• Network&Society – Redrawing the map of Great Britain from a network of human interactions. <br />
  Do regional boundaries defined by governments respect the more natural ways that people interact across space? This paper proposes a novel, fine-grained approach to regional delineation, based on analyzing networks of billions of individual human transactions.
• Rank « Gareth Holt – A series of 13 charts and graphs produced with Ben Branagan for the UK traveling exhibition ‘Rank’: Picturing The Social Order 1516 – 2009. Commissioned by curator Alistair Robinson and exhibited at the Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art, Leeds.
• http://bokardo.com/archives/the-behavior-youve-designed-for/ – I’ve given a few talks recently and by far and away the one idea that is resonating with people is the idea that the behavior you’re seeing is the behavior you’ve designed for
• Metricly – Aggregated Dashboards for Every Business – Dive deep into your data<br />
  With your data in one place, Metricly provides a consistent and powerful set of tools to analyze your metrics – with subtotals, rollups, filters, and insights that help you take action.
• Muddy – Muddy is an indexing and categorisation tool for use by people and companies with lots of content. Using information derived from Wikipedia, Muddy finds notable people, places and organisations in any webpage,

• Misfit Entrepreneurs – Dan Pallotta – Harvard Business Review – He mentioned that in his conversations the thing that stood out most was the willingness of great entrepreneurs to be vulnerable. It's not the first association you'd make with an entrepreneur.
• google-refine – Project Hosting on Google Code – Google Refine is a power tool for working with messy data, cleaning it up, transforming it from one format into another, extending it with web services, and linking it to databases like Freebase.
• 1.0 Is the Loneliest Number — Matt Mullenweg – In that short rapid iteration environment the most important thing isn’t necessarily how perfect code is when you send it out, but how quickly you can revert if you need to so the cost of a mistake is really low, under a minute of brokenness
• Symbiote [beta] :: Stylesheet editing that’s almost alien – Need to find CSS of a website? Just use this bookmarklet.
• How The Guardian is pioneering data journalism with free tools » Nieman Journalism Lab – The Guardian takes data journalism seriously. They obtain, format, and publish journalistically interesting data sets on their Data Blog, they track transparency initiatives in their searchable index of world government data, and they do original research on data they’ve obtained, such as their amazing in-depth analysis of 90,000 leaked Afghanistan war documents.
• Adding Cabbie Know-How to Online Maps – Technology Review – Nobody knows how to get around a city like a taxi driver. A new method for creating online maps taps into that expertise.

• The Complete Business Guide To Facebook Deals – Yesterday Facebook changed the game for businesses who maintain physical presences across the country with the release of Facebook Deals. Suddenly, Facebook users have a reason to check-in to places. For those business owners who aren’t clear on what opportunities Facebook Deals provides, here’s a comprehensive guide.
• Edge – Serpentine Maps Marathon – A social network mapping arbitration of information and amount of connections between narcotraffickers and public servants in a Mexican Cartel.
• Visual Inspiration: 30 Beautiful Web App Site Designs – A web application’s site design is the first look potential users will get before deciding whether or not to sign up for the service; it’s the book cover, table of contents and blurb of a web app that abeyant visitors will scrutinize before deciding to make the jump towards becoming its user.
• Starting with Git: Cheat Sheet | Think Vitamin – A handy cheat sheet for using Git.
• Making user testing happen « Boagworld – We all know we should be doing more usability testing than we are. Fortunately there are some great tools available to make the job easier.

• Help Me Investigate – anatomy of an investigation | Online Journalism Blog – Paul Bradshaw and Andy Brightwell conducted some research into one of the successful investigations on the crowdsourcing platform Help Me Investigate. This looks at how that investigation worked, and might assist others.
• Data-as-a-Service: Factual, InfoChimps & Google Squared: Business Collaboration News « – In 2004, Tim O’Reilly’s famous Web 2.0 manifesto suggested that “data would be the next Intel Inside,” and that any Internet service of significance would be underpinned by specialized datasets, such as Amazon’s product database or Foursquare’s places.
• MediaPost Publications Times Offers Details On ‘Metered-Model’ During Earnings Call 10/20/2010 – Meanwhile, the so-called "metered model" will allow readers who are referred from third-party sites such as blogs, social media networks and search engines access to specific content "without triggering the gate, which will preserve NYTimes.com's significant reach and advertising inventory," according to Robinson.
• Can Twitter predict the stock market? – A new research study suggests that comments posted on the social networking site Twitter can predict swings in the US Dow Jones market.
• Big Money for Companies That Can Analyze Big Data – As data volumes skyrocket, startups looking to take advantage of the opportunity in Big Data need to focus on the art of statistical-learning algorithms, says Michael Driscoll, founder of Dataspora

The biggest change is regarding finances, and how we handle them. Previously we had used Freshbooks for our Invoicing needs, and also used it to track expenses. This worked to a degree, but due to the nature of our revenue streams we had items that were ‘off book’ and we couldn’t account for them in FB, instead a variety of spreadsheets and other tools were needed to keep on top of everything.

The issue we were finding was two fold,
1) Proper tracking of all our revenue streams and being able to segment our expenses into P/L accounts with decent breakdowns, budgettng etc. [And not just things we had invoiced].
2) And how much have we spent, over time by category.

It’s not to say that Freshbooks doesn’t work well. I could easily see how if you were a freelancer, and doing timetracking, and rebilling expenses to clients that it suits your needs. For us, we needed accounting details, and thought it was time to see what else was out there.

There are variety of SaaS web accounting packages out there, and the one we went for was Xero. A personal recommendation secured it, easily when it was referred to as ‘idiot proof’ - perfect for my needs.

Quite simply Xero allows us to have information about our bank accounts (including paypal), and set up automatic rules for dealing with transactions that are not Accounts Receivable/Invoiced based (i.e Google Adsense earning, users buying subscriptions, and clothing orders).

For FY11 we will be able to setup our budgeting, and have one or two views that really give us an overview into how the ‘business’ is running.  All we want is for Kitecrowd to get into the black, and with Xero we now have much more of an idea as to what our core expenses truly are, and what those ‘one off costs’ of year one really amount to.

Due to Xero being able to handle our Invoicing needs, we will be dropping Freshbooks. It’s certainly worth a look though if you use other accounting packages, and l’d strongly suggest testing the market – only by trying things will you know what will allow you an effective workflow.

I’d also like to say how good the service is from Freshbooks, and Xero. A welcome from Xero, and an enquiry from Mike McDerment Freshbook CEO about what I was finding hard with expenses, and why I’m switching. So Mike, this is for you – you guys rock, and served my needs well, but you just at this moment in time don’t allow me to get enough information about how my business is operating.

On an aside, Xero can integrate with Freshbooks, but we are a small company, and can’t afford to be paying for two solutions that handle Invoicing/Expenses. When one of them also handles the rest of our accounting functions, maybe this will change in the future, maybe it won’t. Either way Freshbooks it’s been fun using you.

• Twitter / Working at Twitter – Twitter are after recruiting people to assist with Data Visualisation – just shows a peak into what they may be thinking for the future.
• New car park in illegal parking hotspot | birminghamnewsroom.com – Birmingham City Council announce new parking area in most ticketed street – interesting to note thst a carpark will be in place which will still equal tickets (as per Livery St Carpark, the second most ticketed spot in 2008-2009 in Birmingham)
• An Annual Report on One Man’s Life – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com – The NYTimes talks to Feltron, about his annual life reports.
• Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms – A Gartner report, detailing the players within the Business Intelligence Market. I'm a fan of Tableau, from an analysis and ad-hoc point of view, and they get some good coverage. Alongside other more familiar, and unfamiliar vendors. Worth a scan through.
• Nicholas Felton | Feltron.com – Nicholas Feltron Report for 2009 – His life, as an infographic. Also take a look at the others that have been produced since 2006.