If a super simple "To Do" manager is what you need then TeauDeux might fit the bill

Credit: The White House

• Nope, that's not Wall-E in the front row of the White House theater, sitting between Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, as we first thought. Through the miracle that is the "original size" feature on Flickr, you can zoom in and see that it's actually some kind of a purse. Probably Spielberg's.
• As part of Michelle Obama's "Let's Move!" campaign, the White House is running an Apps for Healthy Kids competition that offers up $40,000 in prize money for "innovative, fun and engaging tools and games that encourage children directly or through their parents to make more nutritious food choices and be more physically active." The contest seems to bring together some of the Obamas favorite things: vegetables and open government; they want developers to make use of the USDA's nutrition data that it recently released through Data.gov.
• The federal highway folks have was seems to be a new zoomy-in map of federal highway projects.
• And Ben Smith's "Remainders" end-of-the-day link post (which, we freely admit, inspired our "Clearing the Cache" regular feature) figures into a plot line on the rather enjoyable new CBS drama The Good Wife. What a world!

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Credit: The White House

• Nope, that's not Wall-E in the front row of the White House theater, sitting between Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, as we first thought. Through the miracle that is the "original size" feature on Flickr, you can zoom in and see that it's actually some kind of a purse. Probably Spielberg's.
• As part of Michelle Obama's "Let's Move!" campaign, the White House is running an Apps for Healthy Kids competition that offers up $40,000 in prize money for "innovative, fun and engaging tools and games that encourage children directly or through their parents to make more nutritious food choices and be more physically active." The contest seems to bring together some of the Obamas favorite things: vegetables and open government; they want developers to make use of the USDA's nutrition data that it recently released through Data.gov.
• The federal highway folks have was seems to be a new zoomy-in map of federal highway projects.
• And Ben Smith's "Remainders" end-of-the-day link post (which, we freely admit, inspired our "Clearing the Cache" regular feature) figures into a plot line on the rather enjoyable new CBS drama The Good Wife. What a world!

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In Russia, bloggers are angrily rejecting the government's explanation of a car crash that killed a well-known Moscow doctor and another woman. (Hat tip, @KatrinaNation) In the wake of the crash, law enforcement officials blamed the two women, saying the drove their Citroen into on-coming traffic. Only thing is, a number of witnesses saw a black Mercedes swerve and hit the women's car -- a Mercedes that had a special license plate given to elites in Moscow and that happened to be driven by an executive with the Russian oil giant LUKoil. And that's tapping into anger over the special treatment that political and economic elites get in Moscow today.

Over on Global Voices, Alexey Sidorenko has the story of what happened next, beginning with the fact that "many people noticed how the official version of the road accident did not make any sense to start with."

In brief, Russian bloggers are poking hole's in the government's story, producing video mock-ups showing the implausibility of the government's explanation, organizing opposition, and making mashups that depict the LUKoil exec as a evil doer straight out of "South Park." Really, Sidorenko's full post is worth a read. Voice of America also has good coverage of this and other, similar car crashes in Russia.

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Oceania road shows create a stir in the travel community about the new Marina

Cool games for the iPhone that will pass the time

Katherine Heigl and her Grey's Anatomy character "Izzie" are missing from the set. What's the mystery?

Credit: DARPA

Back in December, DARPA, the folks at the Department of Defense who (sorta) brought us the Internet, celebrated the 40th anniversary of said Internet with a contest. DARPA moored 10 red weather balloons across the country, and challenged people to use the real-time mobilization and ad hoc team building made possible by the Internet to find just where each balloon happened to be stationed. It took a team from MIT all of nine hours. They got $40,000 -- shared amongst the people online and off who helped them track down the balloons.

Folks liked the contest. Both Aneesh Chopra and Beth Noveck use DARPA's red balloon experiment as an example in their public speeches. In a memo released earlier this week (pdf), the White House announced that they're building a web platform to make more contests like DARPA's possible, to be released sometime in the next four months. Importantly, the Office of Management and Budget is also working with agencies to dot the legal i's and cross the contracting t's it will take to pull off government-sponsored contests. "[I]t is Administration policy to strongly encourage agencies" to hold contests and award prizes.

The White House recommends prizes and contests in six areas: "exemplar prizes" for people who are really good at something, "point solution" prizes for problems that need addressing, "exposition prizes" that celebrate things people are already doing well, "participation prizes" of the "let's all lose weight!" variety, and "market stimulation" prizes aimed at getting people to make big advancements in a certain field. NextGov's Aliya Sternstein has more.

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Check out Ning CEO Gina Bianchini being interviewed by Charlie Rose.  It is a good interview, made better by the fact that one of our clients, the Pickens Plan, is mentioned as an example of how custom social networks can be used in the public affairs / political space. 

Apple will be the loser, whether they win or lose in court.

His Washington Post column wonders why journalists aren't calling out Fox News. Someone show him the Internet.

Another Islamic militant attack in Pakistan

Family members who hoard, and those who love them

Really, what is there to add?

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Natasha Cossell was struck in the head with a golf ball while traveling in a taxi

They say that the political blogosphere is more polarized than the world at large. For once, there's actually a "they" there -- GW professors Eric Lawrence, John Sides, and Henry Farrell (via Andrew Sullivan). Their new study finds that 94% of readers of political blogs only political blogs on their own side of the ideological spectrum. Here's the abstract:

We find that blog readers gravitate toward blogs that accord with their political beliefs. Few read blogs on both the left and right of the ideological spectrum. Furthermore, those who read left-wing blogs and those who read right-wing blogs are ideologically far apart. Blog readers are more polarized than either non-blog-readers or consumers of various television news programs, and roughly as polarized as US senators. Blog readers also participate more in politics than nonblog readers. Readers of blogs of different ideological dispositions do not participate less than those who read only blogs of one ideological disposition. Instead, readers of both left- and right-wing blogs and readers of exclusively leftwing blogs participate at similar levels, and both participate more than readers of exclusively right-wing blogs. This may reflect social movement-building efforts by left-wing bloggers.

Here's where it gets particularly interesting for our purposes. Research cited in the study finds that, contra the current state of blog reading practices, exposure to a wider range of political perspectives helps to make blog readers more tolerant. But it is also associated with depressed levels of political engagement. To flip it around, you consume more news (online, and, perhaps, on cable TV) and get more politically engaged -- but it's a polarized, less tolerant engagement. Tricky. Grab a copy of Self-Segregation or Deliberation? Blog Readership, Participation, and Polarization in American Politics here.

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What is so amazing about Opinion Space is that Secretary Clinton is open to a project where we are not sure what the results will be. This is the true essence of innovation -- being open to results that might go either way.

-- studioBenZion founder Ari Wallach on Opinion Space, the experiment launched yesterday by the U.S. State Department (via email). Both intriguing and somewhat confusing, Opinion Space aims to map global public opinion in such a way that moderation receives center stage and consensus is made plainly visual. studioBenZion worked on the project's content and overall strategy. We highlighted the State Department's launch of Opinion Space yesterday.

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Google's OS expected to be available in second half of 2010

Credit: daleonsouth (Photo caption: "Discovered I was without internet a couple of days ago...")

Just days before the Federal Communications Commission is set to make its über-exciting announcement of its new national broadband strategy, the Commission has launched a pair of web tools that empower citizens to measure the current state of American broadband.

The first new web tool from the FCC is the Broadband Speed Test. Input your street address, and the tool uses either the Ookla or M-Lab measuring programs to assess just how fast your Internet connection is, on four metrics -- upload speed, download speed, latency, and jitter (which seems to measure the stability of your hook-up). The exciting bit there is that, accompanied by a push for broadband labelings akin to nutrition labels, consumers might now have a better sense of just how big and steady a pipe they're paying for, and how big and steady a pipe they're actually getting.

The FCC's second new web tool is a "Broadband Dead Zone" tool with which Americans can let the federal government know that they're not getting broadband in their homes, and whether or not they'd like to be.

On one level, the Broadband Speed Test and Broadband Dead Zone finder are a pair of nifty consumer-empowering tools. But they're also more than that, in an institutional sense. Accurate real-time data on where broadband runs in the U.S., how expensive it is, how reliable it is -- that's treated like the Queen's jewels by the telecom companies. Coping with the current state of U.S. broadband is difficult when you're oblivious to what the current state of U.S. broadband really is. What we're looking at here is an attempt to give the government a bit more of an even hand in that relationship.

Not bad for a couple of basic web tools.

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My colleague Andrew MacDowell pointed me to this interesting BBC data visualization of the 100 most popular sites on the Internet.  Check it out.  Interesting thing I learned: Facebook appears to be more dominant in the social networking space than Google is in search.  Interesting thing I learned number 2: MySpace is no longer a top 100 site.