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NA-369-2011-12-29 
No Agenda Show for Thursday December 29nd 2011
Phobos Grunts
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Phobos Grunts
Executive Producers: Sir Ray Jacobsen, Sir David Hoffman, Stevn Jaffe, Sir Paull Alves, Sir Kris Gielen, Spiros Bettas, Mark Lay, Robert Alter, Paul Palcsek
Executive Producer and 368 Club member: Baron Steven Pelsmaeker
Executive Producer and 369 Club members: Sir Kris Gielen, Baron Steven Pelsmaeker
Associate Executive Producers: Herbert Harms, Dr. Anonymous, Massimo Cattaneo, Falko Richter, Sir Borislav 'Bobby' Marinov, Dean Carson
Become a member of the 370 Club, support the show here
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Knighthoods: Ray Jacobsen (Order of the Dish)
Art By: Brad Connell
ShowNotes Archive of links and Assets (clips etc) 368.nashownotes.com
New: Directory Archive of Shownotes (includes all audio and video assets used) nashownotes.com
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NA Christmas Cliptacular No Agenda Show: Too Many Clips
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Cover Art by Thoren 
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NA-367-2011-12-22 No Agenda Show for Thursday December 22nd 2011
Hats of State
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Hats of State
Executive Producer and 367 Club member: Sir Dwayne Melancon,
Associate Executive Producers: Herbert Harms, Andrew Kirby, Anonymous, Jay Ragusa, Dean Carsen
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Knighthoods: Spike, Paul the Book Guy, Armin Breuer
Art By: alba
ShowNotes Archive of links and Assets (clips etc) 367.nashownotes.com
New: Directory Archive of Shownotes (includes all audio and video assets used) nashownotes.com
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Help Design No Agenda News Network Thanks to an awesome new feature Dave put into the Community River, we now have the ability to completely (re)design our very own river at noagendanewsnetwork.com
The layout is done via a simple template, formatted in opml. Here's the current template
All our Community designers have to do is create a new file and send it to me, or perhaps even better, drop into a public dropbox folder and send me the url.
NA-366-2011-12-18 No Agenda Show for Sunday December 18th 2011
Fools & Knaves
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Fools & Knaves
Executive Producers: Dame Francine Hardaway, Alexander Dimitriyadi, Setevn Wittig
Executive Producer and 366 Club members: Dame Francine Hardaway (we threw in the extra buck)
Associate Executive Producers: Jay Kreamer, Scott Morgan
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Art By: Sir Nussbaum
ShowNotes Archive of links and Assets (clips etc) 366.nashownotes.com
New: Directory Archive of Shownotes (includes all audio and video assets used) nashownotes.com
The No Agenda News Network- noagendanewsnetwork.com
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NA-365-2011-12-15 No Agenda Show for Thursday December 15th 2011
Trojan Horse
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Trojan Horse
Executive Producers: Atomic Rod Adams
Executive Producer and 365 Club members: Gavin Williams, Kirk Anne
Associate Executive Producers: Erik Schimek
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Knighthoods:
Art By: Thijs Brouwers
ShowNotes Archive of links and Assets (clips etc) 365.nashownotes.com
New: Directory Archive of Shownotes (includes all audio and video assets used) nashownotes.com
The No Agenda News Network- noagendanewsnetwork.com
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An Interview with Neil Pasricha, author of "The Holiday Book of Awesome" Just in time for the holidays. but really a timeless gift. Enjoy the simple pleasures in life as highlighted in this real lift-me-up book from Neil
Neil's 'Awesome' journey started with his website 1000awesomethings.com and we takllk about his journey and experience.
Purchase a copy of Neil's book in multiple formats on Amazon
This video has been rotated and formatted to fit a non smart-phone screen, it is best viewed in the free Big App Show app.
To view more interviews, app and book reviews, get the Big App Show app for free on Android and iPhone
You can also subscribe to the podcast feed on your mobile device.
Access this page directly at neilpasricha.bigbookshow.com
An interview with Doug Chernack, co-author of "Awkward Family Pet Photos" An absolute stocking stuffer on this appisode of the show. Doug Chernack, co-author of the 'Awkward Family Photo' series talks to me via skype about the latest New York Times best seller: "Awakward Family Pet Photos"
There's a lot more to this than just the photos though, there's the stories behind the pictures and of course Doug and his co-author's future plans for video.
Purchase a copy of Doug & Mike's book in multiple formats on Amazon
This video has been rotated and formatted to fit a non smart-phone screen, it is best viewed in the free Big App Show app.
To view more interviews, app and book reviews, get the Big App Show app for free on Android and iPhone
You can also subscribe to the podcast feed on your mobile device.
Access this page directly at awkwardfamilypetphotos.bigbookshow.com
Twitter's new RSS strategy I've been using twitter rss feeds to follow people and entities I'm interested in for almost a year now.
The benefit I get from this is twofold; the tweets I want to see show up in my river of news aggregator and I don't have to 'follow' someone or for that matter, let them know I follow them, when I am in fact, following them.
A few hours ago I started noticing that links posted in tweets are are being transformed in the user's rss feed. Instead of the url linking to the intended web resources of the tweeted link, it takes you to the original tweet. From here you can click on the link and get to what you were looking for in the first place.
This practice is clearly intended for twitter to recieve a return on their rss investment, by adding an extra click to your navigation through them. Presumably for advertising, tracking and other purposes beneficial to twitter.
It is admittedly a bit annoying, but so is Richard Stallmans feed, which essentially does the same thing, taking you to his website first before you can access the intended link.
I am encouraged by this move from twitter. It shows they see value in continuing to provide rss feeds of their user's content, and at a minimum it means they are hedging their bets.
At best I think this is not the genius of twitter's (the company) management, but of a smart engineer who is one of us, on the inside, showing the value of the feeds. For this, I salute the unknown sysadmin!
[post script] I am seeing some links in rss tweets that are not yet showing the behaviour described above. I'm hoping this is just how twitter features roll out, like thier new interface, it might take several days. On the other hand I could be entirely wrong, in which case I hope this post will give someone @twitter a good idea....
NA-364-2011-12-11 No Agenda Show for Sunday December 11th 2011
Katy Bar The Door, Baby!
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Katy Bar The Door, Baby!
Executive Producers: Sir Richard Scott Bagwell
Executive Producer and 364 Club members:
Associate Executive Producers: Kenneth Alexander, Noel Malenosky, Squire Snuffles, Fredric Gagnon, David Yeagly, Carrie Schšn
Become a member of the 365 Club, support the show here
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Knighthoods: Richard Scott Bagwell
Art By: Brad Connell
ShowNotes Archive of links and Assets (clips etc) 364.nashownotes.com
New: Directory Archive of Shownotes (includes all audio and video assets used) nashownotes.com
The No Agenda News Network- noagendanewsnetwork.com
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The Ad Free Web My favourite browser plugin is 'readability;
Whenever I hit a page that has those annoying ads that animate and slide over the content (with increasing frequency lately) I immediately hit the readability button and within a few seconds I am presented with a beautiful ad free rendering of just the content. Its pure magic. A lovely font and a slightly sepia shaded background make for an enjoyable read . As a bonus, when a story is broken up into multiple pages, presumably to present more annoying ads, it is displayed on a single page.
The readability folks clearly put a lot of effort into figuring out exactlty what the content is on a page, as well as how to make the most enjoyable experience for the reader. I salute them for this.
Unfortunately I don't think they will survive. Sites will eventually block this practice to protect their 'business model' and readability has no obvious winning model of their own.
There is however a different approach to this, that I believe could change the readability of the web, with a model that can compensate content producers.
Content producers provide their content in a format that any browser can parse and put the users's own rendering preferences on top of. Aceess to this'raw' version of the content would be behind a paywall.
Speaking for myself, I would love to read the New York Times in a layout and view I create myself, or buy from a designer. I can imagine some would love to see the NYTimes rendered like the USA Today site. Most certainly without the increasingly annoying advertising.
The beauty is that there is already a well established format for writing, managing and publishing structured content: OPML.
After some googling, I see that this format is widely misunderstood. It is primarily viewed as a format to store rss feeds in a list. I can assure you it is a LOT more useful for content creators than that. In fact, I have been writing my blog in opml for a year now, including this post ([image] [opml-source])
What we need to boot up this parallel universe, this sub-net if you will, is a plugin that does the rendering as described above. Make it seamless, have it auto discover a page that has an opml version and supply a default tempate that can be customized.
The auto-discovery also already exists btw.
It could (re)start an entire industry of designers, writers and content management and aggregator developers.
As the river flows I opened up the No Agenda News Network as a Community River 2 weeks ago and its a big suceess!
Besides the hundreds of No Agenda producers linking and posting stories, we now have over 20 rss feeds that have been added to the river, all with relevant and interesting content.
People have been adding feeds from other news sites, but we also have a producer who is creating his links on the network by adding his twitter rss feed. Brilliant!
The European Screwing Mechanism Several months ago we deconstructed the EU proposal to introduce the European Stability Mechanism in 2013 on the No Agenda Show.
As
In today's 'Fiscal Compact' agreement, signed by all EU member states except the UK, there is an additional change to the ESM:
"In order to ensure that the ESM is in a position to take the necesssary decisions in all circumstances, voting rules in the ESM will be changed to include an emergency procedure. The mutual agreement rule will be replaced by a qualified majority of 85% in case the Commission and the ECB conclude that an urgent decision related to financial assistance is needed when the financial and economic sustainability of the euro area is threatened."
The emphasis in that paragraph is NOT mine, it is actually bold in the treaty document.
Qualified Majority Voting (QMV) was initially agreed to in the Treaty of Nice, and was intended to weigh voting rights in a manner that gave member states with smaller populations a fair share of any important vote.
So, instead of the ESM conditions (I'm getting to that) being changed by mutual agreement, only an 85% QMV is needed to make the desired changes. This means that Germany, France and just one other country could represent the desired majority. There are several that quality: Italy, Spain, Poland or a combo of two smaller states, like Greece and The Netherlands.
Clearly this ESM thing is important. So just what is ESM? I could summarize easily by saying that it is a loss of sovereignty for EU member states, direct levy of taxes that are paid to Brussels to bail out off-shore banks and more scary language, but this video (German with English subtitles) really does a great job of deconstructing the ESM in 3 minutes.
To the people of Europe I say; you are being robbed by technocrats and bankers. Unfortunately it is too late to stop them.
Psssst... its an outline! An important feature was added yesterday to the World Outline, which is the system I use to manage all my online data with, in a single document .
This single document is an outline.(image)
Upon hearing the term 'outline', I find many people cringe in a pavlovian response to the notion of creating outlines for schoool work.
These same people usually fail to recognize how many outlines they use every single day.
If you use a todo list, you're using a form of an outline. If you file and retrieve documents on a computer, you are using a very sophisticated outliner that knows you to keep track of files, allowing you to move them from one node to another, or even creating aliases.
Outlines and the programs that you manage them with (outliners) are incredibly useful for managing data.
The power of displaying an outline is that the reader of the information can instantly understand the context of how you've arranged and sorted it.
Twice a week for my podcast I create shownotes that have links to all the stories and topics discussed, as well as clips used on the show and a very important list of 'credits'. The credits are to thank financial supporters of each episode.
You can see how it is important that this information be displayed in an intuitive manner.
On this page you see the shownotes for a recent episode.
At the top level you see Credits, The actual Shownotes and the Clips.
Clicking on any of the blue triangles lets you drill down into each section, which usually will go one more level deeper under each subcategory.
You are seeing a web version of my desktop docment. Here's a view of them side by side in a partially exanded state.
If I make a change and save the document, seconds later that is reflected on the webpage.
So far the response to the new display of the show's data has been very positive. Its a fast way to navigate through a relatively large amount of data, without clicking through to other pages. It's mobile friendly since it works on all the modern smartphone browsers without the need for lots of scrolling or waiting for a new page to load.
Links open up in a new tab/window so you don't lose your place in the outline.
The biggest request so far has been to enable a way to share a link that will take you right to a node in the outline, that is in the works for sure, as Dave Winer, creator of this system has been developing, releasing and supporting outline software for 3 decades. Yeah, he's the mac daddy of outlines.
I use his free outline editor, which is available for windows and mac. Outlines are no different from an other file you would create in an application. Where Office lets you create .doc or .xls files, the OPML Ediotr creates .opml files.
Now, the cool part is that we are only beginning to scratch the surface of what can be done collaboratively with outlines on the web.
Dave is already thinking and working on ways to make connecting outlines easy for anyone to participate in.
If you have thoughts about this and ways to use the World Outline for my shownotes or any other use, please post in the comments below.
postscript By popular request, here's a screenshot of my work environment when I'm producing the show, with a number of frequently used outlines.
NA-363-2011-12-08 No Agenda Show for Thursday December 8th 2011
Mothership Uncloaking?
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Mothership Uncloaking?
Executive Producers: Dame Astrid , Sir James Spitzer, Todd Cochrane, Anonymous
Executive Producer and 363 Club members: Sir James Spitzer
Associate Executive Producers: Sir Borislav Marinov, Drew Klassen, Paul J. Sankowski, Erik Hšechel, Steve Nenninger
Become a member of the 364 Club, support the show here
PR
Knighthoods: Adam Miller
Art By: Thoren
ShowNotes Archive of links and Assets (clips etc) 363.nashownotes.com
New: Directory Archive of Shownotes (includes all audio and video assets used) nashownotes.com
The No Agenda News Network- noagendanewsnetwork.com
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An Interview with Samuel Moyn, Author of "The Last Utopia, Human Rights in History" Samuel's book is an important one. If you plan on reading any non-fiction book, this is the one. It provides a history of 'human rights'. Who made up the definitive list, who is the keeper of the list, where does the concept come from? Questions I never pondered before.
You will be surprised to know that the concept of 'human rights' is a very young one, what started in the 1970's and re-emerged in the 1990's has deep historical, religious and legal roots. I spoke with Samuel via skype, where he also weighs in on current events in North Africa and Europe from his perspective as a historian.
Purchase a copy of Samuel's book in multiple formats on Amazon
This video has been rotated and formatted to fit a non smart-phone screen, it is best viewed in the free Big App Show app.
To view more interviews, app and book reviews, get the Big App Show app for free on Android and iPhone
You can also subscribe to the podcast feed on your mobile device.
Access this page directly at samuelmoyn.bigbookshow.com
NA-362-2011-12-04 No Agenda Show for Sunday December 4th 2011
Drone Journalism
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Drone Journalism
Executive Producers: Adam Curry & John C Dvroak
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PR
Knighthoods: AJ Tissier
Art By: Sir Nussbaum
ShowNotes Archive of links and Assets (clips etc) 362.nashownotes.com
New: Directory Archive of Shownotes (includes all audio and video assets used) nashownotes.com
The No Agenda News Network- noagendanewsnetwork.com
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An Interview with Shawn McGuire, Author of "The Shadow Thieves of Rouen" Shawn McGuire is an IT expert who is leading the charge in a new category of 'books'. His 'novella' is under 30 thousand words, but packed with action from the minute you start into it. Completely in the fantasy genre, but 100% entertaining and only $0.99 on Amazon!
I chatted with Shawn about his debut, which is set in France, in the days of cloaks and daggers and hot girls :-)
Purchase a copy of Shawn's book in multiple formats on Amazon
This video has been rotated and formatted to fit a non smart-phone screen, it is best viewed in the free Big App Show app.
To view more interviews, app and book reviews, get the Big App Show app for free on Android and iPhone
You can also subscribe to the podcast feed on your mobile device.
Access this page directly at shawnmcguire.bigbookshow.com
NA-361-2011-12-01 No Agenda Show for Thursday December 1st 2011
The Fact of the Bladder
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The Fact of the Bladder
Executive Producer: Sir Michael Henry
Associate Executive Producers: Austin Voss, Bill Rudder, Sir James Brewis
Become a member of the 362 Club, support the show here
Knighthoods: Dirk Modrow, Robert Simpson, Michael Henry
Art By: Thoren
ShowNotes Archive of links and Assets (clips etc) 361.nashownotes.com
New: Directory Archive of Shownotes (includes all audio and video assets used) nashownotes.com
The No Agenda News Network- noagendanewsnetwork.com
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![[image]](http://blog.curry.com/images/2011/12/10/opmlPost.jpg){kind=link}
