About Lapham’s Quarterly:

“Each issue of Lapham’s Quarterly adopts and explores a single theme. Our first four issues were dedicated, respectively, to War, Money, Nature, and Education, each created with an aim to help readers find historical threads from Homer to Queen Elizabeth I to George Patton, from Aesop to Edith Wharton to Joan Didion. New essays from writers such as Stanley Fish, Fritz Stern, and Andrew Delbanco then knotted each theme together. A typical issue features an introductory Preamble from Editor Lewis H. Lapham; approximately 100 “Voices in Time” — that is, appropriately themed selections drawn from the annals and archives of the past — and newly commissioned commentary and criticism from today’s preeminent scholars and writers.” (more)

First spotted via This Isn’t Happiness.

“Founder and tech wunderkind David Karp wrote to us this morning, “After looking over our roadmap, John, our team, and I all felt that staying on our current track – experimenting with new paid features and optimizing the ones with early traction – was the best way we could spend 2010.”

Karp revealed the company has “a dozen more paid features in the pipeline” as well as a host of new, free features; we hope to provide more details on those soon. The paid features will be focused on promoting high-quality content, increasing pageviews and helping content creators profit from their blogging.

And speaking of pageviews, here are some stats for you to chew on. The 3-year-old content management system has 4.5 million users who upload an average of 29 posts per second. Over the past 30 days, Tumblr garnered a collective total of 1.1 billion pageviews.” (more)

Interesting : in Mashable’s article, Tumblr is a CMS : a content management system. Which comes as a surprise. I never thought of Tumblr as a CMS. Micro-blogging platform, ok, maybe even a blogging service, a social network thing. But not a CMS. Unless you give a very, very broad sense to CMS : then, anything is a CMS. My library is a CMS. Hey, even my fridge is.

“Note : Poll results are not scientific and reflect the opinion of only those users who choose to participate. Poll results are note reflected in real time”

What does it means? That Time’s reader don’t like books? Or that if they were forced to chose between those four specific services ―garbage pick-up, libraries, police, public school hours― they would let go libraries? People want security, health and education before they can sit in a chair and read. It’s neither suprising nor an indication of a failure.

Found via Infoneer.

“Infographic narrative poster that explores Chicago’s historical and cultural relationship with the production and consumption of meat. Project was created for the Select Media Festival 7 Infoporn exhibit.”

First spotted via Information About Information.

“A look back at this year’s biggest news stories, from the serious (financial collapse) to the bizarre (balloon boy), paints an interesting picture of what events held our attention in this last year of the decade. The website Journalism.org monitors the news from 55 outlets every week, calculating what percent of the week’s print, television, radio, and internet reporting is devoted to each story. Our latest Transparency is a look at the totals for all the news this year, divided into categories of politics, culture, business, and plain old bad news”

A collaboration between GOOD and Naz Şahin and Şerifcan Özcan.

“The worldwide number of Internet users surpassed 1.59billion in 2008—up from only 2M+ in 1990, 45M in 1995 and 430M in 2000. Worldwide yearly increase in Internet users is 140M to 145M in the next five years, which means the 2B mark will happen in 2011 or 2012. Much of current and future Internet user growth is coming from populous countries—especially the BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India, China. In the next decade many Internet users will be supplementing PC Internet usage with Smartphone, mobile phone and mobile device Internet usage. In developing countries many new Internet users will come from cell phone and Smartphone Internet usage. China now leads with over 235M Internet users at year-end 2008. The two most populous countries—China and India—are now in 1st and 3rd place in Internet users.” (more)

According to the CIA’ World Factbook there’s an estimated 6,79 billion people in the world (as of July 2009). So a little less than a quarter (23%) of the world population use Internet.

The Business Insider | CHART OF THE DAY: “Amazon’s Stock Wins Day One Of The iPad Onslaught” by Jay Yarow and Kamelia Angelova, Jan. 27, 2010

“Amazon won the first day of its battle with the iPad. At least, as measured by investors. Amazon finished the day up almost 3%, while Apple was only up 1%. This is a long term battle, but Jeff Bezos is probably feeling better than he thought he would today.” (more)

“Phil Gyford time-tested six different methods of writing the same 221-word passage: pen-and-paper, Newton MessagePad 2100, Palm Vx Graffiti, Palm Treo hardware keyboard, iPhone 3G software keyboard, and a full-size MacBook keyboard.”

About Phil Gyford:

“I am mostly focused on thinking about, designing, programming and running websites. I work freelance and am currently thinking about: how aggregation should work on personal websites; how to learn everything; and improvisation via email.” (read more)

“More kids are getting mobile phones: Last year, more than 35% of U.S. children ages 10-11 had cellphones, almost double the amount in 2005, according to Mediamark data, via eMarketer. And even more than 5% of 6-7-year-olds had cellphones last year.”

About the Business Insider:

“Welcome! The Business Insider (TBI) is a new business site with deep financial, entertainment, green tech and digital industry verticals. The flagship vertical, Silicon Alley Insider, launched on July 19, 2007, led by DoubleClick founders Dwight Merriman and Kevin Ryan and former top-ranked Wall Street analyst Henry Blodget.” (read more)

“Here is a Venn Diagram made with Twitter Venn that shows the relative frequency of tweets made about the recent deaths of three celebrities - Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, and Ed McMahon. This analysis was done around 7am EST today and the absolute numbers for tweets/day will certainly increase as more people in the US come online. I expect the proportions among the various combination regions to stay roughly the same.

A couple of points of interest:

– Celebrity interest ranked by number of tweets is Michael > Farrah > Ed with ratios 62:6:1
– Ed was mentioned together with both Michael and Farrah more often than he was by himself

To explore the data using the interactive application click on the image below or this link: Twitter Venn for #michaeljackson, #farrahfawcett, and #edmcmahon.”

About Jeff Clark:

“I have been a professional programmer for about twenty years and my current areas of interest include data mining, statistical analysis and visualization. I enjoy discovering the patterns in the apparent chaos of real life data and exploring new techniques for communicating what I discover in a visually compelling manner.

As you might expect from my interests described above I intend to publish here the results of any analytical projects I undertake as well as sharing with you my thoughts on any tools or techniques I learn something about. I will also write some entries pointing you towards some other places on the web related to these topics.” (read more).

Previously on Skandalon : Michael Jackson.

“In fact, the share of college grads with a doctorate has fallen over the past decade. Not by much, for sure—but there’s no sense of a PhD being a desirable degree. Americans are not flocking to spend 4-6 years writing a dissertation and going on to research. And why not? This chart, which shows the change in real pay since 1999 for higher ed graduates, may help explain the relative undesirability of the PhD.[…] The real earnings for full-time workers with a doctoral degree has dropped by 10% since 1999.” (read more)

About Michael Mandel:

“Michael Mandel was chief economist at BusinessWeek, responsible for formulating BusinessWeek’s coverage of economic policy. Prior to this, Mandel was economics editor. In 1998, Mandel won the Gerald R. Loeb Award for his coverage of the New Economy. Mandel is the author of several books, including Rational Exuberance, The Coming Internet Depression, and The High Risk Society. Prior to joining BusinessWeek in 1989, Mandel was an assistant economics professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Mandel holds a PhD in economics from Harvard.” (BusinessWeek)