Dan Romero

You may have already heard about it from Rob, but we launched the StrawPoll Platform today. Now any Twitter user can easily poll his or her followers. Whether it's to determine the outcome of a Batman/Spider-Man fight or simply where to have the weekly happy hour, StrawPoll can now assist you in your quest for answers.

Posting has been quite sporadic here over the last couple of months. School, work, and life had gotten to be a little too much. So the blog obviously suffered a bit. But I will hopefully get back to posting on my semi-regular basis fairly shortly.

The 2008 election is still almost 10 months away yet from the media coverage you would think it was Columbus Day weekend. For some this may be too much (and with the writer's strike, another reason not to turn on the TV), but despite the negative campaign ads and talking-heads, this election definitely has had some highlights. From the user submitted questions for the CNN/YouTube presidential debates (this guy's song was hilarious) to Barack Obama's MLK-esque victory speech, all of a sudden the words "innovative" and "fresh" are being used in the same sentence as "presidential campaign."

And with the first two primaries having had 4 different winners (and maybe 5 after Michigan votes today), things are really starting to heat up. But what recently caught my attention was a paragraph in an recent op-ed piece by Wiliam Kristol about GOP candidate Mike Huckabee:

He came up from modest origins. He served as governor of Arkansas for more than a decade. He fought a successful battle against being overweight. These may not be utterly compelling qualifications for the presidency. I'm certainly not ready to sign up.

What's interesting here is that Huckabee has successfully dealt with a problem that nearly a third of Americans currently suffer from: obesity. In 2005, well before announcing his run for the White House, Newsweek featured an interview with Huckabee regarding his weight loss and his efforts behind an anti-obesity campaign launched with former President Bill Clinton and the American Heart Association.

Unfortunately, Huckabee's site has no mention of his dramatic weight loss and his advocacy for a slimmer America. I would think that such an impressive accomplishment would be highlighted and used as a building block for his health care policies in general.

Candidates can argue all they want about how their health care packages will save America, but as long as high fructose corn syrup remains king, we are still going to have problems.

While flying home for Thanksgiving, I noticed a couple of passengers without any carry-on items. As a person who always seems to have a carry-on and a "small personal item" (a backpack), I was amazed to see fellow passengers without any bags. The idea of the no baggage traveler intrigued me enough that yesterday I tried flying with nothing but a copy of William Zinsser's On Writing Well.

The result? The best flight I have ever taken. I floated on and off the plane and and airport security was a breeze - no waiting for the bag to clear the X-ray machine. Just my book and me - call it air travel lite.

For those interested in in air travel hacking, Lifehacker has a guide for power travelers and as well as an"air travel tip" tag. 43folders also has a decent travel hacks wiki page.

Looks like Facebook is dropping its mandatory "is" in its status updates sometime in the near future. While hardly newsworthy (yet it's the top story on Techmeme), it's definitely interesting. I have always thought that Facebook status updates were the perfect evolution of crafty IM away messages. And with the rise of Twitter and the whole micro-blogging phenomenon, I think Facebook might be realizing what a real gem they have.

I am a firm believer that the Twitter phenomenon will eventually catch on and spread like a wildfire throughout the SMS-crazed college demographic. The big question is who will capture this market? As much as I love Twitter, I would have to think Facebook will win this.

That is, of course, if Facebook can actually make status updates more like tweets. Right now, updates are just News Feed (or as they say at Duke - stalk feed) fodder. Imagine if you said "hungry" and you were instantly sent a list of your closest friends who were also hungry. Now that would be slick.

Jason Kottke, probably my all-time favorite blogger, has been trying "something new" recently:

In the interest of growing the site beyond its current boundaries (i.e. me having to be seated in front of a computer 24/7/365), I'm trying something new on kottke.org. Starting tomorrow and continuing through next Tuesday, Joel Turnipseed will be editing the site.

While Joel has done a phenomenal job thus far, especially in his recent interview with Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow, I don't know if I am a fan of his style. His posts are simply too long.

One of the reasons kottke.org has been at the top of my list stems from the fact that most of Jason's posts are short, bite-sized blurbs about links. He calls them remaindered links. I like to think of them as examples of what all bloggers should do: link to the interesting content while still adding something to the conversation yourself. Granted someone needs to create the longer content, but a blogger doesn't always have to create it.

So my advice to future kottke.org editors is to keep things smart and short, for the most part.

As NaNoWriMo kicks off today, I too will be working on a "novel" this month. It's a twenty page term paper for my political science class on U.S. economic foreign policy. The topic? The U.S. sanctions against Iran and how European countries have responded to such policies.

Now don't flood my inbox with requests to see a rough draft. I know how fascinating it sounds! But seriously, this topic will hopefully be worthwhile, especially since Iran seems to be the 2008 race's foreign policy focus at the moment.

Anyways, I will be blogging about my experience and any interesting readings I find on the web will find there way on to here or the linklog.

I just got done reading two great posts from Steve Karp on Publishing 2.0. Not only were they incredibly thoughtful and interesting, they were great examples of how tech/new media blogging should be done.

I read a fairly large number of blogs. Okay, maybe not as many as Robert Scoble, but still more than the average Joe. My Google Reader stats inform me that I am currently subscribed to 74 feeds and in the past month I have "read" a little over 2500 posts. That's a lot of information.

For quite a while I prided myself in keeping up with the nitty gritty - knowing about all the different popular memes, what new company was launching, who was raising a third round of financing from Sequoia, etc... I still do pay attention to such things, but I don't find them nearly as interesting. Long gone are the days where I would read the combined daily posts of Techcrunch, Engadget, Mashable, Read/Write Web, and GigaOm, with Scoble's Google Reader shared feed and Hacker News thrown in to pick up the things the big guys missed. Today the only one I read on a daily basis is Techcrunch (and I skim most posts). Engadget with its massive quantity of posts and Mashable's recent lack of quality (i.e. 200+ web 2.0 links for web designers) have been pruned from my feed list.

So what am I reading these days? Thoughtful analysis. According to my stats I have read 100% of the posts from the following blogs: Daring Fireball, kottke.org, Signal vs. Noise, Rough Type, Scripting News, PMarca, A VC and last but not least Publishing 2.0. These guys add stuff to the conversation. They don't regurgitate news, they offer perspective. Sure sometimes there will the occasional news post of which I am already aware, but these guys, with a witty one liner, can make the news worth hearing about again.

Analysis is what's interesting, especially in an age where we are increasingly connected to information streams. We need media to give us better perspective through interviews and investigative reporting.

Seth Godin's recent post on the Wikipedia gap was quite interesting. And it got me thinking.

In the real world, there are few, if any, times when a person has to do something completely from memory. If someone wants to know the date the Treaty of Versailles was signed, they will simply Google it, not try to recall it from the days of 10th grade Western Civ. I am not saying that learning how to commit things to memory is not important either.

I think Seth is right on when he says:

Here's what just about every exam ought to be: "Use Firefox to find the information you need to answer this question:" And as the internet gets smarter, the questions are going to have to get harder. Which is a good thing. Until teachers get unstuck, our kids are going to be stuck and so will we.

America's schools should be focused on empowering students to find information on the Web, not memorize soon forgotten facts from a history textbook. Function over form people.

Shooting straight up to the top of Techmeme, Google is slowly rolling out IMAP support for Gmail. Most of the coverage seems to be focused on how users will be able to use "advanced email clients like Outlook and Thunderbird." While this is good, it's not what I am the most excited about.

What is? Well, now I can actually use my iPhone's email feature. No more endless POP3 streams of already read messages. I feel so alive.