Author: Ryan Sholin
-
Notes on the Cleverness Economy
As a young aspiring writer (of what, I didn’t know), I wrote an awful lot of words in notebooks for the better part of the 1990s, and I mean “an awful lot” to have multiple meanings in this case. All self-deprecation aside, one of the easiest, most satisfying ways to string words together was to…
-
IdeaLab: Q&A 2.0
Over at the PBS IdeaLab blog, I wrote something earlier this week about what I think of as Q&A 2.0, the recent string of modern, general purpose question & answer sites exploring different ways to gather, filter, and deliver information. And that’s the right way to think about it: Gather, filter, and deliver information. That’s…
-
Street by street, block by block
Back in the early days of grad school, when questions about the future of online advertising came up, I was bullish about the future of location-based mobile advertising that would by contextually relevant to the content you were viewing and the place you were sitting. I was wrong about a big piece of how this…
-
We are all technologists now
A company launches a new phone, or is rumored to likely be planning to launch a fancy tablet computer, or a new browser, or upgrading its mobile data network, and thousands (millions?) of us have something to say about it. Really? What do we know about technology, business, strategy, and the machinations of multinational corporations?…
-
About that resolution
Funny thing about writing is that it used to be much easier. Somewhere around 1991, I became one of those kids who didn’t have their textbook with them in class, but always had a spiral-bound notebook with all sorts of strange numbers and notations on the covers, and nothing but my guts spilled inside, in…
-
Blog posts I have written and not written this year
Hey, would ya look at that, the year’s almost over. And while I’m not the biggest fan of arbitrary divisions of time, I sure do like making lists. Year-end lists are little nuggets of candy that fall from the sky like sweet, sweet hail, and every now and then, it’s the end of a decade,…
-
What I would fund: An imaginary challenge for news business models
Last night, I was browsing this year’s public Knight News Challenge entries ahead of the midnight deadline to enter, and I caught myself thinking about what the project doesn’t fund when it comes to supporting journalism. And the answer appears to be business models. My friends at the Foundation might dispute this, or maybe not,…
-
Items that recently have caught my attention
Reading The Top 10 Stories You Missed in 2009 Published at Foreign Policy on December 14, 2009. Global warming, international relations, Iraq, Chechnya, and more — but not the headlines you were expecting. An important year-end list from Foreign Policy magazine, spotted via kottke.org. From a naval alliance that could shift the military balance of…
-
How to Make an Interactive Area Graph
Nathan at FlowingData provides this Actionscript/Flash tutorial on how to build a graph that looks a bit like those baby name explorers and unemployment charts you’ve seen lately. How to Make an Interactive Area Graph