Archive for the 'Monday Links' Category

Tuesday Links: May 19th, 2009

Published by Taylor on May 19, 2009 in Monday Links. Comments

Hey folks–after a few down weeks, I’m getting back to regular blogging.  These items brought to you by the free stream of the new Wilco album, available on the band’s site (highly recommended…though the stream seems to have gotten choppy since i first listened).

  • I’m intrigued by KeyRingThing, a service that allows  you to combine frequent shopper/loyalty program cards (currently in my wallet: Harris Teeter VIC card, CVS ExtraCare card, and Barnes and Noble Member card) into a single credit card-sized page.  My current system is less than ideal: cutting cards down into just the essentials (barcodes) and stuffing the shards of cards in my wallet.  I might try KeyRingThing instead.  Do you carry loyalty cards?  Which do you use regularly?  Would combining them be worth $2.97?  (HT: LifeHacker)
  • Sean at Tactical Philanthropy drew my attention to a new magazine for social enterprise.  It’s called Beyond Profit, and you can flip through the inaugural issue online here.
  • I’m a sucker for anything with a headline like “In Defense of Liberal Arts,” and this post by Lane Wallace (guest blogging in Andrew Sullivan’s absence) is no exception.  I love this thought in particular:

Yes, the U.S. needs technical expertise to keep pace, economically and technologically. But we also need innovators and entrepreneurs creating break-through concepts and businesses. And while knowledge in an area is important, I’d argue that the most important trait a pioneering entrepreneur needs is the confidence to buck convention; to believe he or she is right, despite what all the experts say.

  • I like the instinct behind these ideas for transforming the 1,900+ auto dealerships set to close into greener spaces for business, community, or even nature.  As always, the dream vision for many of these spaces is likely prohibitively expensive; nevertheless, it’s neat to think about how these soon-to-be empty lots could be more than abandoned blights on the edge of a cities and towns.  I’d like to see other creative ideas for how to use the existing (albeit hastily-constructed) structures.
  • Astronauts have performed minor miracles all week repairing the Hubble space telescope for the last time.  Unsurprisingly, some incredible images have emerged:

hubble

Image courtesy of NASA.  On a related note, it makes me really happy to imagine the astronauts floating around their living area watching the new Star Trek movie.

Long Weekend Links: January 16th, 2009

Published by Taylor on January 16, 2009 in Monday Links. Comments

Hey folks–I’m working on a series of longer posts in response to a book I read recently; those will be up next week.  In the meantime, enjoy a few items of interest as we celebrate MLK, Jr., our new President, and a long weekend:

  • I really encourage you to commit some of the free time this long weekend provides to volunteering in your community.  MLK day is also a national day of service, so click here to find opportunities in your community.  Katherine and I will be helping to create a community vegetable garden for a neighborhood of fixed-income seniors in San Antonio as volunteers with the Green Spaces Alliance.  Get out there and give a little time.
  • This is an intriguing new site to help consumers understand the various (and multiplying) sustainability labels on everything from produce and coffee to windows and flooring.  The user interface could use some work, and from a few random spot-checks it seems like the database is slowly growing more robust in terms of the information offered on each certification program.  Nevertheless, I’m glad someone thought to bring this information together in one spot.  [Hat Tip: TreeHugger]
  • Not being a web designer myself, I rarely think about the amount of effort and artistry that goes into even the most basic elements of many sites.  Working on a redesign project at work (with a contract designer for the heavy-lifting…I write the content) has helped me appreciate some of the finer points…and this blog takes my appreciation one step further: a gallery of pre-loading screens.  You know the type, “10%…20%…” screens that display as graphic- or flash-heavy sites load.  Check it out.  [Hat Tip: Andrew Sullivan].
  • TAPPED breaks down 12 foods that absorb chemicals at alarming levels (making those a priority for organic alternatives as you cruise the grocery store aisle), and 10 foods with low absorbtion of pesticides and other undesireable additives.
  • Monica O’Brien follows up on a post about the need for millennials/Gen Y’ers to pursue a second job by offering 10 suggestions for what that job could be.  Apparently I need to parlay my blogging into a guest columnist gig at a more reputable site (no pressure, eh?):

Blogging to demonstrate “expert” credentials is sooo 2007, but blogging IS a good way to test your writing skills and improve your understanding of a topic, which can lead to an article or column in a media publication. Start small, build a community around your blog, and use that momentum to land a stretch job writing about a topic that relates to your career.

Enjoy the weekend.  Volunteer.  Watch history.  Remember why you have the day off:

<a href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=o0FiCxZKuv8">http://youtube.com/watch?v=o0FiCxZKuv8</a>

Special Birthday Edition of Monday Links: January 5th, 2009

Published by Jarred on January 5, 2009 in Monday Links and Tropophilia. Comments

Though our first posts were published in December 2007, Tropophilia was officially launched one year ago on January 5th, 2008.  In that introductory post, we announced our mission:

While we hope that you come to understand some of the changes that are happening around our world, we also hope that we cause some small amount of change in YOU. Whether we expose you to a new idea, or change your mind about an old one, we hope your perspective on life is changed – however so minutely – after having visited Tropophilia. If you’re not a tropophiliac before you arrive, we hope you’ll be one when you leave.

This blog has certainly changed us for the better, and we hope in some small way it’s done the same for you.  Tropophilia has inspired us to read, write, think, re-think, debate, learn, and grow.  We hope you’ve enjoyed the ride so far as much as we have.

We thought that we’d take advantage of this special edition of Monday Links for a little introspection and retrospection, as we reflect on some of the happenings on Tropophilia over the past year.

Content

According to the Internet Archive, we had published 32 posts to eleven different categories by January 19, 2008.  Today, we have just under 300 posts published in 59 categories (check out our new full-page archive to explore all our posts by date and category).  In addition to Taylor and Jarred’s content, we’ve had 17 guest posts from friends such as Dan, Joel, Eric, Bruce, Marriott, Jarry, and James.  We also have over 850 comments on our posts, signifying the robust conversations that have emerged among our growing community of readers.

Here are some of our favorite entries from this year:

Statistics (as of 12/30/08)

  • Google Analytics also tells us:
    • 28.67% of our traffic is direct (i.e. people coming to Tropophilia on their own, without clicking from another site), while 27.59% of our traffic is referred by another link on the web
    • 43.75% of our traffic comes from search engine results (over 90% of those from Google), with our top five keywords being:
      1. tropophilia (423 visits)
      2. bomomo (116)
      3. cons of social networking (111)
      4. 6 word essay (96)
      5. facebook political views (60)
    • 45.2% of our visitors use Firefox, followed closely by Internet Explorer (43.88%), and then Safari (8.61%), Chrome (1.11%), and Opera (0.68%)
    • 68.03% of our visitors are — as far as can be tracked — new visitors to the blog
    • Most of our visitors are from the United States (73.72%), with the top states being North Carolina (12.41%), California (10.94%), Florida (8.34%), New York (7.06%), and Washington, D.C (6.73%).  Internationally, we get most of our visits from the UK (5.44%), Canada (3.55%), and India (1.86%).

Design

In a way, Tropophilia has almost come full circle in terms of visual design.  Check out how we appear in the Internet Archive’s index from January 19, 2008.   We launched with a double-column variant of the excellent K2 theme — much as we have right now, though the width was narrower.  Not long into the life of the blog, we added a second sidebar to the left side of the main content.  We kept this format for most of the year.  After an ill-fated tinkering with a completely new theme in early December, we’ve come back to our roots with the dual-column look.  We love it for its simplicity and the priority it gives to the main content.  We’ve also introduced a new logo up top, which we also hope you like as much as we do.

At launch, we had a “What We’re Reading” widget in place that tracked our online bookmarks of cool articles.  This eventually was replaced with our “By The Way” section, where we would post small updates and links.  Several months ago, we removed “By The Way” and replaced it with feeds from our Twitter accounts.  Finally, in the past few weeks, we have reintroduced the “What We’re Reading” widget with a fresh commitment to keeping it populated with interesting links and notes.

We continue to tweak things here and there to see if they stick.  As always, we welcome your feedback on any design changes and suggestions.

Other Awesomeness

This has been an exciting year for Tropophilia: not only for the interesting conversations that have come out of our posts, but also for some special opportunities it has given us.

In June, we were invited by Brazen Careerist to join their new start-up community of blogging 20-somethings.  Since then, Taylor and Jarred have been featured a number of times on their front page and it’s been a major source of traffic.  Just a few weeks ago, one of Brazen Careerist’s founders (and noted columnist and career coach) Penelope Trunk cited posts by each of us as reasons she’s inspired to keep pursuing her startup business.

Taylor and Jarred have also been doing a little guest blogging.  In May, Taylor attended the Council on Foundations conference in Washington, D.C. and was invited by Sean Stannard-Stockton (who runs the Tactical Philanthropy blog) to write up some of his thoughts from the panels he attended.  Later that month, Jarred wrote a post for Sarah Perez’s blog speculating about how the battle over the social web would be fought, and who would probably win (hint: Google).

Speaking of which, as we’ve noted in several places, this blog played a big part in making Jarred feel confident enough to pursue and eventually get a job offer from Google.  So even though he knows you often found the posts boring or too detailed, he wants to thank you for humoring him as he cultivated and explored his (super geeky) passions and turned them into a dream job.  Here’s hoping that 2009 will help Taylor to do the same.

New Year Resolutions

While 2008 was a great start for the blog, we want to make a conscious and concerted effort to ensure that 2009 is even better.  So, here are our resolutions for Tropophilia in the new year.

  • Keep a steady pace of posting, at least twice per week but aiming for more.  Utilize the post scheduling tool more effectively to spread posts out, and communicate better with each other about up and down times for writing.
  • Continue to evangelize Tropophilia through guest posts and comments on other blogs, Twitter, etc. so that we reach and exceed 100 subscribers (right now we’re hovering around 75).
  • From Taylor: produce more original content, fewer link posts, and longer features every once and a while.  Follow up on guest-posting commitments and respond to comments (sorry for the slack, folks!).
  • Introduce one or two additional regular, sustainable weekly features beyond Monday Links, and commit to keeping them up.  If you have suggestions for what you’d like to see (return of the Tropophy [Taylor's note: please God no] or Satellite Challenge, perhaps, or something completely new), let us know.
  • Publish at least five guest posts, and potentially add a third full-time blogger (we want Eric *clap* *clap* *clapclapclap*)

Thank You!

Thanks for reading Tropophilia.  We’ve enjoyed writing for and sharing with you over the past year, and look forward to 2009 being even better.

We’d love to hear what your favorite posts and conversations from 2008 were, what you’d like to see from us in the new year, and any other comments or questions!  And remember, if you ever want to write a guest post, we’d be thrilled!

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user The Facey Family.

Monday Links: December 22nd, 2008

Published by Taylor on December 22, 2008 in Monday Links. Comments

A few links for you this morning.  I put a little cinnamon and nutmeg in my coffee grinder with the coffee beans this morning, so I’m fired up and ready to go.  For those of you who are already on vacation…well, have pity on the rest of us.  Links!

  • Duke Energy is facing a Renewable Energy and Efficiency Portfolio standard in NC that mandates 12.5% renewable energy in utilities’ portfolios by 2021.  The law is finally pushing Duke to explore creative power generation:

The energy company is proposing to invest $50 million over a two-year period in as many as 425 solar energy arrays atop the rooftops of homes, schools, stores and factories — or on the ground at those properties — to establish a solar distributed generation program. [...]

Under the arrangement, the utility company would install, own, operate and maintain all equipment related to the solar array. The company, rather than the home- or property owner, would also use and own the electricity produced. The customer receives the rent paid for using the rooftop or land, and the compensation is based on the size of the installation.

  • Here’s a compelling new ad from WeCanSolveIt (Al Gore’s effort).  TreeHugger quotes Van Jones: “The main piece of technology in the green economy is a caulk gun.”

<a href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=DWyyPiJNh8c">http://youtube.com/watch?v=DWyyPiJNh8c</a>

  • The Federal government is a huge publisher of information (or, at least, it SHOULD be), but any student of policy or engaged citizen knows what a hassle it can be to search for information on agency websites.  A group of cabinet-agency web directors (the Federal Web Managers Council) put together a white paper on online government that many expect the President-elect’s transition team to embrace; after all, during campaign season Obama’s team seemed to really get this stuff.  Included in the report [PDF here] is this crucial piece (emphasis mine):

One of the biggest problems we face in improving government websites is that many agencies still view their website as an IT project rather than as a core business function. Many government websites lack a dedicated budget. Only a minority of agencies have developed strong web policies and management controls. Some have hundreds of “legacy” websites with outdated or irrelevant content. With limited resources, many find it difficult to solicit regular customer input and take quick action to improve their sites. While there are many effective government websites, most web teams are struggling to manage the amount of online content the government produces every day. [...]

Agencies should be required to appoint an editor-in-chief for every website they maintain, as do the top commercial websites. This person should be given appropriate funding and authority to
develop and enforce web policies and publishing standards, including ensuring that prime real estate on government websites is dedicated to helping people find the information they need.

More from techPresident here; as they write:

Running this gargantuan online network means empowering a vast cadre of managers to do their work – it means giving them the power to make decisions about email and social media, for example. In theory, the Obama apparatus should be great at this. After all, the President-Elect’s operation maintained a keen top-down message throughout the campaign, even while allowing volunteer coordinators to do their thing without running every dash and and RSS feed past the campaign minders.

  • The Year in Pictures from the Boston Globe photographers is a great wya to spend 10 minutes [Hat Tip: Jarred].
  • I’m hoping to do some long-overdue music blogging over the holidays.  I re-discovered one of my favorite MP3 blogs this weekend while cleaning out my Firefox bookmarks.  I followed a number of MP3 blogs a few years ago…this one is apparently one of the few that’s still kicking.  Check out the author’s top-25 songs of 2008.  I particularly recommend the Anathallo song, which I’ve been listening to on repeat for about 2 weeks.  You can also connect with me and Jarred on our favorite music site–Lala.

Monday Links: December 8th, 2008

Published by Taylor on December 8, 2008 in Monday Links. Comments

Super sized links this week to make up for my absence last week.  Please be patient with us as we continue to tweak the new layout.  And by “we” I mean Jarred.

  • Better Place is a California company based on the idea that switching to electric cars need not wait on as-of-yet undeveloped next generation batteries (often cited as what’s holding electric cars back), but rather can be accomplished by leasing batteries to electric car owners and offering a large number of swap stations for freshly charged batteries.  For those of you who have propane grills, you’ve probably done this with your propane tank for years: you drop off the empty tank and pick up a full tank.  Shai Agassi, the founder of Better Place, was profiled in Wired a few months back.  Well it turns out Better Place will be able to test their system in Hawaii:

The State of Hawaii and the Hawaiian Electric Company on Tuesday endorsed an effort to build an alternative transportation system based on electric vehicles with swappable batteries and an “intelligent” battery recharging network. [...]

By using existing electric car technologies, coupled with an Internet-connected web of tens of thousands of recharging stations [...] Better Place L.L.C. of Palo Alto, Calif., will make all-electric vehicles feasible.

  • Here’s a good piece from the Guardian (UK): 10 big energy myths.  The only myth on the list that I find objectionable is this one:

Myth 7: climate change means we need more organic agriculture

The uncomfortable reality is that we already struggle to feed six billion people. Population numbers will rise to more than nine billion by 2050. Although food production is increasing slowly, the growth rate in agricultural productivity is likely to decline below population increases within a few years [...] So we need to ensure that as much food as possible is produced on the limited resources of good farmland. Most studies show that yields under organic cultivation are little more than half what can be achieved elsewhere.

This response from Treehugger is well taken:

[W]e need to both tackle rising meat consumption and improve the yields of organic agriculture and decrease the impacts of conventional farming if we are to achieve sustainability – fortunately there are plenty of ideas to help us on our way without reaching for the pesticides just yet, from vegetarian and low meat diets to urban aquaponics to wireless soil sensors. And of course agrichar, which Goodall is a big supporter of, offers great opportunities to increase yields while producing energy and also sequestering carbon in our soils.

  • Austin is the latest city to explore Smart Grid technology:

In technical-speak, the project addresses the software challenges of “distributed generation” – the idea that people will start generating power from their homes, reducing dependence on centralized power plants.

  • Scoble vents about the many ways in which direct messages on Twitter are completely useless.  I agree wholeheartedly; while I don’t get the volume of Twitter DMs that Robert does, I can vouch that there are well over 100 Facebook messages sitting unread in that inbox waiting for the day when Facebook gives me a “Delete All” button.  I read the Facebook message when it’s emailed to me.  Why make me delete it twice?
  • I expect to write about the potential for Obama’s network soon, but in the meantime I thought this post was spot on (emphasis in the original):

Look, the administration’s efforts are admirable. [...] I think it’s great that the Obama people are committed to trying, and to involving people with the process by some means other than providing their credit card numbers [...]

But I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. The magic value of social media tools is that they let people communicate among themselves, not that they let them communicate with a big institution.

Social media lets you listen in when people talk among themselves. The social web helps people self-organize into groups and movements. It helps them share collective intelligence. If used by government itself, these tools can open up government process to public inspection. It’s socially transformative technology that enables a constant, real-time, global conversation. It will change the world in ways we don’t yet appreciate.

But it’s intellectually dishonest to lay these tools out there and pretend to listen attentively to the incoherent rumble of a billion fingers pounding keyboards all across the land.

  • This video of a frozen pizza assembly line is ridiculous.  [Hat Tip: Kottke].