contentious.com

Poly people find themselves with a very large struggle.. There is no lack of love or want that keeps them out of certain relationships. But that doesn’t mean that they should stay in these relationships, either. A lot of genuinely loving relationships can end up being disruptive to the people within those partnerships when those other resources are lacking. And let’s not get into how disruptive they can be for the people around them. That is when the logic wins over love.
This is the hardest part of being polyamorous; knowing that the love doesn’t go away when the relationship does. The cruel hope; optimism leaves you wishing on your favorite star for the missing resources to show up.
Luckily, one of those resources is patience.

"Five years ago, Chris Batty, until this week Gawker’s vice president of sales and marketing, was looking to fill un-purchased ad space on the site. He wanted to forgo the “horrendous creative” of ad networks that litter sites with penny stocks and would keep his sales teams pushing buttons instead of building relationships. Batty sought something prettier, more intimate, more unique for the company’s growing real estate. She didn’t act on Batty’s inspiration, but he did — bringing images of artists’ work to stand alongside Gawker’s blog posts.
"The result was a workaround that gave Gawker full control over its pages’ aesthetics. Born as a stopgap to complement blog posts, Gawker Artists is now taking on an unexpected life of its own — it became a standalone site in 2006 — in large part by thinking of art not merely as a pretty placeholder for text but as something that could survive on its own."

Another good example of a journalist's transparency statement.

Example of a journalist's disclore statement. See: Transparency won't kill you!

"Unsettling as the punditization of the news may be to old-school journalists, there is a powerful cultural reason why Fox, Jon Stewart and other news-with-a-view productions have caught on: Consumers are so overloaded with information that they want someone to tell them what it means.
No fewer than 92% of Americans today “use multiple platforms to get their daily news,” according to a survey conducted earlier this year by the Pew Research Center. However, 70% of respondents felt the volume of news was overwhelming and 50% said they looked to others to help them divine its significance."

"Robert Allbritton wanted to shift away from some of the stuff I thought was most innovative — geo-coding of content, heavy use of aggregation, heavy use of social media, etc. — and put more toward original reporting. I’m all for more original reporting, but not at the expense of the strategic elements that I felt were a large part of the reason we’d been successful."

In this tutorial we discuss the difference between two development approaches: graceful degradation and progressive enhancement. Putting things simply, here are working definitions:
Graceful degradationProviding an alternative version of your functionality or making the user aware of shortcomings of a product as a safety measure to ensure that the product is usable.Progressive enhancementStarting with a baseline of usable functionality, then increasing the richness of the user experience step by step by testing for support for enhancements before applying them.

I've gotta admit, this "anchor" concept really resonates with me. It describes some of the most important relationships I've had in my life, friends and lovers. It's not just a poly thing.

"The deal would also be Google’s boldest foray in local business online advertising, a large and untapped market it has been trying to get into, most recently by promoting Marissa Mayer to oversee the local business and attempting to buy Yelp, the local review site, last year."

"I've always disliked the idea that we have to download apps on our phones when the apps we use on the web are loaded in the browser on demand. But I've accepted the mobile app paradigm as something we will be living with for the next five years. I'm not sure it's five years anymore."

"HTML5 is a specification for how the web's core language, HTML, should be formatted and utilized to deliver text, images, multimedia, web apps, search forms, and anything else you see in your browser. In some ways, it's mostly a core set of standards that only web developers really need to know. In other ways, it's a major revision to how the web is put together. Not every web site will use it, but those that do will have better support across modern desktop and mobile browsers (that is, everything except Internet Explorer)."

If you have an e-mail list, use this to generate instructions for how your subscribers can whitelist your messages

SMS-based crowdsourcing of local civic ideas: "“It’s about people in a specific neighborhood saying let’s put in a garden here,” Barton continues. “I’d say it’s a more nuanced approach to crowd-sourcing, less the winner-takes-all model but rather getting a group to rally around something specific. The entire process is designed for maximum participation to some kind of constructive end. The basic idea was to reinvent public participation for the 21st century.”

"In David Simon’s world, a few brave reporters had the special knowledge and connections to get enforcement of open data and open records. In our world, the government policy needs to make data available as a matter of course, and crowdsourcing tools and communities need to give more people the knowledge and the courage that David Simon had to demand accurate information from the cops.
The world is different. Open data and crowdsourcing give more people the raw information and open government literacy that David Simon had. But we need the organizational structures, funding, and motivation to use them. There’s no guarantee how well the new way will work, but there are tremendous opportunities, and it’s up to us to make them work."

"Both the evangelical Christian yogaphobic position and the Hindu essentialist yoga-belongs-to-Hinduism position reflect religious fundamentalist tendencies to define ideas and practices not as human constructs that are subject to change over time, but as monolithic stable products that belong in specific traditions and accordingly do not belong in others."

Need your Trek fix? Go here, they have most of the episodes from all of the Trek series

" there's no breakdown of "social media" in this view of traffic sources, and with the dramatic rise of social media marketing, marketers need an easy way to segment and "see" this traffic separately from the rest of their referrers. We know it's mixed in with "referring sites" and "direct traffic" but luckily, there's a way to extract that data in just a few simple steps.

Step 1: Create a Custom Segment

Custom segments are the way to go for separating traffic into filter-able buckets for deeper analysis. GA makes this fairly painless…"

I don't agree with everything Barack Obama says or does. But I must say, I am damn proud that the president of my country would speak up to support and encourage LGBT teens to no despair, and to remind them that life gets better. That's leadership.