The fundamental difference between these two services is how they are paid for. Instapaper is an application that you pay for on your mobile device. While it's free to use on the web, if you want to take your content with you on your iPhone or iPad, you've got to pay $5 for it, all of which goes to Instapaper. Readability on the other hand, asks for an optional subscription to go and support the service.

Readability also distributes 70% of their subscription revenues back to the content providers themselves, effectively paying them for their contribution to the Readability service. In order to get that money, though, a content provider has to register their website with the readability service. That said, readability accounts for the money owed to you, the content provider, whether you opt to sign up for the service or not, thus you can write a killer blog post, get a whole bunch of readability traffic, then sign up for the service, and get credit for the post even after you sign up for the service. But only if you sign up within a year of when you wrote it.

Most of the content that is collected by the publishers is sustained by advertising, and both of these services strip advertising away from the content entirely. In essence, each service takes content from a website that earns the publisher money, and puts it on a website that makes them money. Both allow content providers to opt-out of the service entirely.

Only Readability offers the publisher compensation for the content that they're essentially taking, and capturing value from. I'm puzzled as to why John Gruber of Daring Fireball would go so far as to say that the Readability guys are scumbags for doing so.

Again, two networks are taking content from publishers. One keeps all of the money for itself, the other shares money with the publishers, even in arrears. I suspect that neither of these companies are "scumbags" (here are some scumbags) but I'll leave it to you to decide who is more ethical in this situation.

If I ever ran for governor, and wanted to stay governor indefinitely, then my first priority would be to revamp the department of motor vehicles. When people think of government, bureaucracy, and incompetence, I think what most are usually thinking about is their last experience at the DMV. It's one of those things that most people have to deal with at some point or another, and it's one of those things that always evokes a visceral response. Nothing says dread like "I have to go to the DMV"

So I'd revamp the department of motor vehicles so that the experience would be like going to a 5 star hotel. It'd be completely service oriented. I'd invest in advanced scheduling technology so that there would be no line. I'd invest in good architecture and aesthetics so that the DMV offices would look great and be comfortable. If I were governor, your trip to the DMV would be as easy and as pleasurable as a trip to the Apple Store. People would herald me. They'd say "our government is awesome! Check out our DMV!" and people wouldn't be able to buy the argument that government was incompetent or lazy.

But most importantly, I'd make sure that great customer focused people worked there. The people who work at the DMV ought to be incentivised to do right by the customer -- those that resolve issues and ensure that the customer leaves without contempt will be compensated and rewarded well. And those that don't, won't.

Government isn't a monolith -- it's a wide variety or agencies that are loosely knit by the law, with its own values, incentives, and culture. We spend a lot of time working on how technology can enhance the relationship between government and citizen. It's time to start thinking about how technology can be used to enhance government's culture.

Of course, this is the difficult part. The flaw in my plan to become permagovernor is that much of our government workforce isn't compensated for performance, they're compensated for time and seniority. There is no incentivization for culture. So if I were mayor, governor, head of a governmental agency, or president of the United States, I'd incorporate a service like DueProps into my organization's culture.

Due Props is a way to be explicit about praise inside of an organization. While I've never used the service, I'm intrigued by it and by what it could do to change the culture of government.

The key to making the DMV like a 5 star hotel, or making an agency like the CFPB or FCC like a 5 star hotel is by improving the working culture of the organization -- it isn't through reforming a collective bargaining agreement or flat out paying people more. While it's true that salary correlates to happiness to an extent, I strongly suspect that most people working for 100,000 in a toxic culture, are less good at their jobs than people working for 50,000 in a great culture.

My wife's firm, Fission Strategy has no defined workplace. They're enirely distributed. Yet they have the best corporate culture of any workplace I've ever seen because they make active, practical decisions to deliberately create culture inside the organization. They use tools like Yammer and Skype, along with a culturally explicit way of praising people that make it so that people that work there, despite being in places as remote as Guam, feel connected to one another.

When we think of government, we think of it being completely absent of culture, and that ought to change. There ought to be an app contest that incentivises people to build more things like DueProps that government can use to solve problems with itself. Some of them are pretty basic (there is no shared employee directory between government agencies, for instance) and others are a bit more challenging, but the challenges of helping government have great culture are every bit as important as helping government interact with citizens better.

In other words, all the technology in the world won't help government's relationship with ordinary people if the people on the inside are just trying to get to the end of the day.

It's typical that governmental bodies release ethics related information, or information they don't think anybody will care about on Friday afternoon or even late evenings. It's called the "Friday News Dump". So in honor of transparency's special time in the news cycle, I'm releasing my last post in the How To Fix Government series on smart transparency.

We need to get a grasp on what effective transparency looks like, and up our game -- both inside the government and outside, too. All too often, the claim is made that transparency alone is some kind of antidote to corruption and it isn't. It's a bizarre and cynical shortcut -- when a system needs regular monitoring and policing in order to stay honest, politicians say "we'll open it up to the public, so that everyone can see what's going on, and that will keep everyone honest."

The problem is, it doesn't keep everyone honest. As Sunlight Labs' Director Tom Lee said at South by Southwest, it's not as though people come home from work, eat dinner with their family and say "I'm going to go fight waste, fraud and abuse on Recovery.gov." It's a preposterous and dangerous notion that signs the public up for a job they neither understand nor are committed to, and it lets government off the hook for policing itself.

We need to get beyond this idea that either publishing the data, or making the data pretty or more usable is good enough. We need to engage a bit more in "transparency design" to make sure that the data that's being released is useful, and that it's release is helping solve the problem that it's intended to solve.

Here are some suggestions for a well designed transparency initiative inside the government, or product outside the government:

Know the intent

Know that transparency can have many desired outcomes, and it's important to discuss what those are before fully planning out a transparency or open data stragegy. Agency employee: it's really not important that you spend a whole lot of time on this, just a little consideration. A meeting's worth of time, not six meetings worth of time. Just understand if the intent of the data is either to help fight corruption or increase accountability, create jobs, support interagency efficiency, spur industry growth, or even just experimentation. All or valid. All are useful. It's just worth discussion up front.

Anomaly Detection and Advanced Sorting

For accountability data especially, it's useful to design some form of anomaly detection into the system, and while government may not need to do this for bulk data releases, if you're a web developer looking to increase transparency and accountability, it's useful to think about this.

Instead of just putting "Here are Obama's top donor employers" on a web page somewhere, tell me which employers surged in their giving for a given day, month, or quarter. Instead of saying "here are the top lobbying firms for the quarter" tell me which lobbying firms have increased their lobbying spending in the past quarter. Instead of just telling me who visited the White House, tell me whehter or not White House visits are increasing or decreasing, and whether or not a given person is visiting more frequently than they used to.

This is a kind of anomaly detection, and it'd be a great feature to add to most oversight products because I think it'd really tip off journalists in a new way. As they continue to have tighter deadlines and increased concern about revenues, it'd be nice to make it easier for reporters to connect the dots so that media can do its job more easily.

Context

Coupled with anomaly detection, it's useful to put data into context. If the intent of the story you're trying to tell with obesity data is that people are getting fat, telling people that the obesity rate in their county went up by 2% for the year isn't nearly as powerful as telling people that the obesity rate in their county went up by 2% while the surrounding counties went down by 3%. Or that their county is the thinnest in the country.

Likewise, telling people that Barack Obama took $25,000 from employees of the UPS isn't nearly as useful or important as putting that number into some form of context. What percent of Obama's fundrasing draw was that for the quarter? How does that compare with donations to other political candidates? How does UPS rank on the list of the top 5,000 donors to Barack Obama?

Education

A good transparency system comes coupled with education about the system. A long time ago I wrote a blog post calling for a Github for Data, Derek Willis noted a slight objection:

"Even a well-documented dataset can have its quirks that show up only in the data itself, and the act of importing often reveals more about the data than the documentation does. We need to import, prune, massage, convert. It’s how we learn."

Derek's right and I'd add the problem of importing is nothing compared to the problem of understanding nuance of data. That's why I think the entire transparency community: government agencies, the non-profit transparency community, the press and the civic hackers, need to do a much better job of both showing their work and explaining the data.

The mantra of the open source community is to build on the shoulders of giants, and the transparency community ought to be no different -- but that cannot be done unless we start making it easier for people to get up and running. How many times has an organization spent time "understanding" campaign finance data when much of that time could have been saved by reading some documentation written by someone that's already gone through the process? How much tacit knowledge of the nuance of the data behind FedSpending.gov lies within organizations like OMBWatch and the Sunlight Foundation? That knowledge needs to be more widely documented, available and shared.

The Real Value

If we want transparency to be useful for people, we have to stop designing it in such a way where we think that putting the data out there and making it pretty is the end-game. Software can do more than this.

To me, the most interesting undercurrent of the Obama administration is how we've had a bunch of very left-of-center campaign staffers go and work for the administration in some shape or another (I know mostly federal agency New Media Directors) and come out of their experience being a little more libertarian. The same thing happened to me as director of Sunlight Labs. While conservatives might argue that Obama is pushing America too far to the left, he's driving a lot of his progressive staff towards what I'd call traditional republican ideas.

Here's how it happens: So imagine you've worked for a couple years in politics and really made a difference, and then get recruited to work on a presidential campaign. You've got to keep up with the opposition and keep innovating technically, and you've just been placed in charge of mobile strategy. You're given a budget of $300,000 and you're told: make something happen. Quick. So you go out, you find a programmer and a designer and say "hey, do you want a contract with a presidential campaign" and you get things kicked off within a week.

Then your candidate wins, and you get appointed Director of New Media at the U.S. Department of Miscellany. On your first day on the job, you take a look at your website and go "crap, we gotta fix this." So you go to your boss and say "look, we need to fix misc.gov. I spoke to my two buddies who did stuff like this for me on the campaign. They said it'll take them 3 months to do it with all the compliance stuff we need to do, and it'll cost $250k."

Your boss, a federal bureaucrat for 30 years, says "not so fast, we've got to go to the procurement people." So the procurement people say to you "ok, write an RFP, we'll put it on FedBizOpps.gov for the required 90 days, at which time we'll give you the qualifying solicitations and we can go through them together. Then there will be a contest period of 2-3 weeks for other vendors to protest the decision. You should be able to get started on the website in 6 months after we've selected a vendor if we hurry."

Reader, I won't lengthen this painfully true story out for you any longer. The punchline is, what was a $250,000, 3 month project from your buddies on the campaign turned into a $5 Million 18 month long project with people who aren't nearly as competent or as hard working as the people you're used to working with. And so you start saying to yourself "man, regulations suck." This is how Recovery.gov ended up costing upwards of ten million dollars in its first 18 months.

This problem -- governments inability to acquire technology cheaply enough or affordably enough, is a dangerous and scary problem and it ought to be at the forefront of your mind. While industry and the private sector reap the benefits of Moore's law, government has a systems-designed inefficiency in it that prevents it from attaching itself to the same exponential curve. So while we may see technology double in function or halve itself in cost every 18 months, government tends to always be a cycle or two behind on Moore's curve.

More scary is that Moore's curve is exponential. This means the gap between any two points on the line doubles with every cycle. Today you see this problem manifest itself in government offices with the two computer problem. Government workers have one machine on their desks that government provides for them. It's about 4 years old. Then they have another machine on their desk that's newer, and that's the one that they use to do their job. But as that gap grows, how long is it before we are driving flying cars while government is chasing us around in Buicks?

I think the solution to this problem is really quite simple, and we can start with the web. Let's make it so that campaign staffer cum government worker can hire their buddies from the campaign. Ask yourself this as a taxpayer: would you rather have $250,000 your tax dollars go towards "lining the pockets of campaign cronies" or $5,000,000 of your tax dollars go to lining the pockets of established government contractors.

There's going to be fraud in both systems, but at least the former is fraud for the little guy!

I think we need to come up with a smart, real-time procurement system for federal IT purchases that allows government to use technology to be more efficient, and it ought to be at the top of the list for any political party. It's a cross-spectrum problem and it needs to get resolved. A real-time procurement policy has the following characteristics:

Inclusive

Real time procurement is inclusive. If you have a Domestic Tax ID number, a bank account, are incorporated in the United States, and can accept credit cards, you're eligible to do business with Real Time Procurement. There are no needs to apply to get on any "GSA Schedules" or Contractor List. The only businesses you can't do business with are ones that have been deemed ineligible or penalized by the system. Make the default market an open one.

Performance Based

Work should be performance based, standardized and audited by a third party reviewer also inside government. If a contractor gets several poor reviews in a row based on negotiated contract-bound criteria, by either the person the contractor is serving, or a third party reviewer, then they're either penalized in the system (ineligible for a certain period of time) or banned forever. Eligibility requirements should be tied not just to the Tax ID of the organization, but by the names and social security numbers of the directors of the organization to prevent poor performers from simply reincorporating.

Electronic

All deals in real-time procurement are done electronically. There are no checks to be written. Instead, payments are made by credit card or wire transfer.

Real-Time Disclosure

All deals in real time procurement are disclosed in real-time, online. When a deal is made, it's reported online. The disclosure says what the deal is, what the total cost is, shows the payments made, and shows the rating of the final product. This disclosure website should also display the top ten recipients of money from real time procurement, and the greatest earners in 30, 60, and 90 days. You should also be able to see who those earners are, what projects they worked on, and how they were rated. Updates should happen instantly: when a payment is made to a contractor, it is updated on the website in reasonable real-time (minutes, not days).

Limited

At first, this system should be limited to information technology buys, and be capped at $250,000. This cap can be adjusted over time based on the success or failure of the program.

Patrolled, Monitored & Tested

The system I'm describing here is not fraud proof. It's not designed to be. Rather, let's design an experimental procurement system that expects fraud and finds new ways to catch it rather than designing system like we have now: one that tries so hard to prevent fraud that it only ensures it. While citizen watchdogging ought to be encouraged, it shouldn't be relied upon. Employ a couple of people whose job it is to monitor the system for fraud -- taking advantage of some of the same kinds of fraud detection technologies used by services like PayPal to root out bad players and send them to jail.

This is a starting point, not an endpoint. It's a loose framework for a procurement system that could help government acquire new technology. Annually there ought to be a survey of the system to see if it's being used and having the desired outcomes: saving taxpayer money and increasing efficiency. Also: this is how government could really stimulate the economy. By making it easy for small business job creators to do good work for their community.

Today I want to talk about the Judicial branch of government -- the one we rarely talk about in terms of online engagement, civic participation or heck, even transparency. But just because I don't talk about it doesn't mean that it isn't important and worthy of attention.

The judicial system is different than the other two branches of government. Unlike the presidency and Congress, there are no requirements for a Supreme Court justice. Child labor laws not withstanding, the president can nominate an infant to be a supreme court justice and provided that they pass senate confirmation, they'll grow up in a black robe. In that regard, the branch is actually more populist than the rest, but in practice, it's far more elitist.

In order to practice law, you've got to become a lawyer. Sure, everyone has the right to defend themselves in a court of law, but they've got to study a lot of law in order to do it right. And while much of the actual federal law is available online for free, it's the case that the important stuff -- the precedents based on prior court decisions -- called "case law" is not. I suspect there are few lawyers who would argue that you could be a relatively decent attorney without understanding case law.

Instead, most of our case law and other primary source material for the law has been locked behind paywalls and inside of for-pay law libraries owned by corporations like WestLaw. Our law is commoditizeable content. If you want access to electronic court records, even from the taxpayer funded, public agency, the Department of Justice, then you end up with some access problems. It's a revenue opportunity, not a public good, and that's no good.

Carl Malamud, the nation's unofficial public advocate, noted three years ago that three retail services monopolize the legal market. The Administrative Office of the Courts pays 150 million taxpayer dollars to private corporations in order to access its own legal doccuments.

Why is this bad? In a knowledge economy, it's knowledge of the law not guns that give us the ability to defend ourselves from government wrongdoing. If universal access to the Internet means universal access to knowledge, education and opportunity, then universal access to the law means universal access to justice.

This ought not to be a wonky cause for DC Open Gov insiders. Access to the complete law ought to be fundamental right, not something you have to pay for. Equal access to the law ensures equal treatment under the law. Open primary legal materials isn't just a civil right, it's the primary one.

When you look at it from that perspective, it makes things like SOPA/PIPA seem trivial. Malamud set up the Law.gov initiative to make this happen, but it needs more widespread public support. While heady, try and spend 20 minutes and give Malamud's 20 minute talk on this your undivided attention. If you want to skip ahead, make sure you at least watch from the 12 minute mark.

Imagine that a Fortune 500 company comes to you and says: Reader, we recognize your expertise. We think you're really good and smart at what you do. Would you mind coming and spending a day with us to figure out what we should do next?

If you're any form of expert on anything, what you say next is: sure. My rate for day-long sessions is XYZ per hour. You send them a proposal. Whoever asked you manages to get your proposal through some kind of process. You show up, you spend the day brainstorming with them, and you're then compensated for your time.

Nearly all large corporations do this for good reason: sometimes innovation comes from outside an organization. Sometimes its useful to try out something like GameStorming to shake things up. Other times it's useful to bring in someone who knows a thing or two about sustainability to help you iron out your sustainability strategy.

Government needs experts too -- more in the latter category than the former. If government wants to regulate the Internet, for instance, it's necessary for government to bring someone in to help figure out the best way to do that. But government also needs operational experts -- voices from the outside (read: constituency) that can tell them what to do that people want.

But because it's actually very expensive for government to buy things, government asks the experts to come in for free. And sometimes they get them. If, for instance, someone has a book to sell, they'll often come by in the hopes that people will buy their book. Most of the time a good expert will stop by for a meeting at the White House for their own ego. Who doesn't want to say that the president "picked their brain" even if the person doing the picking is located in an office building three blocks away from the White House.

But eventually those experts have other commitments, and cannot afford to give away their product for free forever. And so those experts give way to another class of people willing to take that seat. These experts are called "lobbyists" and they're able to afford "half-day brainstorming sessions" to government for free because they usually have a sponsor who pays them to do so and to represent their interests.

Now these sponsors are either non-profit organizations and advocacy groups like the National Rifle Association or the Sunlight Foundation, or they're corporations themselves. So when the department of Treasury has a "brainstorming session on the Future of FOIA" you can bet that the "experts" that show up are either registered lobbyists for interest groups around FOIA, or federal vendors who make the software and infrastructure around FOIA. But they're all people that have been working on these problems for years.

This yields to entrenched power. Those that have "years of expertise" around a regulatory subject are entrenched and become the default source of information around it. Thus innovation happens less and the ideas inside Washington stagnate. If the only inputs into the system are the ones that are financed to give input, then the only inputs the system gets are the ones that that rely on the way the system gets financed.

This is admittedly a small problem (and also one I have an economic interest in), and it's also one that government is working on. When Obama took office, his first executive order called for ExpertNet(now a dead wiki), whose job it was to “offer Americans increased opportunities to participate in policymaking and to provide their Government with the benefits of their collective expertise and information.”

The idea was that government could build a giant platform, and that experts would deliver their collective expertise online to government and thus better policy would be created. This idea is good, but it ignores an economic principal: those with more expertise generally have less time.

If government wants real expertise for policy making, then it has to include some form of compensation -- either through money, access or stature (you're on the presidential commission for regulatory arts).

This is an excellent example of why [procurement causes ethics problems] in Washington. Because it costs so much time and money to pay for advice inside the government, it's only done rarely. Here's a radical idea: let's change the system so that government can quickly pay people who are smart at what they do, just like everybody else in the world does.

For subject matter experts, I think (and again, I'm biased and have an economic interest) that the way to solve this problem is through direct payment. It ought to be very easy for government agencies to pay experts less than $5,000 for their time, without much of a hassle. That'll get government some expertise it needs when it needs it. Understand that this may sound simple to you, but iinside the government there are stacks of regulatory policy that actually stop this from happening most of the time. But it can be fixed.

For a wider net, I never understood why government wants to build its own platforms for interaction with the public. In order to win an election, Barack Obama did not build his own mall to hand out flyers in. He (and his campaign staff) went to malls where people already were and handed out flyers there.

So I was thrilled when Aneesh Chopra our former CTO, started asking questions on Quora. And while it may be tempting to say that solves the problem, it really doesn't as you cannot tie the government to one particular medium made by one particular company. We run into huge problems that way. That's why we built ThinkUp over at ExpertLabs -- it's a network independent app that allows you to sort through all the answers you get.

In order for government to get what it needs -- the experts that it needs, it's got to get over making special platforms for itself and go to where its constituents are. Which is why the concept of identity is important: in order for government to get the best expertise, it's got to know who is providing it. We need more Aneeshes on more Quoras and we all need to celebrate and make winning opportunities out of those solicitations.

This question of expertise is going to take regulatory change as well as outside technical championship if its able to happen. But until it does, the majority of inputs into the system will continue to be the inputs that have a vested interest in keeping things the same. And that's got to change.

Our national identity system is entirely broken, and must be fixed if our democracy is to remain healthy. Right now, when you identify yourself to government -- whether that be through a phone call to a member of Congress, or through a comment to a regulatory body like the EPA or the FCC, you give them your street address. Sometimes, that's checked against an address verification service to make sure that your address is actually correct. Sometimes it's not.

It's always trust based, too. If you want to make a political contribution to a federal candidate's campaign committee, you've got to also add your employer and occupation to that list of information. Which humourously yields a battle between Domestic Goddesses and Freedom Fighters, as well as weird problems like this one where Saturday Night Live executive producer Lorne Michaels uses one job to donate to republicans, and another job title to donate to democrats:

Contrast this to our public social identities from Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or even just our email providers. There is no Lorne Michaels problem on Facebook -- few of us maintain a different profile between our job and our home life, and fewer of us do what Michaels is doing -- maintaining a different profile between two different jobs that he has. It's also difficult to be fraudulent and participatory with a social media account. Sure, spambots exist, but not many with actual friends. A spambot on Facebook is more detectable as a spambot than a spambot filling out fake information on a webform.

The good news is that the Feds get this, sort of. They're working on the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace that's aiming to create a way to eave your various social media profiles together to identify themselves to governmental entities. The idea is that you'll pick an identity provider that you'll prove your identity to: either a government agency, or companies like Google and Facebook. They'll become your primary identity provider that will then authenticate you to the rest of the participating providers. Technically, it'll work a lot like Facebook Connect works today, but with the added benefit of being attached to your physical identity.

There are three problems with this approach. The first problem is that it's a little passporty (in the microsoft sense). You're handing over the goods to a singular organization and giving it a whole lot of power. The second other problem is that they've been working on this for nearly two years now. At the present rate of progress, it's likely that we'll see widespread adoption of this service by 2035. Finally, this problem revolves around private, one-to-one transactions with government that generally involve commerce: like banking or tax payments. The website doesn't mention a whole lot about talking to your member of Congress or regulatory comments.

To solve this problem for real, you need three things:

1. A way to verify a person is who they say they are,
2. A way to verify that the person is someone who should be listened to
3. Political consequence for not listening.

To solve problem 1, we need some kind of non-profit organization (ahem, Mozilla you'd be awesome at this) that allows people to link their social media profiles together and agrees to not sell the index (a la Rapleaf). In other words, I want to say that I live at XYZ street in Washington, DC, and I'm @cjoh on Twitter, I'm clayjohnson on Facebook, and I'm 100258208745065110297 on Google+. Let's not limit the index to these three particilar services, obviously. This index ought to be freely queryable by anybody whose gotten my oauth permission to query against it.

This does something really important: it gives government permission to engage with people where they are for things that matter. Presently, because government only accepts the street address as an acceptable form of identification, it means that agencies cannot and members of Congress do not take into account what we tell them through the various social networks for official business.

Things get more interesting if we have this index built because then we start solving the second requirement: a way to verify that the person is someone who should be listened to. With this index built, it's easy for a member of Congress to start sorting out who is a constituent and who isn't. Members want to give the most weight to what their constituents have to say, an we want them to do that. With an index of social media profiles like the one I'm proposing, Congress can do just that. They can say things like "show me what people in my district have to say about SOPA."

For regulatory agencies it's even more interesting because it's easy to start sorting out experts from non-experts. In weighing out whether or not a bank should be purchased you could start sorting out the employees of that bank from the non-employees of that bank to see what they have to say. Or you could see how many physicians are concerned about the mmrb vaccinations.

The final portion of these requirements is the creation of political consequence for not listening. In other words: if a constituency tells its representative not to do something, and the representative does it anyway, then that representative needs to be seriously concerned for their job safety. In the case of the SOPA/PIPA argument the Internet claimed victory, but how many blackouts by Wikipedia can be had before Congress decides to see if it has an electoral consequence?

Electoral consequences rarely happened unless the incumbent, the challenger and the press is equipped with the knowledge of what's happened. Services can be built on top of this identity provider such that all three parties can see what people told their member and what their member did. Opposition researchers for political campaigns spend weeks scouring vote records to see how many times a member of Congress voted against their district, but since most votes are never polled, it's impossible to tell. But if there was an open service that just did it, it'd be a vital way of holding members accountable for their votes.

This is important to our democracy because the only democracy that's got more people in it than ours is India's. India's democracy is also much more impacted by the Golden Rule (those with the gold rule) than ours. Part of the reason large democracies start to have scalability problems is because of volume. Less than a century ago, our population was small enough that you could knock on the door of the White House and ask to see the president, but today that's an absurd notion. As population continues to grow, government itself grows farther from its citizens and only those who can command attention get it.

I don't subscribe to the notion that the only way to solve this problem is by designing better algorithms that give the user a more diverse information diet. Software's built by other human beings, and while I appreciate the idea that a little diversity ought to be injected into our diets via software, in that scenario the reader is simply ceding control over to a new kind of editor (a developer) rather than learning to make good decisions. It's a bit paternalistic to me.

Instead, I see the problem as a lack of a social mirror[1]. To go back to the aforementioned tweet: I wish the companies that are tasked with building up huge profiles of me and my behavior would allow me to tell me who I am better. To build for me a mirror of my social behavior online. Tell me that I only click on links from liberals on Facebook, or that I'm 25x more likely to click on pictures from my friends from Atlanta than I am my friends from San Francisco. Tell me the aggregate demographics of who I follow on twitter, and let me know whether or not I reply less on gmail to women than I do to men.

Right now we're playing without much of a social mirror. Sure, Google has its dashboard which gives you way to see much of the personal information Google has on you, as well as its ads preferences which tells you who the advertising part of Google thinks you are. The problem isn't just that they're inaccurate[2], it's that they aren't giving you an idea of consequence. Trying to keep a diverse social information diet without this mirror is like trying to shave without an actual mirror -- sure you can do it, but you're bound to miss some spots.[3]

Imagine how empowering a strong, well-polished social mirror would be: a census of your social activity. If you knew you hadn't emailed anybody in your family in 33 days, or that you were only clicking on links about entertainment news in Facebook perhaps you'd diversify your diet a little bit.

Combine this with knowing the rules of the personalization game, and we're on to something. In Eli Pariser's Filter Bubble Talk, he talks about not seeing links from his conservative friends anymore. But he doesn't see them because he doesn't click on them. What will expose Eli to more conservative ideas:

1. Having Facebook continue to add some links from his conservative friends into his newsfeed that he'll continue to not click on, or
2. Facebook telling Eli that he's not clicking on any links from conservative friends so they're going to go away soon.

I think that the former will generate a lot of wasted space, and the latter. But if he's told that that kind of stuff isn't going to be headed his way anymore, fear of missing out will make Eli click on and read some conservative information. If he's checks on his Aunt Sally a lot more than he checks on his Uncle Warren, there's context to what's happening, and that's what's missing. A social mirror will produce the best outcome: knowledgeable corrective action and a more diverse information diet. Facebook knows how you spend time on Facebook. Google knows how you spend time on Google's wide swath of properties. It's about time they started sharing that information with you.

[1] Pete Skomoroch pointed this term out to me.

[2] Google thinks I am a 35 year old body builder interested in the arts and baby names that lives in Washington, DC. 2/5 are correct.

[3] I'm sorry for the metaphor that's generally only understandable by men, but I couldn't come up with something better. If there's something better, toss it in the comments.

Appointment based media is now all but extinct. We can time-shift television now and watch Northern Exposure whenever we want to. Instead of reading the morning paper before we go to work now, the paper follows us around all day long, in our pockets -- waiting to be read at the dinner table or anywhere else we feel the urge to look at a glowing blue rectangle.

But the problem is, that convenience comes with a cost. Instead of killing ourselves in cars rushing home to get to the media we want to see, we're killing ourselves in cars by reading the media we want to read while we're supposed to be driving. Once we start staring at those glowing blue rectangles -- no matter how big or small they are -- some of us get sucked in. We lose track of time, and we can spend all day there, grazing instead of producing. We can lose our whole day, if we're not careful, to a passive over-consumption of manufactured information.

That's why I wrote The Information Diet, and it's why you should consider start making your media consumption a bit more appointment based. It helps you maintain a healthier relationship with information. By scheduling an appointment with your media, for instance, you never lose a day to your Facebook news stream or your RSS reader.

I make appointments first with email. I check email 4 times a day, for 15-20 minutes a day. This is a practice we've heard over and over again. It helps you remain focused and not a slave to the evil notifications headed your way. But don't stop at just email.

If you're a heavy Facebook user, schedule time for it, too. That way, you'll never find yourself on Facebook when you're not supposed to be. You can't get "lost" on Facebook if you've made an appointment for it, and that appointment ends. If you're finding yourself spending too much time playing Words with Friends, then make an appointment with it instead. That way your relationship with it is both proactive and constrained.

And consider appointments with your television media too. Just because you can watch all 160 episodes of How I Met Your Mother in a row on Netflix doesn't mean that you should. Even though prime-time television can now be watched anytime, doesn't mean that it shouldn't come without some constraints. Allot yourself some time, and schedule it in.

Another thing you might consider is scheduling in your production time too. In my book, I recommend that you write 500 words before 8am to shift your mindset from being a consumer into being a producer. Consider also scheduling your producer time. Writing might be your thing, or you could make videos or write songs. Doesn't matter -- just produce something when you wake up in the morning so that you spend your day being a producer. Separate your producer time and consumer time and be deliberate about both.

And the trick to making sure you do it and stick to it? Don't put it on your to-do list. Put it on your calendar. Make an appointment for it. And treat it like it's as important as knowing how things would end up between Dr. Fleishman and Maggie was to my mom.

FlyCut

Flycut is a dead simple clipboard utility that puts what you copy to the clipboard into a stack. This way, you don't have to go back and find where that link was when you copied it, you can just get to it through the keyboard. I've used a bunch of highfalutin' keyboard managers in the past, but this is the one that has stuck with me the longest. To access your clipboard history, you just press shift when you want to paste, and you can flash through your entire history. It's free.

MOU

MOU is a markdown editor for the Mac. Markdown is a text syntax that lets you get straight to writing, rather than worrying too much about formatting. The Information Diet was written originally in Markdown, and this blog is written in Markdown. MOU is a very simple editor that lets you see how your markdown will look as you type it in real time. What's useful is that it also allows you to assign a stylesheet to the editor preview. So as I'm writing this blog post, it looks exactly how it will look on InformationDiet.com.

BetterTouchTool

Better Touch Tool allows you to take full advantage of the multitouch trackpad on your mac. I set up two gestures that have made my life a lot easier. For me, it does for the trackpad what Divvy does for the keyboard. A three finger swipe to the left makes my current window maximize to half the screen on the left, and a three finger swipe to the right puts another window on the right. So if I want to write something, and have a browser window open to reference it, I never have to worry about resizing a window.

DashExpander

DashExpander is a text expander -- you type in an abbreviation, and it expands the text to what you want. I never type in http://www.informationdiet.com, for instance, when I'm typing. I just type in "id.c". This is useful for other things too, like always having links that you want to constantly share on-hand, like links to my amazon page (which is "booklink"). It also syncs with Dropbox which is very useful.

Other free tools I use that I can't live without these days (and that I've mentioned before): Dropbox and Alfred. Of course there's also the recommended tools for a good Information Diet -- but those are more focused on the consumption side than the production side.

Now if there was only a free copy-editor...