Mint.com is a phenomenal service.  I first wrote about mint back in Feburary of 2008, and the application has improved dramatically since. Aaron Patzer, Mint’s founder and CEO, published a guest post on TechCrunch today that discusses the current state of the economy — through the eyes of Mint.com.  It’s a fascinating read. You see, Mint.com has real data from real consumers.  They have the ability to track consumer spending habits and trends.  Granted, the population of users who use Mint might not be entirely representative of the general population of the United States...

In a previous post, I discussed how music listening trends could be shown in a very interesting visual manner.  The good folks at Very Small Array have done something similar by presenting a visual representation of Pitchfork Media’s Top 100 Tracks of 2008.  What you see below is some statistical information about the songs, artists and genres culled from a myriad of data sources around the internet.  By looking at this representation, you get a lot of information that you would otherwise gloss over if it was presented in tabular format. Thanks to Very Small Array for putting this together,...

File Under This Is Gonna Go Viral: Rathergood.com presents The LOLCats singing The Cure’s “Love Cats”.

Here is a neat concept:  Have a community of people ask questions of House Speaker John Boehner and vote on what the best questions are.  I sometimes wonder about the effectiveness/necessity of Digg, but doing things like this makes their software very, very worthwhile. Check out the Digg Dialogg with John Boehner here.

For those who are following the news about Hamilton’s Elder-Beerman store closing, here are some related articles from around the web: City Protests Closing of Elder-Beerman (source: Hamilton Journal News) Bon Ton “Firm” on Closing Elder-Beerman (source: Hamilton Journal News) Bon Ton on Motley Fool’s Retail Death Watch (source: Motley Fool) So, it doesn’t look good for the city of Hamilton or Bon Ton.  Although this is painful for the city, I am hopeful that it serves as a wake-up call for our leaders.  We need to diversify our portfolio and take advantage of...

Winter brings time for reflection, doused with a little solitude for good measure.  Winter causes you to slow down, think about what is important in life and appreciate the relationships that you have with others.  This poem by J.R.R. Tolkien has always been a favorite of mine. A print out was hung on my cork board in college, and that same, yellowed paper is now strapped to my refrigerator via a magnet. Enjoy. Bilbo’s Song I sit beside the fire and think of all that I have seen, of meadow-flowers and butterflies In summers that have been; Of yellow leaves and gossamer in autumns that...

Here is a really neat visual representation of my listening tastes for the past 3 months.  Without digging into numbers, charts or tables, you can see which artists I have been listening to in a visually interesting manner. Edward Tufte argues in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, good design reveals the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time and smallest space.  I think that Epson and Last.FM are on to something with this visual display of listening behavior. When I design a web site, I am always taking the user experience into consideration.  How can I relay the greatest...

President Obama, Today you are inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States. Today is the culmination of years of hard work on the part of you and your millions of supporters.  During your campaign, you inspired a nation with your message of change.  You turned non-activists into activists.  You encouraged people to take pride in their country again.  You gave the political process back to the people.  Most importantly, though, you gave us hope. Our country has hope for the return of a morally just America.  We have hope for the ending of a senseless war.  We hope that those who...

Media streaming company, Ustream.tv, has rolled out an iPhone application that will let you stream their broadcasts directly to your phone.  If by some strange, bizarro, outlandishly weird circumstance, you find yourself unable to find a television that is not showing today’s inauguration but have wi-fi available, you will be able to watch it on your iPhone. If you’d like to watch the inauguration from here, I have embedded the UStream feed into this post. Enjoy!

Watching this reminds me why I am so looking forward to Obama taking over on Tuesday.