• Make Each Day Your Masterpiece: Trent Hamm writes a blog called The Simple Dollar, which focuses on managing personal finance. There’s a wealth of information in there about money matters, but this particular post is about former UCLA men’s basketball coach John Wooden, who died June 4, 2101. He was 99 years old. Hamm uses Wooden’s words to inspire us to “seize the day.”

Today is really the only day that matters. You can’t make your past self do anything. You can’t make your future self do anything, either. Your only freedom of choice is right now, and thus today is your one chance to paint your masterpiece.

• Don’t pull all nighters, says 37signals founder: Lauren Rabaino (awesome former CICM intern) recounts her personal experience as an overworked, underslept college student. I can attest to the drain that a lack of sleep can have on both physical health and mental acuity. And squeezing more hours out of the day doesn’t mean you’re more productive. Recently, I’ve been trying to make a point to get more sleep. Read the post and some of the reasons why sleep is important for productivity.

• Don’t Write That e-Book!: Georgina Laidlaw at WebWorkerDaily explains why it might not be the best thing to follow an online trend just because everyone else is doing it. Some good tips on developing your own path to success in the online world.

Journalism Related

• Journalist’s Resource: The Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy put together this web site.

Journalist’s Resource is designed to promote knowledge-based reporting. The site provides access to scholarly reports and papers on a wide range of topics. Journalist’s Resource provides the user with a brief Overview of each study, Teaching Notes and links to other relevant material.

The site includes information about public policy, journalistic ethics, interviewing, style and ethics, and an instructor’s guide. Be sure to check out the section on math for journalists. That said, I’m curious as to why they didn’t create this site as a wiki instead of a WordPress site.

• News and media on the iPad: A mixed bad so far: Mark Briggs scans the horizon to see how the iPad is being used to consume news.

A paid app might offer an incremental revenue stream, but advertising is going to have to carry the water (again). The Craigslist iPad app (which costs 99 cents) has moved into the top spot among paid apps, so the desire to connect with local content – and a local marketplace – is apparent. The opportunity to create something of value, something people will use, without recreating the newspaper or TV news show experience on the platform will determine whether local media can seize this opportunity. Or fall behind and hope to play catch-up as we have done with the web for 15 years.

• iPad for Journalists: Not on the Wires (a blog by a group of multimedia reporters in the UK) posts a video blog with five iPad apps that show how the platform can be used by journalists. (via)

• Bad pageview practices: Marco Arment highlights a quote from Richard Dunlop-Walters about the sorry state of site design that cheats for pageviews. To wit:

Employing tricks like needless pagination, auto-refreshing (see Salon.com), misleading headlines, and the like is cheating. You didn’t earn those pageviews, you tricked people into giving them to you.

Be sure and read the rest of the quote, which contains some salty language. (via)

• Gannett plans to roll out hyperlocal sites: Gannett TV stations are going to partner with DataSphere to provide content to hyperlocal neighborhood news sites in 10 markets. With more newspapers trying to make the hyperlocal equation work, I’d expect more broadcasters to hop on the bandwagon as well.

Activism

• PayInterns.com: Anyone who knows me knows that I despise the practice of unpaid internships. PayInterns is a site set up by Matthew Zinman that seeks to end that practice and replace it with more equitable internships. From an e-mail he sent to me:

At first blush, one might assume that abolition would be counter-intuitive to fostering opportunity for students and employers. To the contrary, our Proposed Reforms take a sensible, phased approach to actualize societal and systemic change with an emphasis on stimulating opportunity, not stifling it.

General Tech Geekery

• Camtasia for Mac: Camtasia is a screencasting tool that has been around for quite a while for the PC. Now, it’s been ported for the Mac. Unlike most screen capture tools, Camtasia allows you to edit and add transitions to the screencast within the software. SnapzPro, for instance, will export the screencast as a .mov file, and you must edit it in another program like iMovie or Final Cut. There’s a free 30-day demo to try it out. I’m trying it for the next month. (Via WebWorkerDaily)

• Starbucks to offer free wi-fi, new portal: Starbucks, which prides itself on its hip brand, has always been a pain when it comes to wi-fi access. You had to pay for an AT&T subscription to access the wireless in store, and the few times I tried to use it, I had trouble accessing the Internet anyway. Now, they are going to be offering free wi-fi in stores, and also this:

Building on the Wi-Fi update, Schultz also revealed plans for a new online customer experience called the Starbucks Digital Network, in partnership with Yahoo!, which will debut later this fall.  This online experience – available only in U.S. company operated Starbucks stores – will be unique in its content offerings, allowing customers free unrestricted access to various paid sites and services such as wsj.com, exclusive content and previews, free downloads, local community news and activities, on their laptops, tablets or smart phones.

While it’s nice to get some of that paid content for free, I don’t know exactly how this Starbucks Digital Network will be so “unique” as to distinguish itself from every other portal on the Internet. We’ll see. (via just about every tech web site on the Internet)

Online Trends

• Neighbors Online: The Pew Internet and American Life Project has a new study that shows more people are using the Internet to communicate within their communities. (via)

Face-to-face encounters and phone calls remain the most frequent methods of interaction with neighbors. At the same time, internet tools are gaining ground in community-oriented communications.

By the way, the Pew Research Center databank is a great place to get raw polling data, as they make most of their datasets available for download. I used this in a research methods seminar a few years ago. There is information to be gleaned from the data that isn’t presented in the formal polling results Pew publishes (like regression analysis).