159,000 new private-sector jobs in October. That's better than previous months. But 125,000 net new jobs are needed just to keep up with the growth of the American labor force. So another way of expressing what happened to jobs in October is to say 24,000 were added over what we need just to stay even.
Yet the American economy has lost 15 million jobs since the start of the Great Recession. And if you add in the growth of the labor force -- including everyone too discouraged to look for a job -- we're down about 22 million.
Or to put it another way, we're still getting nowhere on jobs.
One out of eight breadwinners is still out of work. Most families in the Average Worker economy rely on two breadwinners. So if one out of eight isn't working, chances are high that family incomes are down compared to what they were three years ago.
And that means the bills aren't getting paid.
According to a recent Washington Post poll, more than half of all Americans -- 53 percent -- are worried about making their mortgage payments. This is many more than were worried two years ago, when the Great Recession hit bottom. Then, 37 percent expressed worry.
Delinquency rates on home loans are rising. Distressed sales are up as a percent of total sales.
Most people in the Average Worker economy own few shares of stock, if any. Their equity is in their homes. But with all the delinquencies and distressed sales, the housing market has a glut of homes for sale. As a result, home prices are still dropping. So the net worth of most Americans is still dropping.
And even though interest rates are falling, most people in the Average Worker economy can't refinance their homes. They can't get home equity loans. Banks don't want to lend to the Average Worker economy because people in it are considered bad credit risks. They still owe lots of money, their family incomes are down, and their net worth has fallen.
And according to the Reuters/University of Michigan survey of American consumers, expectations about personal finances are at an all time low.
Inhabitants of the Big Money economy are celebrating Republican wins last week. They figure financial regulations will be rolled back, environmental regulations will be canned, the Bush tax cut will be extended to the top 1 percent, and it will be harder for workers to form unions.
Inhabitants of the Average Worker economy aren't so sure. The economy has been so bad they're angry at politicians. They showed their anger at the ballot box. They took it out on incumbents.
But if nothing changes in the Average Worker economy, there will be hell to pay.
Robert Reich is the author of Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future, now in bookstores. This post originally appeared at RobertReich.org.
eric seiger
Pulse Brings You <b>News</b> and RSS in an Elegant Flow
Android/iOS: Blogs and news sites put all that effort into making their posts graphically appealing, so why not see what they've got? Pulse, a nicely different kind of news reader, pulls your news in through side-scrolling, ...
Breaking <b>News</b>: Humanities in Decline! Film at 11. — Crooked Timber
But I just don't know of any realm of human endeavor in which a precipitous decline from 1967 to 1987, followed by a couple of decades of stability, counts as breaking news. It's the equivalent of saying “sales of Sgt. Pepper posters ...
Kinect doubles UK Xbox sales Xbox 360 <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net
Read our Xbox 360 news of Kinect doubles UK Xbox sales.
eric seiger
Hacking and Tracking the Conversation
Andy Baio announced on his blog today that he is joining the web technology think tank Expert Labs, along with Director and blogging forefather Anil Dash and Gina Trapani, former founding-editor of mega-blog LifeHacker.
Baio says the group's goal is "to help government make better decisions about policy by listening to citizens in the places they already are: social networks like Twitter and Facebook."
Trapani built an open source software product called ThinkUp, which collects and analyzes responses to questions posted on social networks. Dash brought it to Washington, partnering with the Obama Administration early this year. Now Baio will hack on ThinkUp, the social media conversation and Washington.
"There's tons to do," he wrote this morning, "but I'm particularly excited to tackle ThinkUp's ability to separate signal from noise, making it easier to derive meaning from hundreds or thousands of responses, using visualization, clustering, sentiment analysis, and robotic hamsters. I'm planning on building some fun hacks on top of ThinkUp, as well as keeping an eye open for other vectors to tackle our core mission."
In making the move, Baio will leave his spot as CTO of the fast-growing and innovative crowdsourced funding platform KickStarter. KickStarter announced last month that more than 250,000 people have now pledged over $20 million to fund home-recorded music projects, independent films and books and many other creative projects, in just 18 months since the site launched. "Kickstarter's leading an indie-culture revolution," Baio writes. He'll stay on in an advisory capacity.
Baio says he rarely feels engaged enough to write about his political opinions, but he believes technology could be key to solving the country's biggest problems. "To tackle our most serious national issues, we need better communication between government and citizens," he says. "I want my son to grow up in a world where he doesn't feel disconnected and disillusioned by government, and I want government to meet the needs of the people, rather than favoring those with the most money or the loudest voices."
Look out Washington, Baio is already among your ranks. It's sure to be interesting.
Audio Interview: Andy Baio - A Master of Crowdsourcing
Next time you hear an economist or denizen of Wall Street talk about how the "American economy" is doing these days, watch your wallet.
There are two American economies. One is on the mend. The other is still coming apart.
The one that's mending is America's Big Money economy. It's comprised of Wall Street traders, big investors, and top professionals and corporate executives.
The Big Money economy is doing well these days. That's partly thanks to Ben Bernanke, whose Fed is keeping interest rates near zero by printing money as fast as it dare. It's essentially free money to America's Big Money economy.
Free money can almost always be put to uses that create more of it. Big corporations are buying back their shares of stock, thereby boosting corporate earnings. They're merging and acquiring other companies.
And they're going abroad in search of customers.
Thanks to fast-growing China, India, and Brazil, giant American corporations are racking up sales. They're selling Asian and Latin American consumers everything from cars and cell phones to fancy Internet software and iPads. Forty percent of the S&P 500 biggest corporations are now doing more than 60 percent of their business abroad. And America's biggest investors are also going abroad to get a nice return on their money.
So don't worry about America's Big Money economy. According to a Wall Street Journal survey released Thursday, overall compensation in financial services will rise 5 percent this year, and employees in some businesses like asset management will get increases of 15 percent.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average is back to where it was before the Lehman bankruptcy filing triggered the financial collapse. And profits at America's largest corporations are heading upward.
But there's another American economy, and it's not on the mend. Call it the Average Worker economy.
Last Friday's jobs report showed 159,000 new private-sector jobs in October. That's better than previous months. But 125,000 net new jobs are needed just to keep up with the growth of the American labor force. So another way of expressing what happened to jobs in October is to say 24,000 were added over what we need just to stay even.
Yet the American economy has lost 15 million jobs since the start of the Great Recession. And if you add in the growth of the labor force -- including everyone too discouraged to look for a job -- we're down about 22 million.
Or to put it another way, we're still getting nowhere on jobs.
One out of eight breadwinners is still out of work. Most families in the Average Worker economy rely on two breadwinners. So if one out of eight isn't working, chances are high that family incomes are down compared to what they were three years ago.
And that means the bills aren't getting paid.
According to a recent Washington Post poll, more than half of all Americans -- 53 percent -- are worried about making their mortgage payments. This is many more than were worried two years ago, when the Great Recession hit bottom. Then, 37 percent expressed worry.
Delinquency rates on home loans are rising. Distressed sales are up as a percent of total sales.
Most people in the Average Worker economy own few shares of stock, if any. Their equity is in their homes. But with all the delinquencies and distressed sales, the housing market has a glut of homes for sale. As a result, home prices are still dropping. So the net worth of most Americans is still dropping.
And even though interest rates are falling, most people in the Average Worker economy can't refinance their homes. They can't get home equity loans. Banks don't want to lend to the Average Worker economy because people in it are considered bad credit risks. They still owe lots of money, their family incomes are down, and their net worth has fallen.
And according to the Reuters/University of Michigan survey of American consumers, expectations about personal finances are at an all time low.
Inhabitants of the Big Money economy are celebrating Republican wins last week. They figure financial regulations will be rolled back, environmental regulations will be canned, the Bush tax cut will be extended to the top 1 percent, and it will be harder for workers to form unions.
Inhabitants of the Average Worker economy aren't so sure. The economy has been so bad they're angry at politicians. They showed their anger at the ballot box. They took it out on incumbents.
But if nothing changes in the Average Worker economy, there will be hell to pay.
Robert Reich is the author of Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future, now in bookstores. This post originally appeared at RobertReich.org.
eric seiger
Pulse Brings You <b>News</b> and RSS in an Elegant Flow
Android/iOS: Blogs and news sites put all that effort into making their posts graphically appealing, so why not see what they've got? Pulse, a nicely different kind of news reader, pulls your news in through side-scrolling, ...
Breaking <b>News</b>: Humanities in Decline! Film at 11. — Crooked Timber
But I just don't know of any realm of human endeavor in which a precipitous decline from 1967 to 1987, followed by a couple of decades of stability, counts as breaking news. It's the equivalent of saying “sales of Sgt. Pepper posters ...
Kinect doubles UK Xbox sales Xbox 360 <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net
Read our Xbox 360 news of Kinect doubles UK Xbox sales.
eric seiger
eric seiger
eric seiger
Pulse Brings You <b>News</b> and RSS in an Elegant Flow
Android/iOS: Blogs and news sites put all that effort into making their posts graphically appealing, so why not see what they've got? Pulse, a nicely different kind of news reader, pulls your news in through side-scrolling, ...
Breaking <b>News</b>: Humanities in Decline! Film at 11. — Crooked Timber
But I just don't know of any realm of human endeavor in which a precipitous decline from 1967 to 1987, followed by a couple of decades of stability, counts as breaking news. It's the equivalent of saying “sales of Sgt. Pepper posters ...
Kinect doubles UK Xbox sales Xbox 360 <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net
Read our Xbox 360 news of Kinect doubles UK Xbox sales.
eric seiger
Hacking and Tracking the Conversation
Andy Baio announced on his blog today that he is joining the web technology think tank Expert Labs, along with Director and blogging forefather Anil Dash and Gina Trapani, former founding-editor of mega-blog LifeHacker.
Baio says the group's goal is "to help government make better decisions about policy by listening to citizens in the places they already are: social networks like Twitter and Facebook."
Trapani built an open source software product called ThinkUp, which collects and analyzes responses to questions posted on social networks. Dash brought it to Washington, partnering with the Obama Administration early this year. Now Baio will hack on ThinkUp, the social media conversation and Washington.
"There's tons to do," he wrote this morning, "but I'm particularly excited to tackle ThinkUp's ability to separate signal from noise, making it easier to derive meaning from hundreds or thousands of responses, using visualization, clustering, sentiment analysis, and robotic hamsters. I'm planning on building some fun hacks on top of ThinkUp, as well as keeping an eye open for other vectors to tackle our core mission."
In making the move, Baio will leave his spot as CTO of the fast-growing and innovative crowdsourced funding platform KickStarter. KickStarter announced last month that more than 250,000 people have now pledged over $20 million to fund home-recorded music projects, independent films and books and many other creative projects, in just 18 months since the site launched. "Kickstarter's leading an indie-culture revolution," Baio writes. He'll stay on in an advisory capacity.
Baio says he rarely feels engaged enough to write about his political opinions, but he believes technology could be key to solving the country's biggest problems. "To tackle our most serious national issues, we need better communication between government and citizens," he says. "I want my son to grow up in a world where he doesn't feel disconnected and disillusioned by government, and I want government to meet the needs of the people, rather than favoring those with the most money or the loudest voices."
Look out Washington, Baio is already among your ranks. It's sure to be interesting.
Audio Interview: Andy Baio - A Master of Crowdsourcing
Next time you hear an economist or denizen of Wall Street talk about how the "American economy" is doing these days, watch your wallet.
There are two American economies. One is on the mend. The other is still coming apart.
The one that's mending is America's Big Money economy. It's comprised of Wall Street traders, big investors, and top professionals and corporate executives.
The Big Money economy is doing well these days. That's partly thanks to Ben Bernanke, whose Fed is keeping interest rates near zero by printing money as fast as it dare. It's essentially free money to America's Big Money economy.
Free money can almost always be put to uses that create more of it. Big corporations are buying back their shares of stock, thereby boosting corporate earnings. They're merging and acquiring other companies.
And they're going abroad in search of customers.
Thanks to fast-growing China, India, and Brazil, giant American corporations are racking up sales. They're selling Asian and Latin American consumers everything from cars and cell phones to fancy Internet software and iPads. Forty percent of the S&P 500 biggest corporations are now doing more than 60 percent of their business abroad. And America's biggest investors are also going abroad to get a nice return on their money.
So don't worry about America's Big Money economy. According to a Wall Street Journal survey released Thursday, overall compensation in financial services will rise 5 percent this year, and employees in some businesses like asset management will get increases of 15 percent.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average is back to where it was before the Lehman bankruptcy filing triggered the financial collapse. And profits at America's largest corporations are heading upward.
But there's another American economy, and it's not on the mend. Call it the Average Worker economy.
Last Friday's jobs report showed 159,000 new private-sector jobs in October. That's better than previous months. But 125,000 net new jobs are needed just to keep up with the growth of the American labor force. So another way of expressing what happened to jobs in October is to say 24,000 were added over what we need just to stay even.
Yet the American economy has lost 15 million jobs since the start of the Great Recession. And if you add in the growth of the labor force -- including everyone too discouraged to look for a job -- we're down about 22 million.
Or to put it another way, we're still getting nowhere on jobs.
One out of eight breadwinners is still out of work. Most families in the Average Worker economy rely on two breadwinners. So if one out of eight isn't working, chances are high that family incomes are down compared to what they were three years ago.
And that means the bills aren't getting paid.
According to a recent Washington Post poll, more than half of all Americans -- 53 percent -- are worried about making their mortgage payments. This is many more than were worried two years ago, when the Great Recession hit bottom. Then, 37 percent expressed worry.
Delinquency rates on home loans are rising. Distressed sales are up as a percent of total sales.
Most people in the Average Worker economy own few shares of stock, if any. Their equity is in their homes. But with all the delinquencies and distressed sales, the housing market has a glut of homes for sale. As a result, home prices are still dropping. So the net worth of most Americans is still dropping.
And even though interest rates are falling, most people in the Average Worker economy can't refinance their homes. They can't get home equity loans. Banks don't want to lend to the Average Worker economy because people in it are considered bad credit risks. They still owe lots of money, their family incomes are down, and their net worth has fallen.
And according to the Reuters/University of Michigan survey of American consumers, expectations about personal finances are at an all time low.
Inhabitants of the Big Money economy are celebrating Republican wins last week. They figure financial regulations will be rolled back, environmental regulations will be canned, the Bush tax cut will be extended to the top 1 percent, and it will be harder for workers to form unions.
Inhabitants of the Average Worker economy aren't so sure. The economy has been so bad they're angry at politicians. They showed their anger at the ballot box. They took it out on incumbents.
But if nothing changes in the Average Worker economy, there will be hell to pay.
Robert Reich is the author of Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future, now in bookstores. This post originally appeared at RobertReich.org.
eric seiger
eric seiger
Pulse Brings You <b>News</b> and RSS in an Elegant Flow
Android/iOS: Blogs and news sites put all that effort into making their posts graphically appealing, so why not see what they've got? Pulse, a nicely different kind of news reader, pulls your news in through side-scrolling, ...
Breaking <b>News</b>: Humanities in Decline! Film at 11. — Crooked Timber
But I just don't know of any realm of human endeavor in which a precipitous decline from 1967 to 1987, followed by a couple of decades of stability, counts as breaking news. It's the equivalent of saying “sales of Sgt. Pepper posters ...
Kinect doubles UK Xbox sales Xbox 360 <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net
Read our Xbox 360 news of Kinect doubles UK Xbox sales.
eric seiger
eric seiger
Pulse Brings You <b>News</b> and RSS in an Elegant Flow
Android/iOS: Blogs and news sites put all that effort into making their posts graphically appealing, so why not see what they've got? Pulse, a nicely different kind of news reader, pulls your news in through side-scrolling, ...
Breaking <b>News</b>: Humanities in Decline! Film at 11. — Crooked Timber
But I just don't know of any realm of human endeavor in which a precipitous decline from 1967 to 1987, followed by a couple of decades of stability, counts as breaking news. It's the equivalent of saying “sales of Sgt. Pepper posters ...
Kinect doubles UK Xbox sales Xbox 360 <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net
Read our Xbox 360 news of Kinect doubles UK Xbox sales.
eric seiger
Pulse Brings You <b>News</b> and RSS in an Elegant Flow
Android/iOS: Blogs and news sites put all that effort into making their posts graphically appealing, so why not see what they've got? Pulse, a nicely different kind of news reader, pulls your news in through side-scrolling, ...
Breaking <b>News</b>: Humanities in Decline! Film at 11. — Crooked Timber
But I just don't know of any realm of human endeavor in which a precipitous decline from 1967 to 1987, followed by a couple of decades of stability, counts as breaking news. It's the equivalent of saying “sales of Sgt. Pepper posters ...
Kinect doubles UK Xbox sales Xbox 360 <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net
Read our Xbox 360 news of Kinect doubles UK Xbox sales.
eric seiger
Pulse Brings You <b>News</b> and RSS in an Elegant Flow
Android/iOS: Blogs and news sites put all that effort into making their posts graphically appealing, so why not see what they've got? Pulse, a nicely different kind of news reader, pulls your news in through side-scrolling, ...
Breaking <b>News</b>: Humanities in Decline! Film at 11. — Crooked Timber
But I just don't know of any realm of human endeavor in which a precipitous decline from 1967 to 1987, followed by a couple of decades of stability, counts as breaking news. It's the equivalent of saying “sales of Sgt. Pepper posters ...
Kinect doubles UK Xbox sales Xbox 360 <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net
Read our Xbox 360 news of Kinect doubles UK Xbox sales.
eric seiger eric seiger
eric seiger
eric seiger
eric seiger
Pulse Brings You <b>News</b> and RSS in an Elegant Flow
Android/iOS: Blogs and news sites put all that effort into making their posts graphically appealing, so why not see what they've got? Pulse, a nicely different kind of news reader, pulls your news in through side-scrolling, ...
Breaking <b>News</b>: Humanities in Decline! Film at 11. — Crooked Timber
But I just don't know of any realm of human endeavor in which a precipitous decline from 1967 to 1987, followed by a couple of decades of stability, counts as breaking news. It's the equivalent of saying “sales of Sgt. Pepper posters ...
Kinect doubles UK Xbox sales Xbox 360 <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net
Read our Xbox 360 news of Kinect doubles UK Xbox sales.
eric seiger
Pulse Brings You <b>News</b> and RSS in an Elegant Flow
Android/iOS: Blogs and news sites put all that effort into making their posts graphically appealing, so why not see what they've got? Pulse, a nicely different kind of news reader, pulls your news in through side-scrolling, ...
Breaking <b>News</b>: Humanities in Decline! Film at 11. — Crooked Timber
But I just don't know of any realm of human endeavor in which a precipitous decline from 1967 to 1987, followed by a couple of decades of stability, counts as breaking news. It's the equivalent of saying “sales of Sgt. Pepper posters ...
Kinect doubles UK Xbox sales Xbox 360 <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net
Read our Xbox 360 news of Kinect doubles UK Xbox sales.
eric seiger
Pulse Brings You <b>News</b> and RSS in an Elegant Flow
Android/iOS: Blogs and news sites put all that effort into making their posts graphically appealing, so why not see what they've got? Pulse, a nicely different kind of news reader, pulls your news in through side-scrolling, ...
Breaking <b>News</b>: Humanities in Decline! Film at 11. — Crooked Timber
But I just don't know of any realm of human endeavor in which a precipitous decline from 1967 to 1987, followed by a couple of decades of stability, counts as breaking news. It's the equivalent of saying “sales of Sgt. Pepper posters ...
Kinect doubles UK Xbox sales Xbox 360 <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net
Read our Xbox 360 news of Kinect doubles UK Xbox sales.
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