Obama’s post-SOTU plans? Announcing high-speed rail, of course!

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We’re making some drastic changes, but they’re much-needed drastic changes. People are going to be shocked at some of the directions we’re taking. You have to be comfortable with completely tearing down and throwing away a bunch of ideas.
Digg founder Kevin Rose • Regarding an upcoming redesign of his site. Rose claims the site will be more photo-driven and with a stronger real-time focus, and he claims that most people won’t even think of the site as being the same brand as before. Sound intriguing? Yeah, pretty much. But considering his site isn’t the innovation front-runner it was when it launched (thanks, Twitter), it may be what it needs. source

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From The Guardian The U.K.’s most consistently awesome newspaper has a pretty sweet, well-organized “river” of news.
From The New York Times Not to be outdone, the Times’ “CustomFeeds” prototype allows you to cleanly and simply filter the news.

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Now that research has proven that chips made out of silicon can be made smaller and faster, how long until the chips get a mind of their own? source

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I don’t think people realize how much you have to go through. They think, ‘I have a great idea and I’m going to make a lot of money off it.’ If you have a great idea, that’s only 5 percent of it.
Entrepreneur Robert Stribling • Who’s talking about a new style of juice straws that doesn’t leak all over you if you put it in too fast. He’s spent millions of dollars in research and development but has no takers for his snake oil. • source

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$57,400 cost of the all-electric Tesla Model-S sedan, which is a well-heeled startup company founded by the guy behind micropayment retailer PayPal
two number of top-ten hits Tesla had in the ’80s and ’90s; if they can rock that hard musically, just imagine what their cars are like source

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He’s right, you know Shirky makes this argument that all the stuff that the newspaper industry is doing right now is essentially trying to prop up an unsustainable model ruined by the Internet. Well, yeah. It’s the nature of creative destruction, something I wrote about a couple of months ago. But despite this, the content itself is more popular than ever. We read it because we love it. Even when we bitch and moan about the bias, we secretly love it.
Nothing will work Shirky’s main point: Experiment like crazy. Fail. Lose your shirt. Because you might eventually come up with a new type of thread which is a lot better than the one that held together your crappy shirt. I’d like to think that I got his point without having to be told it bluntly. I think a lot of people I know didn’t really get his point until it hit them in the face so hard that they couldn’t stop staring and they felt stung. It’s creative destruction. Don’t fight it.
Everything might work My friends are getting laid off, event the ones outside the newspaper industry. Newspapers are getting closed. The media feels like a watchdog that’s running out of sweet, sweet kibble. And it’s not because kibble’s in short supply – it’s because it’s getting dumped into a different bowl and it has a slightly different taste. It’s not going back into the old bowl. And you’re going to starve to death eating stale kibble. source

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It’ll be fun to see them try to pull this off. Someone needed to combine the philosophy of Digg with a print product, right? And these guys are all about it – it appears that they’re not newspaper people, even, but smart people with a good idea (and hopefully, money). One interesting thing to note is that they plan to ultra-localize the content they distribute, with the possibility of 100 print editions in Chicago alone (!). Watch out for this one. source

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28 Jan 2010 11:03