I finally hit the button in WordPress to upgrade to 3.0 and nothing broke. Yay. Now that I’m running 3.0, I plan on setting up various content types (a new feature in 3.0) to make this blog more Tumblr-like and finally make my own theme (I make them for others, why not myself?). In the meantime I’m rocking the default WordPress 3.0 theme called Twenty Ten, which is actually pretty pleasant to look at.

Earlier, well wondering whether The New York Times would add a local section for the Twin Cities, MinnPost’s David Brauer posted a chart of the top 17 New York Times markets outside its home market. Minnesota ranked 17th by number of subscriptions. But knowing our perennial status as one of the most-literate states, I wondered where we ranked per capita. So I grabbed some quick populations numbers from the Wikipedia, and now here’s David’s graph rejiggered to show that.

We’re 12th. (Note that this is incomplete data since I’m just working with the 16 states and the District of Columbia that David listed.)

One of the more significant announcements from Twitter at this week's Chirp conference was the introduction of Annotations. 

I’m always saddened when I learn an otherwise decent person doesn’t like cilantro. Cilantro makes or breaks guacamole in my book.

The New York Times found at least one doctor who says cilantrophobes are just closed-minded.

“I didn’t like cilantro to begin with,” he said. “But I love food, and I ate all kinds of things, and I kept encountering it. My brain must have developed new patterns for cilantro flavor from those experiences, which included pleasure from the other flavors and the sharing with friends and family. That’s how people in cilantro-eating countries experience it every day.”

“So I began to like cilantro,” he said. “It can still remind me of soap, but it’s not threatening anymore, so that association fades into the background, and I enjoy its other qualities. On the other hand, if I ate cilantro once and never willingly let it pass my lips again, there wouldn’t have been a chance to reshape that perception.”

There’s something otherworldly about Justice John Paul Steven’s resignation letter: the typewriting, the odd (“formal,” I suppose is another word) capitalization, the addressing simply to “The President, The White House.”

This is 2010, isn’t it?

Download now or preview on posterous

20100409-JohnPaulStevens-Letter.pdf (33 KB)

I’ve been reading everything I see on David Simon’s new show Treme set to premiere tomorrow on HBO, including last month’s expansive profile in The New York Times Magazine.

Slate’s Troy Patterson has a more digestible summary of the show, and the first graf pretty well sums it up.

If you need an introduction to David Simon, then this article will be useless to you, and you need to address your cultural illiteracy by arranging an enviable first screening of The Wire, his Baltimore epic. If you do not need an introduction to David Simon, then you do not need an article to tell you what a pleasure it is to watch Treme (HBO, Sundays at 10 p.m.), the new New Orleans-set drama, created by Simon and Eric Overmyer, that exhibits the potential to emerge, like The Wire, as a rich and complicated portrait of the urban South. If you do not think that Baltimore is in the South, then think again, hon. If you are familiar with Simon’s work and do not admire it, then you have my condolences.

All this obsession, and I don’t even have HBO.

My Northeast Minnepolis mainstay The Bulldog has a new beverage book — those binders at the table that every TGI Fridays has. But this is no TGI Fridays beverage book.

The Bulldog doesn’t focus the book on mixed drink concoctions with lame names like most places, but on the beer. That makes sense for a place known for its wide selection of Belgian beers, but they take it one step further by including a glossary of beer terms.

It’s a great way to educate thirsty customers and a nice example of content marketing in the offline world.

Tomorrow is iPad day, and while I won’t be standing in line for one (I recently bought a netbook instead), I’m more than excited at the prospects of the device and, yes, a little jealous of those who are buying an iPad right off the bat. Much of the buzz about the iPad before Steve Jobs’ January announcement for the device centered on it’s potential to replace magazines.

There was no talk about magazines during the announcement and there has been little talk since (though the Wall Street Journal and New York Times apps have everyone excited), but the Mag+ app looks like it could be that killer app that puts the end to magazines on dead trees.

Makes me even more jealous of you iPad-toting bastards.

(via Kottke)

This post has been sitting in my drafts for a while. The Clay Shirky video embedded below is one of my all-time favorite videos about social media and technological sociology. I had a few versions of what I wanted to write about this video, but forget all that; the more I think about it, the more I realize it doesn’t matter; just watch this video if you haven’t seen it before. Or, if you have seen it before, watch it again. 

What matters here isn’t technical capital; it’s social capital. These tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring. It isn’t when the shining new tools show up that their uses start permeating society; it’s when everybody is able to take them for granted. Because now that media is increasingly social, innovation can happen anywhere that people can take for granted the idea that we’re all in this together.
—Clay Shirky