Youth social networking researcher danah boyd has observed that many people presume the way they use social networks is the way everyone uses them. "I interviewed gay men who thought Friendster was a gay dating site because all they saw were other gay men," she says. "I interviewed teens who believed that everyone on MySpace was Christian because all of the profiles they saw contained biblical quotes. We all live in our own worlds with people who share our values and, with networked media, it's often hard to see beyond that."

Now picture our perspective leaving our own experiences, zooming out and up until we can see how all the different groups are interacting on a worldwide social network. That bird's-eye view could be both beautiful and horrible if the resolution was clear enough. That's what a Ramen-eating, ex-Apple engineer named Pete Warden is about to release to the public this week.

Sponsor

This Wednesday, Warden will make Friend, Fan page and name data from hundreds of millions of Facebook users available to the academic research community. It's a move that Facebook has to have seen coming, a move that many in the data-centric community have been calling on the company itself to do for years, and an event that's been complicated by Facebook's recent privacy policy changes, which have muddied the waters of right and wrong but rendered even more data available for outside analysis.

If what people call Web 2.0 was all about creating new technologies that made it easy for everyday people to publish their thoughts, social connections and activities, then the next stage of innovation online may be services like recommendations, self and group awareness, and other features made possible by software developers building on top of the huge mass of data that Web 2.0 made public. It's a very exciting future, and Warden is about to fire one of the earliest big shots in that direction.

Nerds in Space: Social Graph Analysis For Solving Large-Group Problems

Warden studied Computer Vision in college in the U.K., then got into game development. After moving to L.A., he spent six years building graphics drivers for the original Playstation and the XBox. Then he started his own independent business, where, thankfully, he open-sourced much of his work (something he's still doing today).

When he found out that starting his own business wasn't going to work with his immigration status, he was very fortunate to have also caught Apple's eye with the software he had been releasing to the public. Apple bought his company in order to bring him on board. The proceeds of that small sale are now sustaining his next project after going independent again.

After spending five years at Apple struggling to navigate the maze of people and connections and types of expertise in order to get the information he needed, Warden decided to go independent and build a company that solved exactly that kind of problem. "I can't think of a better big company to work for, but it was still a big company," he says. "It was hard to find the right people to talk to, whether for particular expertise or for contacts at external companies." And so Warden left Apple to build a company that would use social graph analysis to solve problems like that. He called the company Mailana.

We've written here a number of times about Mailana's tool that analyzes the social graph of any Twitter user. Enter the username of someone on Twitter and Mailana will show you which 20 other people the user has exchanged the largest number of reciprocal public @ replies with. Find someone interesting or important? Mailana's Twitter analyzer will tell you who they most regularly interact with. See, for example, The Inner Circles of 10 Geek Rockstars on Twitter.

Pulling Down the Facebook Social Graph

Now Warden is about to unveil a much larger project along the same vein. For the past six months he's been crawling public profile pages on Facebook. He now has more than 215 million of them indexed and updated about once a month. When he began he was using the Web crawling service 80legs, but over time he had to build his own crawling infrastructure.

When I talked to him this afternoon, he had already begun uploading 100 GB of user data onto his server to make it available for academic research starting on Wednesday. Warden says he's removed identifying profile URLs but kept names, locations, Fan page lists and partial Friends lists. All those fields of data are just waiting to be analyzed and cross referenced. That's one very rich resource.

Yesterday Warden posted some of his own initial observations from the data on his personal blog. Those included:

• In almost every state in the Southern U.S., God is number one most popular Fan page among Facebook users. Among people in the L.A., San Francisco and Nevada regions? "God hardly makes an appearance on the fan pages, but sports aren't that popular either," Warden writes. "Michael Jackson is a particular favorite, and San Francisco puts Barack Obama in the top spot." In the Oregon and Idaho region? Starbucks is number one.
• In the Mormon-influenced areas of Utah and Eastern Idaho, the most popular Fan pages are The Book of Mormon, Glen Beck and the vampire book Twilight, which was authored by a Mormon.
• The bulk of Warden's posted analysis yesterday was about location networks. People in the western U.S. tend to have Facebook friends all over the country; people in the southern U.S. tend to mostly be friends with people who have remained in the same area.

Taking a Deeper Look

These observations are interesting, but they are only the beginning of what's possible. Name, location, friends and interests are great data points to analyze. Warden has written a program that will estimate gender as well, based on names. All these data points can be cross-referenced with outside data, too. Members of Facebook's own staff did this kind of analysis when they compared user last names to U.S. Census data, which allowed them to estimate changes in Facebook's racial composition over time based on the likelihood of people with particular last names to report a particular racial backgrounds.

"I'm mostly thinking 'What do I try first?'," Warden says. "There's so many interesting ways to slice the data - especially as I'm starting to get changes over time. I'm also trying to map out political networks in aggregate; how polarized the fans of particular politicians are - so how likely a Sarah Palin fan is to have any friends who are fans of Obama, and how that varies with location too. One of my favorite results is that Texans are more likely to be fans of the Dallas Cowboys than God."

Warden says he hasn't talked to anyone from Facebook since he started crawling the site, but he did get an email from someone on the security team asking him to take down instructions he'd posted that exposed a security hole that made harvesting peoples' email addresses easy. So the company is paying attention. "I'd love to see them put me out of business by putting decent data out there," Warden says. He says his Amazon Web Services bill was over $5,000 last month.

Why is he indexing all this content and why is he going to hand it over to the academic world later this week? "I am fascinated by how we can build tools to understand our world and connect people based on all the data we're just littering the Internet with," Warden says.

"Nobody thinks about how much valuable information they're generating just by friending people and fanning pages. It's like we're constantly voting in a hundred different ways every day. And I'm a starry-eyed believer that we'll be able to change the world for the better using that neglected information. It's like an x-ray for the whole country - we can see all sorts of hidden details of who we're friends with, where we live, what we like."

For a great example of the kind of social impact that data analysis can make, Warden points to some of the fascinating ways that GIS data is illuminating the intersection of race and public services. Data has shed light on social injustices for decades, and measurable information about the interactions of hundreds of millions of people every day on Facebook offers opportunities to discover both good and bad news about the contemporary human condition.

Warden says he's not yet been able to interest any investors in his ideas for businesses based on this data, so his girlfriend Liz Baumann, a former insurance actuary, stepped in to help and is now running much of the crawling. He says he's now focused on "working on ways of presenting all this information in a form that answers questions for people willing to pay." His first experiment along those lines is the very interesting FanPageAnalytics.com.

What does Pete Warden hope for from this week's public release of all this Facebook data? "Hopefully I'll get to see a bunch of interesting [academic research] papers come out of it, worst case. And I'd like to be the guy people turn to when they need stuff like this."

Already well-respected among a fringe group of bleeding-edge geeks, we hope that Warden's work on social graph analysis will end up impacting a far larger number of people than may ever know his name.

By Senior Editor Kris Smith (@croncast)

Reading glasses are for old folks and big type is for kids that don't know how to read. Well, that used to be true.

For those that believe that the web is now looking like itself and no longer doing a mimetic dance with it's first cousin, print, you should be down with this: Bigger font sizes, better kerning, wider line height and plenty of negative space make for a better user experience. Especially when reading thousands of words online everyday.

What got me going down this path was a link that someone shared today through their Google Reader shared feed to an article in Rolling Stone by Matt Taibbi. The link, as you can see, is a link to a printable version of the piece. I was rate this as great for print and poor for readability.

The post content font size is super for saving printer paper and thus trees, but it is a killer on the eyes. Reading the post at that size even in the the early paragraphs was causing me strain and fatigue. I was tired of reading the dense blocks of text without even forming half and opinion about writing. I was more concerned with the design and the inability to read it quickly because the type was packed so tight letters like sardines.

To read this article and make it not about the squished fonts and tiny words I had to throw the Readability plugin at it. Once activated it gave me plenty of white space, larger font and the ability to scan the words with ease. It performed the duty of making the web look like itself.

This got me thinking about what the best size for type readability on screens is. Turns out that after reading a couple of studies that say that is someplace between a 12pt or 14pt sans-serif typeface with a setting of 120% height in CSS. Readers also typically prefer serifed fonts for legibility but sans-serifed for actually reading blocks of text.

The major irony of course is that this blog and both of the posts that I linked to don't follow any of these guidelines for creating and optimal reading experience! Tech Startups will be heading there in the not so distant future but I fear that the those two poasts are going to be stuck in the internet dark ages.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Typographic Design Patterns and Best Practices (smashingmagazine.com)
• Talking RSS Reader Does Just What it Sounds Like [Downloads] (lifehacker.com)
• Social media has made me boring (mdzlog.alcor.net)

No Shame In Readability is a post from: TechStartups.com

By Staff Writer Boonsri Dickinson (@boonspoon)

There is hope. The Huffington Post calls this The Obama-Effect in Journalism, where small donations from a crowd is used to fund stories. If crowdfunding becomes the future of journalism, the editorial power will shift from an elite group of editors deciding on what is important to the community choosing which issues they care about most.

Several companies such as Kickstarter have figured out a way to fund the creative mind. Musicians and journalists can connect with fans to raise money for their projects. For example, Polyvinyl Records sold their overstock through Kickstarter and racked in $15,000. The donors received complementary DVD sets for their payments.

David Cohn founded Spot.us, a non-profit that recently had one of its community funded stories end up in The New York Times. Spot.us raised money for Lindsey Hoshaw's $10,000 trip to the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch. Hoshaw spent a month aboard Captain Charles Moore's research vessel, the Alguita, to report on the plastic trash floating in our seas. Eventhough The Columbia Journalism Review was underwhelmed by the actual reporting of the story, it is an example of how community funded reporting can be done.

Hoshaw's garbage patch story might be a one-hit wonder. Crowdfunding isn't going to save traditional media. The real issue is figuring out the best payment model for online content. Sadly, 80 percent of us admit that we wouldn't pay to read anything online. But if you're in the minority, these companies will collect your spare change.

Image: flickr/ Donncha @ InPhotos.org

Fund Your Stories and Projects With Small Donations is a post from: TechStartups.com

Update: The CNN iPhone App is now in the app store. Download it here [iTunes link].
-
A little over a month ago, we reviewed the NPR News iPhone App. We raved about its radio integration and personalization options, so much that we definitively declared that NPR's iPhone app blows other news apps out of the water.

We may have spoken too soon, because that declaration was before the CNN iPhone App.

The CNN iPhone App, which is now live in the app store [iTunes link], is nothing short of impressive. It combines breaking news with customization, the ability to save stories, streaming video whenever breaking news is in progress, and most intriguing of all, citizen journalism.

CNN's iPhone App: It's Impressive

The CNN iPhone app is divided into four key (but very different) components, combining for one seamless app experience. Here's what you can expect if you download the $1.99 app:

Headlines: It's the core of any news app being able to read breaking news. You can sift through news by recency and by category (crime, politics, health, etc). And since it's CNN, you can also share stories via Facebook Connect, Twitter, SMS, and email.

Oh, one more cool thing about headlines: if you turn your iPhone on the side, you can view stories like you can your iPod album covers. Flick through images to find the story that interests you. It's a uniquely visual way to consume news.

My CNN: The app is chock-full of personalization options. Our favorite is the ability to save stories you want to read later. You don't even need a connection to read saved stories, so you pick out the news you want and read it on the plane without a problem.

Another nifty feature: you can follow topics or stories that interest you and get alerts when there are updates to that story.

Video: Yeah, this app gets even better. It is CNN we're talking about, so you'd hope there would be some video. You can watch on-demand clips related to breaking news. However, we're huge fans of the live streaming video integration. Anytime there's a breaking event (Obama gives a speech, a major natural disaster, election night, etc.), live coverage from CNN Live becomes available. Hell, this is a feature that I'd purchase as a standalone app itself.

iReport: Out of all of the CNN iPhone App's features, this one may be the most game-changing. iReport is CNN's user-generated citizen journalism initiative, where everyday citizens can upload photos, videos, and stories about events happening near them. Some of it is even used on CNN's news coverage.

Guess what? The app lets you submit photos and videos you take with your iPhone to iReport and to CNN. Can you imagine how much citizen journalism this app will encourage?

To say we're impressed with this app is an understatement. CNN went all-out with features and functionality, but did it in a way that's simple and easy to use and consume. The app sets a new standard in functionality and even has the potential to change the news game with its iReport integration. It's the complete package.

Tags: cnn, iphone, iphone app, News

Shared by Marinho Brando
no que eu concorde com os comentrios (no os li, no posso julgar)... mas apenas dois cents:

"quem" Sarah Lacy? aspirante a Thomas Jefferson? suplente do Obama? seguidora de Paris Hilton? ou s mais uma jornalista p-de-chinelo de um site que vive de blefes?

e a segunda coisa : NINGUM tem o direito de pichar a bandeira de uma nao, colocar fogo, rasgar ou fazer seja l o que for. A bandeira de uma nao no a bandeira do PT nem do Talib. At onde eu sei, a lei pode perfeitamente dar cadeia pra ela se ela pisar por aqui no futuro. Quer reclamar da burocracia? Entra na fila! Mas eu estou rindo at hoje da pisada dela e acho que vou continuar rindo...

No ltimo dia 3, o TechCrunch publicou um artigo de Sarah Lacy no qual a jornalista basicamente mete o pau no governo brasileiro por supostos problemas tcnicos e burocrticos que a impediram de vir ao nosso pas na data em que planejara. O mais relevante, porm, no foi a chiadeira dela, mas a reao de grande parte dos leitores.

Alm de escrever para o TechCrunch, Sarah trabalha para o site da Business Week e o Yahoo! Finance. Abaixo, segue um resumo do contedo de seu texto:

• Sarah decidiu vir ao Brasil para conhecer startups e empreendedores, pois prepara um livro sobre empreendedorismo em mercados emergentes.
• O Brasil era o lugar que ningum no Vale do Silcio insistiu para que ela visitasse, e seu marido at lhe pediu que no viesse, pois ouvira muitas notcias de sequestros e violncia.
• Mas ela estava convencida de que havia um mundo de empresas e histria empolgantes por aqui. Assim, durante cerca de quatro meses estudou portugus e planejou a viagem.
• Seu visto deveria ter chegado no dia 28 de agosto, mas isso no ocorreu com isso, ela perdeu tempo e dinheiro, sendo obrigada a reorganizar seu calendrio.
• Garantiram a ela que o visto chegaria at dia 2 de setembro, mas a nova data tambm no foi cumprida com isso, Sarah perdeu mais tempo e dinheiro.
• Ela trocou a passagem ao Brasil por uma China.
• Aparentemente, o governo brasileiro decidiu mudar para um novo sistema de computadores em seus consulados, e esse processo tem causado severos atrasos Sarah foi vtima disso.
• Ela conclui dizendo o seguinte:

Voc quer investimento externo e ateno, Brasil? Eis uma ideia: DEIXEM AS PESSOAS ENTRAR NO MALDITO PAS. Voc quer mostrar seu valor de TI? Que tal equipar seus consulados com sistemas de computadores que funcionam? Ou talvez implantar [a mudana] lentamente, para que outros postos possam cuidar da demanda. Ou treinar pessoas primeiro.
O pas deveria se sentir embaraado, e suas empresas deveriam estar furiosas. Vou planejar tentar todo esse negcio de Brasil novamente em dezembro ou janeiro. No por culpa dos empreendedores ou dos nossos leitores que isso aconteceu, e ainda acredito que h timas histrias no Brasil que eu vou querer contar. Mas ser um pas mais difcil de entrar do que a China no um bom indcio para o investimento externo, Brasil.

O texto de Sarah gerou muita polmica, com cerca de 500 comentrios no TechCrunch e repercusso em outros sites, alm de um interessante artigo de Paul Carr (que j ultrapassou os 450 comentrios) no mesmo blog.

Carr diz que, se tivesse uma startup, estaria puto, pois teria perdido uma oportunidade mostrar seu negcio para algum de fora do pas.

Ele nota que a maioria dos leitores que comentaram ataca Sarah e a poltica norte-americana de vistos. Alguns deles usaram palavras como reciprocidade' e troco', e muitos sugeriram furiosamente que ela deveria ter comeado a solicitar o visto mais cedo. Houve ainda reclamaes montagem da bandeira brasileira e afirmao do marido sobre a violncia no Brasil.

Confuso diante de tanta agressividade, Carr releu o texto de Sarah para ver se no deixara passar algum trecho batido um pedido para que o Brasil seja bombardeado de volta idade da pedra ou uma insinuao de que as mulheres do pas no so limpas, por exemplo. Mas no, ela realmente havia apenas reclamado que uma atualizao de computadores causou inconvenincias a ela e outros viajantes que j tinham seus vistos aprovados, mas que no o receberam no dia prometido.

Uma reclamao completamente vlida. Mas que gerou centenas de comentrios raivosos.

Assim, h basicamente dois grandes problemas nos comentrios sobre o post de Sarah: grande parte deles (1) foge do assunto principal a suposta falha tcnica e burocrtica do governo brasileiro e (2) demonstra excessiva agressividade.

Planejamento, bandeira, violncia, reciprocidade. A maior parte dos comentaristas concentrou-se nesses pontos e fugiu do mais importante no texto de Sarah.

Sim, ela poderia ter solicitado o visto mais cedo, usado outra imagem para ilustrar o post e, sei l, casado com um homem que no liga para a falta de segurana em outros pases. Os Estados Unidos poderiam ter um processo menos caro, desgastante e irritante para os brasileiros conseguirem o visto.

Que seja.

Nada disso muda o fato de que Sarah no recebeu seu visto na data prometida. Duas vezes. Nada disso muda o fato de que as startups brasileiras perderam uma boa oportunidade de divulgar seus negcios para a mdia do exterior. Culpa, segundo a jornalista, do governo brasileiro.

Esse o cerne da questo, ignorado na maioria dos comentrios.

No digo que Sarah no merece crticas. Muito pelo contrrio. Como nota o Valleywag, ela aparentemente no solicitou o visto a tempo, pois teve que recorrer a um tipo de servio de despachante e foi a dona desse servio que a informou sobre os problemas consulares. No duvido que o Brasil realmente tenha atrasado a entrega do visto de muita gente, mas existe tambm a possibilidade de a empresa ter cometido falhas e jogado a culpa para o governo brasileiro, e Sarah no levou isso em conta.

Enquanto isso, Jenna Wortham, do New York Times, conseguiu entrar aqui sem problemas, o que levou Peter Kafka, do All Things Digital, a dizer no Twitter que ela deveria dar dicas de visto a Sarah.

Para piorar, o artigo de Sarah exala certa arrogncia. Esta definitivamente a pior coisa que j ocorreu ao Brasil, Sarah Lacy no ser autorizada a visit-lo... Epic-est fail', de fato, ironizou o Valleywag.

Tanto Sarah quanto os seus leitores tm direito a criticar. Mas preciso uma ateno especial quando muitos dos que comentam fogem do assunto principal (o atraso na entrega do visto) e, pior, atacam o autor do texto com argumentos rasos (ou nenhum), ofensas absurdas e alto nvel de agressividade incluindo at ameaas. Por que tudo isso ocorreu? Como as coisas chegaram a esse ponto?

Paul Carr d a dica.

Ele diz que foi contratado pelo TechCrunch para ser o controverso, para dizer coisas inflamatrias e incitar debates furiosos entre idiotas. Como seus textos provocaram muito menos comentrios do que o de Sarah, Carr diz que passar a usar ttulos como estes abaixo, deliberadamente provocativos:

O Estado de Israel passou dados RIAA?
Aquisio do Last.fm pela CBS: o mais inteligente acordo norte-americano com um alemo desde Wernher von Braun?
Educao dos EUA no produziu um aluno decente desde o atentado de Oklahoma: ento por que to difcil para terroristas estrangeiros conseguir vistos H1B?
Os fanboys do Brasil: por que os usurios latino-americanos de Mac so ainda mais insuportavelmente presunosos do que aqueles no resto do mundo
Os franceses so preguiosos, os americanos so preguiosos, os britnicos tm dentes ruins, os palestinos so todos terroristas, e os suos ficaram ricos com ouro nazista e tudo culpa da AT&T
V se foder, Blgica

Brilhante.

O erro de Sarah foi falar mal de um pas. No caso, o Brasil.

Erro entre aspas porque o grande problema daquele post no o texto dela, mas os comentrios, que demonstram um nacionalismo exacerbado em manifestaes insanas e sem razo, no raras vezes aproximando-se da xenofobia e do racismo.

A questo aqui no o nacionalismo em si, mas alguns atos que derivam (em parte) dele. Essas reaes extremadas parecem ser infelizmente cada vez mais comuns, principalmente com o relativo anonimato proporcionado pela internet.

Crticas em geral podem atingir as pessoas de diferentes maneiras, provocando reaes variadas. Quando elas envolvem um sentimento de identificao como o nacionalismo , as reaes frequentemente so mais colricas e menos racionais.

Repito: no um problema (apenas) do nacionalismo. No prprio post de Sarah os comentrios ofensivos no so apenas de brasileiros. Muita gente de outros pases tambm meteu o pau nos Estados Unidos. Por qu? Provavelmente rolou uma identificao com os brasileiros em maior ou menor escala, o antiamericanismo um sentimento muito difundido pelo mundo.

Outro exemplo: futebol. Mesmo entre amigos, quando critico outros times, preciso tomar cuidado. Se no, acontece isto:

Voc viu o Juvenal Juvncio? O cara um...
Ah, t falando o qu? Vocs tm o Andres Sanchez!
Sim, eu tambm no sou f do Andres, mas...
Deixa o meu time em paz!

Pois torcer por um clube envolve um sentimento de identificao. Ento no raro eu preciso criticar o meu prprio time ou fazer algum tipo de ressalva antes de falar sobre o time dos outros, para desarmar o meu interlocutor. Eu sei que no Corinthians assim e assado, no gosto disso e daquilo. Ponto. Mas agora quero falar do Palmeiras.

Mesmo quando o assunto tecnologia, vemos reaes exageradas de gente que de alguma maneira se identifica com Apple, Linux, Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, Canon, Nikon...

Esse sentimento de identificao seja com nao, clube, marca, filosofia, religio ou qualquer outra coisa comum, aceitvel e muitas vezes incontrolvel. Mas ele no pode justificar atos extremos e irracionais, que no raras vezes tm consequncias graves.

necessrio haver maior tolerncia a opinies alheias, especialmente quando elas tocam em assuntos que envolvem sentimentos. Obviamente, no h uma soluo evidente para isso se houvesse, o mundo seria um lugar bem mais pacfico , mas no por isso que vamos ignorar esses excessos, deixar de debat-los. Talvez no exista de fato uma soluo definitiva para a intolerncia, mas h como diminu-la e discutir o problema certamente faz parte desse processo.

A intolerncia generalizada pode ser consequncia de uma tolerncia excessiva. Para ficar no caso do TechCrunch, a internet um ambiente to tolerante que acaba dando espao a manifestaes de intolerncia. Nesse caso, o desafio estabelecer os limites da tolerncia ela no pode servir como subterfgio para atos de intolerncia.

Como voc vai nas suas resolues de Ano Novo?
No fiz nenhuma.
Note que, para algum se aperfeioar, ele precisa ter alguma ideia do que bom. Isso envolve certos valores.
Mas como todos sabemos, valores so relativos. Cada sistema de crenas igualmente vlido, e precisamos tolerar a diversidade. Virtude no melhor que vcio. apenas diferente.
No sei se consigo tolerar tanta tolerncia assim.
Eu me recuso a ser sacrificado segundo noes de comportamento virtuoso.

O Brasil supostamente falhou com Sarah, e ela tem todo o direito de reclamar disso, assim como ns temos liberdade para critic-la. Mas tudo isso deve ocorrer dentro de certos limites que, a meu ver, foram respeitados pela jornalista, mas ignorados por grande parte dos leitores que deixou comentrios no post.

Quando os limites so desrespeitados, a liberdade de expresso perde um pouco do seu sentido. A manuteno desse direito passa pelo controle dos limites da tolerncia.

by publius

I'd give it a big "eh." Tonight's strategy seemed right, but the execution could have been better.

My hope tonight was that Obama would focus more on the human side. The debate has been getting bogged down in costs, and CBO reports, and new commissions, etc. All that stuff is extremely important -- but it's also very hard for the public to follow these types of policy minutiae.

And so I liked Obama's initial focus on "what's in it for you." That side of the debate should be more loudly emphasized because, at the end of the day, it's the most important. But Obama just didn't pull it off all that well, either in delivery or in the questions (Kevin Drum seems to agree). Anyway, maybe the point was just to get quotes in tomorrow's papers and to refocus coverage. As a live performance, though, he could have done better.

One last point on the whole "shouldn't we slow down" question... We don't have to analyze this question in the abstract. The stimulus debate provides good guidance.

Remember that the Republicans were saying "let's think about this," "let's slow down," etc. Now, if they had actually been interested in stimulating the economy more efficiently, fine. But that's not what they used the delay for -- they used it to drag things out and to kill the stimulus by a thousand cuts. Each day brought new demagoguery on things like honeybees.

If we were living in some sort of Platonic ideal of The Republic, fine. We could study things and enact the very best plan possible. But in this world, we have John Boehner. And delay at this point means death to reform.

by publius

Tomorrow's NYT takes a look at the fall of Sarah Palin over the past few months. The theme that emerges is that Palin simply wasn't ready for the glare of the spotlight. In particular, the NYT describes Palin as overly obsessed with -- and distracted by -- criticisms. She apparently felt the need to answer them all.

To me, this hair-trigger sensitivity was a function of her inexperience. It's easy to forget just how meteoric her rise was. She went from a small-town nobody mayor in 2006 to governor. And even then, most people had never heard of her until McCain picked her. Basically, she went from nobody to world celebrity in 24 hours. As a result, she never had time to develop the thick skin that successful politicians must eventually acquire.

Indeed, one of the overlooked benefits of political experience is that you develop scars. Sure, experience helps you learn issues and the media game and all that. But it also hardens you. You learn over the years to take your blows, pick your battles, and adjust to reading savage attacks on you and even your family. You learn not to be debilitated by it.

This proven toughness was always Clinton's strongest virtue. Whatever her flaws, I had no doubt that she could take a punch and punch back. With Obama, I was never 100% sure. But even Obama developed scars before it was all over. He took his lumps over a grueling two year period and excelled. Palin, by contrast, had a few days. She needed more time -- and more battles.

It's a lot like childhood vaccines. Children don't get all their vaccinations at once. They get them progressively over years -- and they become progressively more resilient. Seasoned politicians have to learn to be resilient.

And that, ultimately, was Palin's problem (well, one of them). Everything came at once, and too fast. And she simply folded under the pressure.

I'm not saying I could do better -- it's an insanely difficult game to master. But it is a reason why she should have never been picked in the first place.

by publius

The Obama campaign has a problem -- it needs more revenue for health care coverage reform. But increasing revenue is politically problematic.

One potential source of funding is to tax employees' group health benefits by imposing a modest cap on the amount that can be excluded. It raises revenue, and it's actually good progressive policy. The problem, however, is that Democrats are terrified to do it. And as Jon Cohn reports, Reid has apparently vetoed the proposal.

Hopefully, we'll find money elsewhere - the reform is too important. But a lot of the blame here falls squarely on the Obama campaign's demagoguery. They bashed McCain over the head with this, and now they've penned themselves in. McCain's proposal wasn't bad because of the tax per se, but because it would have thrown people out of employer health care and into a not-regulated-enough individual market where they lack bargaining power, information, low deductibles, good coverage, etc.

It's just another a reminder that what you say before the election matters. If you say the things you want to do, you have a mandate and political cover to do them. If you don't, you won't.

And one last general point -- the campaign attacks also reinforced the broader anti-tax narrative that is hurting progressive priorities and, by extension, the nation. At some point, that narrative has to change.

In September I wrote a blog post about reading RSS feeds for, if not at, your work. (Reading Blogs at Work: Why You Should Do It & How You Can Make it Worthwhile) One of the things I discovered in writing that post was the fantastic weekly carnival of medical blogs called the Grand Rounds. This wonderful series has been running for more than 4 years now and many of its participants put great care into their hosting efforts. When it's their turn to play host the solicit, search for, organize and sometimes summarize an awesome selection of the best posts on medical blogs that week.

Unfortunately, I haven't found any way to subscribe to an RSS or email list of those posts and I've looked really hard! Tonight I'm preparing for a presentation I'm giving tomorrow to a medical tech and civil liberites organization and I really wanted to make such a subscription available for them. So I bit the bullet and made it myself. It was not as easy as I'd like and is going to take a few minutes each week for me to maintain so if any participants are here reading this and would like to take it over, I'll show you below not just how I created the feed but how you can help too.

Read on for RSS and email subscription options and step by step instructions describing how this was done. I hope the first commenter from the medical blogging community who stops by will break my heart by showing me an existing RSS subscription option that I just haven't found yet.

Here's the feed, give it a click: http://feeds.feedburner.com/GrandRoundsFeed

And if you'd like to subscribe by email here's a form to do that with.

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner

I tried a lot of things that didn't work and this is the solution I came up with. It should be reusable in other contexts of course, not just with Grand Rounds.

Step One

Thankfully, there's already a starting place because Dr. Nicholas Genes, a resident in the Emergency Medicine program at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, keeps a Google Calendar of all past and future hosts of the Grand Rounds embedded in a four year old post on his blog.

I clicked the plus button in that embed to subscribe to the calendar in my Google Calendar so I'll see when and where future editions are being hosted. Unfortunately there's no permalinks to the particular posts available, it's just links to the home pages of the host blogs.

Step Two

What I'm going to do is click on each link that comes into my calendar each Tuesday morning, visit the host blog, find the permalink to the Grand Round post and tag it grandroundsfeed in my Delicious account.

Step Three

Delicious publishes an RSS feed for everything I as a user tag as grandroundsfeed. I took that RSS feed and put it through FeedBurner. Feedburner lets me keep track of how many subscribers there are, add a link to the end of every item that says please visit Marshallk.com and take over maintance of this feed from me please, offer subscription to the links by email, transfer control of the feed to another Feedburner account holder when someone capable volunteers and perhaps most importantly, it lets me switch out the source feed when the time comes to be instead the feed of someone else's delicious account items tagged grandroundsfeed (or any other tag of their choosing).

That's it! It's as simple as that. If no one volunteers to tag the new link each week, I'll just keep doing it mself. It will only take 2 minutes and it's a great public service for an awesome round up of content. We could create a widget that displays these links each week, we could do all kinds of things with it. I'm fantasizing about a combination of Dapper.net, PostRank and maybe one other tool to create a best of Grand Rounds feed that would deliver only the most popular links from the entire collection each week. I probably won't take the time to try to figure that out, but I think it's doable.

Subscription options are, again, up above these instructions. Obviously if you're interested in getting any help with projects like this for your organization, drop me a line, but hopefully these instructions are clear enough that you could do it yourself with one hand tied behind your back.

In the mean time enjoy the awesome medical blogosphere round ups. If you want to see some examples, recent ones include Dr. Deb's adorable iTunes playlist version and the wacky Grand Round in the form of medical blog posts re-interpreted as job advice for Barack Obama over at Musings of a Distractable Mind. See also the recent edition at the very nicely produced Nurse Ratched's Place. Next week is at Canadian Medicine. I just linked to particular recent posts of all of these blogs so they'd get a trackback notification about this post. Is that trackback spam? I don't think it is.

Happy feed creation in whatever fields you're in!