Get Satisfaction allows people to post feedback about their experiences with any company they choose, and it encourages companies to visit its site, www.getsatisfaction.com, to respond publicly. Since September, when the site began, people have posted complaints or comments regarding 2,000 companies, and 40 percent of the companies have answered, at no charge to either side

Can you design a better book jacket/cover than this?

If so, Tara Hunt would love your help.

There really are no rules. Just take the words that are there and make the thing look better.

There is a lot of buzz these days about coworking (without the hyphen), a new movement — well chronicled in this recent New York Times article — in which people share a workspace to combat loneliness, forge a community and enjoy the creative sparks generated by like-minded people. But coworking is about much more than sharing a workspace. It is a global movement whose adherents follow certain principles (check out the terrific video at the bottom of this page), including environmental responsibility and a free exchange of ideas. Interestingly, these spaces are not usually run for a profit; they tend to be more mission-focused.

Classical Music. Classical music is our future so take some time to consider it.

Music software that lets anyone compose music. The first music software program designed to teach students and adults how to compose music simply by drawing lines on the screen.

So what is going to be new in 0.9? Lots of bug fixes and improvements to general interpretation of how microformats work. I detailed this in a previous post, but here are some highlights:

Songbird support!
Fixes to make sure things work in Firefox 3
Menus no longer magically disappear on some pages
hCards supports nested menus to access actions (more logical than trying to use adr for multiple addresses)
Nested microformats are now handled per the spec as best we can figure it out
Performance should be much better (and it has been in my experience)

Genbook is the smart way to convert online searches to appointments on your calendar.

Awesome. Now I can build a schedule for SXSW ahead of time!

Nassim Taleb talks about the challenges of coping with uncertainty, predicting events, and understanding history. This wide-ranging conversation looks at investment, health, history and other areas where data play a key role. Taleb, the author of Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan, imagines two countries, Mediocristan and Extremistan where the ability to understand the past and predict the future is radically different. In Mediocristan, events are generated by a underlying random process that is normally distributed. These events are often physical and observable and they tend to cluster around the middle. Most people are near the average height and no adult is more than nine feet tall. But in Extremistan, the right-hand tail of events is thick and long and the outlier, the seemingly wildly unlikely event is more common than our experience with Mediocristan would indicate. Bill Gates is more than a little wealthier than the average. The civil war in Lebabon or the events of 9/11 were more worse than just a typical bad day in the Beirut or New York City. Taleb’s contention is that we often bring our intuition from Mediocristan for the events of Extremistan, leading us to error. The result is a tendency to be blind-sided by the unexpected.

This is a site where people teach & learn online.

For over a decade UK government has been busy moving online. This has made some progress, for example in driver and vehicle licensing, but is yet to take off in terms of usage in the way of some spectacular contemporary Internet examples like Facebook and iTunes.

More than a bit of a historical revision on the story of coworking (like taking the fact that Chris and I and others worked our asses off to help spread the movement), but any article spreading the idea is good.

Professional Screencasting Studio…for Mac

This 2.5 minute video is a result of feedback from our fans. We’ve received a number of requests from people who want their
friends to use the micro-blogging service Twitter, but can’t seem to explain it well. We hope this video helps.