I keep arguing in conversations with friends that – once some solid metrics start emerging about the cost/benefit of investing in social media – I think we’ll see cooler heads prevail.

This sort of sets the stage for that kind of scrutiny. Business Insider has an article about some Twitter API data that someone collected and analyzed. Twitter boasts 175 million registered users, but according to their own measure of an “active user” (following at least 30 accounts with a third of those following back), the API data showed that less than 21 million Twitter accounts are active.

The data from the API also showed that 56 million Twitter users are following zero accounts, while 90 million users have zero followers.

I think it would be interesting if someone figured out how to sort by type of user – whether they’re essentially selling or buying. I think that if you were able to pull the sellers out of that pool of 21 million active users, you’d see a dwindling audience that is actually listening.

I’m not saying it’s useless. But it’s a tool, not a solution.

Man, I want to see Bad Writing, if only to hear George Saunders talk about the craft of writing. Speaking of which, I recently listened to an episode of Marc Maron’s podcast interview with Ben Stiller, in which Stiller said that for years he’s been shopping around a script for a movie version of CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, to no avail. I wonder why the studios are scared of it. It would definitely be weird, but I would bet on it being awesome, too.

From the Skateistan website:

Skateistan is Afghanistan’s – and the world’s – first co-educational skateboarding school. Operating as an independent, neutral, Afghan NGO, the school engages growing numbers of urban and internally-displaced youth in Afghanistan through skateboarding, and provides them with new opportunities in cross-cultural interaction, education, and personal empowerment. Skateistan’s students come from all of Afghanistan’s diverse ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. They not only develop skills in skateboarding and skateboarding instruction, but also healthy habits, civic responsibility, information technology, the arts, and languages. The students themselves decide what they want to learn—we connect them with teachers who will enable them to develop the skills that they consider important. Since Skateistan has been active in Kabul, we’ve seen that Afghan youth of all ethnicities, genders, and socioeconomic backgrounds love to skateboard. Skateistan brings them together, equipping young men and women with the skills to lead their communities toward social change and development.

Justuno offers a widget-based tool that allows retailers to promote their active coupons with a coupon button embedded on their websites. The beauty of it is, since it’s essentially a widget, any updates in coupon information are made on the Justuno website, and the changes show up immediately in the retailer’s coupon button, already embedded on their site. No need to change any code.

Research shows that consumers who arrive at a retail website after googling “[retailer's name] + coupon” are ten times more likely to complete a purchase than the average customer. And the most common reason cited for abandoning shopping carts – something I’ve come to learn is a huge issue in online retail – is the cost of shipping. So using Justuno to promote even simple discounts like free shipping seems like a no-brainer to me. If the numbers are correct, the increase in sales should far outweigh the discounts offered. It’ll be interesting to see how well Justuno is adopted into the online retail world.

talk about putting it into perspective

Dimensions offer a wide variety of historical events, environmental disasters, spectacles and festivals whose geographical areas you can overlay over any location using Google Earth. What if Burning Man took place in your town (I bet it’s a lot bigger thank you think)? What if the Great Wall of China started in Texas? (It would stretch from the Gulf of California to Kentucky.) What’s the flight range of a Predator drone?

Pretty cool stuff.

We just aired our July 2010 episode on rural health in Northern California, featuring stories from people living and working in towns all along State Route 299. The map features photos and interviews with people who are in the radio broadcast, plus many more we couldn’t fit into the hour.

I grew up fly fishing on the rivers and streams in this far northern section of California, and have spent some time in many of these towns. It was great to hear host Scott Shafer and reporter Sarah Varney file stories from Weaverville, Trinity Center and Fall River Mills, among other places.

Even greater, in my opinion, is that rather than talking to “experts” on rural health issues from the comfort of a radio studio, we took the show on the road and did all the reporting in the field. I think the show really worked, and the map helps bring a sense of place to Scott and Sarah’s terrific reporting.

photo by Dundas Football Club, used under Creative Commons License

There’s been plenty of talk – rightfully so – of the annoying swarms of bees that are the Vuvuzela horns you hear during the 2010 World Cup.  There reportedly have been more than one million sold since the Cup began last week.

Nothing short of a ban on the horns (it’s not going to happen) would help the players, broadcasters and fans at the matches, but as TV viewers, we thankfully have technology on our side.  A German sound engineer has created a 45-minute sound file you can buy and play during broadcasts.  It’s supposed to cancel out the sound using active noise control, the same way noise-canceling headphones work.

But thanks to another more industrious method, also originally posted by a German (Google translated page), you can just set your computer, stereo or TV equalizer to filter out the sound of the Vuvuzelas.

Apparently, all you have to do is duck your equalizer by at least 40dB at 465Hz and 235Hz.   If you are using your TV equalizer and it doesn’t offer those specific Hz levels, you can probably get away with approximating.

If you really want to get nerdy with it, here’s a video from Lifehacker that shows the before and after results:

With talk bubbling up lately about whether people who are underwater should just treat their home as a bad investment and simply walk away, we decided to take a look at Case-Shiller values over the last 20 years or so. Some markets appear to have climbed back toward their previous peak values – enough that your home might still be a good long-term investment. Other markets look like they have a long way to go, especially if you bought close to the peak.

In researching the topic, I found that a lot of commentary was ignoring the fact that you might live in a recourse state, where the lender can claim more than just your house if you walk. So the map also shows which states allow recourse, and which don’t.

You can find the full activity (discussion, links, embed code) here. If you just want the interactive that I embedded above, you can grab it here.