Released in April of last year in the U.K., Jamie Woon's "Mirrorwriting" has finally made its way to the States thanks to Verve Records. Although the British singer/songwriter is often thrown into the dubstep category, a closer listen to his... | Continue »

The White House loves Twitter, and Twitter loves the White House. How much? Last year, they grew their audience by over one-third, adding another 650,000+ followers to their 2M+ base. There are lots of views into engagement on Twitter, but we have the data to give a unique view into what it looks like from the @whitehouse perspective. We've tracked their activity for the last couple years using ThinkUp to analyze and publicly release large datasets. We decided it might be nice show how the White House engaged their audience last year — without resorting to cheap gimmicks like linkbait... | Continue »

Over the years, a large amount of material from Prince's pre-Warner Bros. debut has surfaced amongst collectors. Prince signed with the label in June of 1977 but his first album "For You" did not see release until April of 1978.... | Continue »

Today, according to the announcement on the BlogPulse homepage, is the day that Neilsen will shutter the longstanding blog analysis and search site. BlogPulse was originally envisioned by Natalie Glance, myself and other colleagues at Intelliseek as a way to... | Continue »

Path.app does not report the correct phase of the moon. Edith Zimmerman on the Making of The Hairpin: I don't read Jezebel -- and there's a reason for that, I don't want it to come off sounding like "Oh, I... | Continue »

Reader beware: huge hunks of my professional career's been spent in the blogiverse. Lest you be tuning in from the distant past, I want to make it clear before we go on that if you're still picking sides on blogging... | Continue »

# Feedback on the U.S. Open Government National Action Plan The White House is once again asking for feedback on its Open Government Initiatives. As you may recall, [we made several recommendations](http://expertlabs.org/2011/08/expert-labs-recommendations-for-open-gov.html) on comment-taking and data.gov the last time they asked for feedback, and we're going to do the same today. Specifically, we're responding to [this request for input](http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/12/06/seeking-your-input-us-open-government-national-action-plan), asking for input around practices and metrics for measuring public participation. Specifically, they're asking about how they should be measuring the outputs of the open government directive. It's a good question, and personally I'm glad they're open to public input here.... | Continue »

Facebook has moved from merely being a walled garden into openly attacking its users' ability and willingness to navigate the rest of the web. The evidence that this is true even for sites which embrace Facebook technologies is overwhelming, and the net result is that Facebook is gaslighting users into... | Continue »

What a week. The news that ThinkUp 1.0 is here inspired an incredible response. We wanted to share some highlights with the community: ReadWriteWeb calls ThinkUp "the social media management tool that matters most" in an effusive review. CNET summarizes ThinkUp's availability with "this is a big deal." Betabeat says that ThinkUp is "not just a convenient way to grab all your data. It’s taking a stand against those who use your data for financial gain." Gigaom writer (and ThinkUp beta tester!) Matthew Ingram emphasizes that the app "makes it easy to see patterns or to analyze the effectiveness of... | Continue »

I did this today. I thought I’d write it up so I can remember for next time. I’m working on another project using Django and have liked using the ORM more than any other of the big Python ORMs out... | Continue »

After 8 alphas, 17 betas, and 1,342 commits by over 60 contributors over the past 20 months, we're thrilled to announce that ThinkUp is now out of beta. Download ThinkUp 1.0 here. For everyone hearing about it for the first time, ThinkUp is the first free app that lets you to archive your Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ activity, a powerful open-source tool for analyzing and searching through the activity of your social networks. Thanks to the hard work of our dedicated, rapidly-expanding development community, we're thrilled to announce this new milestone. A sample of ThinkUp's features: Archive your Twitter, Facebook,... | Continue »

A lot had changed for The Time in 1983. Despite the fact they enjoyed tremendous success with their first two albums, they were essentially written, recorded and produced by Prince. Although they became an extremely tight live band, often upstaging... | Continue »

A long-standing tension in our household is that I believe we should spend about $50 apiece on Christmas presents for each other, buying and making maybe one or two things, and then additionally making a donation somewhere in the other... | Continue »

Before going into the details, let me first couch myself in saying: I really like Steve VanRoekel. I think he was the glue that held together the FCC's New Media endeavors, I think, after meeting with him and talking with him on several occasions, that he's really smart, and I'm really excited that he's the federal CIO. In his first talk in that position, VanRoekel gave an outline of his agenda, the [Future First Initiative](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alexander-howard/federal-cio-vanroekels-future-first_b_1032686.html) and I think, all in all it's great stuff and good thinking. But there's one eensy part of the talk that nudged me the wrong... | Continue »

For the last year I've been using my friend Ben's app Sendtab to manage all the different places I find interesting content. He originally built it as a way to send anything from his laptop to a mac mini attached... | Continue »

Reading Steve Jobs - John Markoff At Macworld, when I asked Mr. Jobs about the idea of an iTouch in a larger "Safari Pad" format, he snapped at me, "I can’t talk about unannounced products." Last night I dreamed I... | Continue »

Over the past year, through 8 alpha and 15 beta releases, ThinkUp has evolved into a rich platform that captures and analyzes data from Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. All this time, the developer community has been more focused on ThinkUp's internal engine than its user-facing look and feel. ThinkUp's current design, generously created by Bill F. at Dash30 in his free time, came together in a piecemeal fashion, bit by bit, as new functionality emerged. So far, we haven't taken a comprehensive, user-focused approach to designing ThinkUp's application interface and design. That's about to change. For the past 7 months,... | Continue »

Requirements: Blog is personal. It can be a part of a more official publisher but the author's voice is their own (like Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic) Blog is mostly original written content. Not a link log or curator (which probably tosses most tumblrs) Blog is active. Writer doesn't have to write every day (or even every week or month for that matter but this question isn't about nostalgia. No former blogebrities with wastelands for websites, please. That's about it. The reason? I don't believe I read many active personal blogs anymore and I know there are still great ones... | Continue »

San Francisco: We have a parade for that. San Francisco: That’s illegal, unless you stand over there. San Francisco: That’s a great idea! (thinking to self: That is terrible.) San Francisco: So passive-aggressive about the homeless we passed a LAW... | Continue »

A couple years ago as I was getting a credit report from Experian (I was about to buy a new car and wondered where I stood credit-wise), I signed up for one of their monthly tracking features. I justified this... | Continue »