Last June, I got to borrow our solitary Hoodie to put it through some every day adventure pacing. While I couldn’t fit it on my Big Dummy (this current version is not compatible with Big Dummy, if you’re spending that kinda cash, just get the full blown FreeLoaders (plus they’re new for 2010!)), I was able to rock out the company FreeRadical.

2010 Hoodie Color Comparisons, none of which actually made it into production. Hoodie comes in two colors - Redical Red and Graphite Grey

My mission: gardening supplies and sustenance for los gatitos (cats for those not Spanishly inclined). Retrieve and pay for said items, load and lash as needed to my Xtracycle and ride home, event free.

My initial thoughts: lovin’ it. The sleek profile, minimalist style and straightforward features all appealed to me. The install was easy, like a glove. It felt secure, taught and ready to ride. The webbing down the spine seemed a bit over kill. Might be useful to tie things down to, but I can CamStrap more securely off the frame members of my bike or the FreeRadical (Note: the webbing is not on the production version). I’m happy the logo is small and subdued, a nice touch.

This is the Hoodie that Rick tested. That's the understated logo Rick liked, though production Hoodies have even more understated branding.

I thought I may have some issues with the lack of straps a la FreeLoaders, but the large side pockets held my goods with grace and fortitude. I wasn’t a big fan of how low the upper lip came, so we raised the height of the pocket about an 1″+.

Cinching down the pockets was easy and smooth. They held super tight, giving me confidence that they wouldn’t loosen or slowly open.

Since my pocket space was gobbled up by my soil bags, but still had cat food, litter and a lock left, I was happy I brought a CamStrap with me. Attaching to the handle of the FreeRadical, I looped it through the litter handle and over the food bag. I attached the cam end to the rear horizontal bridge of the FreeRad and cinched everything down nice and snug.

The ride home was uneventful. I shook, shimmied and slalomed down the biggest hills I could find, took the long way home, hopped a curb and nothing budged. Me like.

Conclusion: Hoodie rocks. From it’s clean looks, simple operation, nice lock pocket, reflective webbing and other features, I dig it. I know that may be a biased opinion, but keeping it simple has its merit. Another bonus, it’s $75! That, coupled with a FreeRadical, and you’re looking at $364 to fly your every day skies.

Learn more about what Hoodie features and fits at XC.com.

Today, the Federal Highway Administration is releasing "The National Biking and Walking Study: a 15-year Status Report." This study, by the Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center, discusses trends and outcomes in bicycling and walking since 1994. I think the news is pretty good.

First and foremost, Americans are hitting the sidewalks and streets on foot and by pedal in record numbers. From 1990 to 2009, the number of trips taken on foot more than doubled from 18 billion to 42.5 billion. Similarly, the number of bike trips increased from 1.7 billion to 4 billion.

Now, the original goal of The National Biking and Walking Study submitted in 1994 was to "double the percentage of total trips made by bicycling and walking from 7.9% to 15.8% of all travel trips."

In transportation circles, we call that percentage "mode share," and any planner will tell you that doubling mode share is an ambitious goal. But it turns out that we're getting there.

According to the 2009 National Household Travel Survey, bicycling and walking now account for 11.9% of all trips. It's not the 15.8% we hoped to see, but--considering the increase in population and overall number of trips--it's progress.

Even better, the safety data is also promising. From 1994 to 2008, the number of pedestrians killed decreased by 22.3% and the number of bicyclists killed decreased by 12%. Since the number of trips taken on foot or on bike has more than doubled in the same period, those declines are a good sign of increased safety.

Also, even as the percentage of all trips taken on foot or on bicycle has increased in the same period, the number of bicyclist and pedestrian fatalities as a percentage of all traffic fatalities has dropped. Again, not only have bicycling and walking gained in mode share, but they've also gained in relative safety.

But, we are still talking about 4,378 pedestrians and 716 bicyclists killed in 2008. No matter how we look at the data, that is just too many.

I don't think I need to remind readers that safety is DOT's highest priority. As FHWA Administrator Victor Mendez said, "We are proud of the work we’ve done to integrate walking and bicycling into people’s transportation options, but we won’t stop working until we find ways to prevent fatalities."

And that's why we're working so hard to help create Complete Streets, ensure Safe Routes to School, and develop Livable & Sustainable Communities.

In 1994, when the first National Biking and Walking Study was sent up to Congress, the report identified five categories of benefits from non-motorized transportation:

• Health benefits
• Transportation efficiency benefits
• Environmental & energy benefits
• Economic benefits
• Quality of life benefits

Times have changed in 15 years--it's true--but these benefits only seem more important today.

Americans want and need safe alternatives to driving. And by making biking and walking safer and more accessible, we’ll be able to provide Americans with more choices and help foster more active, more sustainable, and--yes--more livable communities.

That's why we recently announced a policy change that encourages transportation agencies to go beyond minimum standards and provide safe and convenient facilities for pedestrians and bicyclists.

That's why we've partnered with HUD and EPA in President Obama's Interagency Partnership for Sustainable Communities.

And that's why we're making sure that, as we plan for the future, biking and walking get a seat at the table.

The company had previously offered benefits such as group health insurance and 401(k) retirement plans to freelancers through oDesk Staffing, but that required members to bill a minimum of 30 hours per week through the oDesk system. The new benefits plans — made available through a partnership with NetBenefits Plus — provide health insurance to everyone with an oDesk account; there’s no minimum hours billed requirement.

There are three different plans available:

• Wellness Plan. With an oDesk User ID, coverage issuance is guaranteed. There is an annual benefit limit of $20,000, and the plan starts at $210/month
• Catastrophic Plan. Covers all costs after the first $10,000 and is designed to cover major medical care, including hospitalization. This plan starts at $140/month. Note that coverage issuance is not guaranteed on this plan — there’s a standard six-question application and phone interview.
• Comprehensive Plan. Combines the Wellness Plan and $1 million of catastrophic coverage for a more complete coverage option. This plan starts at $280/month. Note that coverage issuance is not guaranteed on this plan — there’s a standard six-question application and phone interview.

It’s worth noting that these new plans look to be more expensive than the oDesk Staffing plan, and don’t offer its additional benefits, such as 401(k) plans, W-2 tax filing and dental coverage. However, oDesk Staffing’s requirement to bill a minimum of 30 hours per week through oDesk will exclude many freelancers. The new benefits plans are open to all, which may tempt more people to leave the reassurance regular employment provides and take up freelancing — presumably one of the reasons why oDesk is providing these plans.

Would oDesk’s new benefits plans tempt you to leave regular employment?

Photo courtesy stock.xchng user je1196

The title of this book hooked me from the start. What am I writing about at The Simple Dollar if I’m not writing about “the new frugality”?

Chris Farrell, the author of the book, is a name I’m familiar with having been a long-time faithful listener of Marketplace Money (and it’s other Marketplace brethren) on NPR. I expected a well-written book that offered lots of insightful thoughts on the “new frugality” along with some practical tips.

That’s precisely what I got. Let’s dig in.

1 | The Rise of the New Frugality
Farrell opens the book by making a strong effort at defining what “new frugality” means. I think it’s best summed up as “seeking the best value, not the lowest price.” Quite often, frugality has meant the same thing as cheap, but the “new frugality” means something different entirely. It means finding ways to preserve exactly what’s important to you while minimizing the costs, with costs going far beyond just dollars and cents. The cost is about the environmental impact. It’s about the time impact. It’s about even the emotional impact. Really, the new frugality is simply being mindful of the many ramifications of the purchasing decisions we make.

2 | The Great Transformation
How did we get here? This chapter is basically a history of modern consumerism, particularly focusing on the housing bubble of 2008 and the rise in environmental and social awareness of people over the past decade. Farrell’s argument seems to be that the current economic stagnation along with a growing sense that our actions have ramifications far beyond ourselves add up to a new attraction to frugal, simple living for people. I can’t argue – I largely feel the same way.

3 | A Margin of Safety
What’s the result of all of that uncertain feeling? People have begun to desire a margin of safety – something many of us felt naturally until the events of the past decade have shaken that sense of a margin of safety right to our core. How do we get back that sense of a margin of safety? By living within our means and preserving the resources we have – but without abandoning many of the enjoyable perks of today’s life. We seek a balance that wasn’t there in the Depression and wasn’t there in the spend-spend-spend 80s and 90s.

4 | The New Frugality Rules
Keep it simple. Pay yourself first. Invest in yourself. Worry about the downside. Borrow rarely and wisely. Give back. These are the new frugality rules that Farrell proposes – and they pretty much describe a financially stable way of life that maintains that balance we all strive to have. I think the first one is key – keep it simple. The best way to do that is to make all of your saving as automated and straightforward as you possibly can, making it easy for you to make do with what’s left.

5 | Make Frugality a Habit
One big way to make all of this work is to simply make frugality a part of your everyday life. The best way to do that is to simply start being mindful of every dollar you spend. It’s fine if you want to splurge on yourself sometimes – that’s not the point. The point is to think about it first. At the same time, think about what you’re buying at the grocery store or when you go out to eat or anywhere else. Farrell offers tons of ideas on reducing your spending in sensible ways, but they all boil down to this one basic idea: think about what you’re spending and why every time a dollar leaves your account. The more you think about it, the more you’ll likely realize there are better ways of doing it that achieve the same result for lower cost. When you find those routes, that’s nothing but a big victory for you.

6 | Borrow Wisely
The best debt is no debt, of course. When you do borrow, however, make sure you’re borrowing to pay for something that will generate value (like an education) or will at least retain it (a sensible home purchase – meaning not a McMansion in a large metro area). Also, always borrow only when you have a margin of safety – in other words, don’t borrow money when you’re already hurting to pay your own bills and you don’t have any savings in the bank. There’s also a discussion about setting up your own debt repayment plan if you’re already under a heap of debt.

7 | Investing the Simple Way
The investment advice here is pretty straightforward. If you have a 401(k) available to you that offers a company match, jump onto that and get every drop of that match. If you don’t, get a Roth IRA. Put at least some of your money into something safe, like CDs or possibly treasury notes. If you want to take on more risk, buy some index funds – they’re low cost and help you to diversify your money very widely. Use dollar cost averaging – in other words, set up a regular automated investment plan that puts a certain amount into your investment every month.

8 | Live Long and Prosper
This chapter has the most honest answers about retirement I’ve ever read in a personal finance book. Farrell simply says that there’s no way to know if you have enough set back for retirement – and you don’t. No one knows when or how their number will be up. How can you save, then? Your best bet is to save as much as you possibly can. Then, when you retire, rediscover the simple pleasures in life. It’s a lot easier to cook yourself an inexpensive but amazingly delicious meal at home if you’re not running back and forth to an all-encompassing career.

9 | Home, Sweet Home
Should you rent or buy? Much of this chapter focuses on this question. Farrell seems to point people towards the P/R ratio, which is the price of a home you would buy versus the cost to rent similar housing for a year. That ratio should be somewhere around 16 – if it’s higher, you’re probably better off renting. Most of the actual advice on mortgages is very solid – only buy when you have 20% down (unless you want to be hammered on the mortgage(s)), make a “thirteenth” payment each year by making half of a monthly payment every two weeks, and don’t worry about the myth of maintaining a mortgage for a tax writeoff.

10 | The College Sheepskin
What about paying for college? Farrell argues that an education is very worthwhile, but the premium paid for a degree from a prestigious school rarely makes up for the huge difference in tuition costs. In other words, the huge additional cost for a typical student to go to Harvard versus their local four year state school will likely not be made up for after graduation. Your best strategy, actually, is to control costs (unless you get very lucky with a scholarship). He also recommends using a 529 savings plan if you’re saving for your child’s future education.

11 | Generosity and Gratitude
The book closes with a look at charity and the “keep it simple” mantra applies here. Identify charities that match your values. That takes time, because for many of us, a lot of charities sound good. What’s important is to figure out our true purpose in giving. What is our mission with the money we give? Let that specific mission lead your giving and you’ll find that you’re truly building a better world.

Is The New Frugality Worth Reading?
What makes The New Frugality stand out isn’t the advice. For the most part, the advice in this book is the standard personal finance stuff that you can find all over the place. What makes The New Frugality stand out is the broader awareness of the writing, which brings the book to life in a unique way.

I enjoyed reading this book for many of the same reasons that I enjoy listening to Marketplace on NPR. It takes information that I could get anywhere and places it in a social and cultural context that not only brings the ideas into a new light, but also makes clear the connections between our money and the broader world around us in ways that aren’t always obvious.

I enjoyed it if for no other reason than it cast some new lights and angles on a lot of the ideas I already knew. That type of book is always a refreshing read.

Well this is a bummer: A Belgian study finds that bicyclists on urban streets inhale tens of millions of toxic nanoparticles with each breath, taking in five times as much as drivers and pedestrians on the same streets.

The U.K. Times reports on the new research: 

Because they are exerting themselves, cyclists breathe harder and faster than other road users. The study found that they suck in about 1,000 cubic cm with each breath, meaning they may inhale tens of millions of the particles each time they fill their lungs, and billions during a whole journey.

“This is the first time anyone has counted the particles while also measuring people’s breathing during city commuting. It showed that cyclists can inhale an astonishing number of pollutant particles in one journey,” said Luc Int Panis of the transport research institute at Hasselt University in Belgium, who led the study.

Researchers fitted bikers with devices that counted the particles—mostly emitted by car tailpipes—in the air they breathed. Research on the long-term effects of inhaling these particles is murky, though they’ve been linked to heart disease and respiratory problems. “Other studies have shown that exposure to particulate pollution can have rapid short-term effects too—such as provoking asthma attacks,” says the Times.

As an occasional bike commuter, my expert opinion is that this news blows. Biking (along with walking) is the most helpful commuting method for the planet and for fellow citizens, so I’d like it to have even more benefits for bikers themselves. Int Panis’ study complicates the picture, although it doesn’t really change the long-term solutions—fewer internal-combustion vehicles, more electric vehicles, much more mass transit, land use that reduces the need for daily travel, and streets that are safe for bikers and walkers as well as autos.

In the short term, nanoparticles are so small that wearing a mask doesn’t help (which is a relief in its own way—who wants to wear a mask?). The research instead suggests finding ways to separate bikes from cars and trucks. Cyclists can choose routes away from arterials and heavily trafficked streets. Diesel fumes are especially important to avoid: on an equal horsepower basis, diesel exhaust is 100 times more toxic than exhaust from automobiles, according to Robert W. Derlet of UC-Davis.

Avoiding traffic gets tough, though, when you’re trying to go where everyone else is trying to go (say, downtown) at the same time (say, rush hour). And for the public-health and environmental benefits of biking to be fully realized, it’s got to be more than weekend recreation. Sticking to bike paths and country roads doesn’t get most people where they need to be in their daily lives.

Planners can help by creating cycle tracks that give bikers a buffer of trees, sidewalks, or parked cars so that they’re not breathing directly behind auto tailpipes. (Seattle just announced plans for its first cycle track.) But does a few feet of separation do any good? Anne Lusk, a cycling advocate and research fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health, is applying for funding to study just that, since there’s no definitive research on whether cycle tracks help bikers avoid significant levels of road pollution, she said. A 2005 study of busy central London streets found that air on sidewalks was cleaner than in the road, suggesting a small separation makes a difference.

 “What you clearly should do as a bicyclist is to avoid busy arterial roads,” said Lusk.

Compared to drivers, she said, cyclists have shorter commutes and use fewer busy roadways (you don’t see many of them on interstates), which limits their exposure to tailpipe pollution.

Lusk said Int Panis’ nanoparticle research is sound and accurate, but that bikers still get a net health benefit, given the exercise their hearts, lungs, and muscles are getting. “Bikers are still coming out ahead,” she said.

Making biking safer and more commonplace will only make that more true.

Related Links:

What’s up with Murkowski and Graham? Formerly climate-conscious GOP senators flail around

BP: We don’t know why our stock is falling

The BP coffee spill [VIDEO] [AWESOME]

Page uncovers CMP developers’ emails. Jamie Page of the Pensacola News Journal has a blockbuster story out this morning about the Community Maritime Park developer MPDP and its five-month “secret negotiations” with Hoar Construction to “obtain the financial muscle to get a contract to build the park.” Mr. Page obtained the email communications through a provision in the MPDP-CMPA development agreement that makes such document public.

Tar balls found at Fort Pickens. WALA-TV is reporting that three tar balls were found at Fort Pickens. Gross.

BP hasn’t forked over cash. Rick’s Blog reports that BP hasn’t actually given the State of Florida the $25 million it pledged for advertising efforts. Big surprise. Rick’s Blog is doing a great job of covering this depressing oil calamity — check them out for all your updates.

Video feed from oil gusher. Pensacola Beach Blog has BP’’s live video feed of the underwater oil gusher, via PBS.

An estimated 4 million gallons of crude oil has leaked into the Gulf of Mexico since the Deepwater Horizon oil platform exploded and sank April 20. Various efforts to contain or slow the leak have been unsuccessful. To date, winds and tides have kept oil from impacting the Pensacola Bay area, but the spill has devastated other Gulf communities, putting fisherman and others out of work, killing wildlife, and contaminating ecologically-sensitive areas.

For more information, contact the even organiser at epkrak@cox.net.

One analysis suggests gusher is 70,000 barrels daily, or an Exxon Valdez every four days, and 12 times more powerful than estimates by Coast Guard or BP

Marine scientists were carefully viewing footage of oil and gas billowing out of a ruptured well on the ocean floor today, to try to deliver the first reliable estimates of the crude gushing into the Gulf of Mexico – it could be as much as 70,000 barrels a day.

The video could help resolve the increasingly contentious debate about the scale of the disaster, and the oil companies' willingness to give access to any information.

BP has claimed repeatedly there is no way of measuring the scale of the leak. The US Coast Guard, meanwhile, has stuck to an early estimate of 5,000 barrels a day.

Independent marine researchers have suggested the spill could be much larger.

National Public Radio in the United States last night reported that the well is spewing up to 70,000 barrels of oil a day – the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez disaster every four days. Nearly 11 million barrels of oil were spilled in Alaska's Prince William Sound in 1989 when the Exxon Valdez tanker ran aground, oiling beaches and poisoning marine life for generations. NPR said scientific analysis of newly released video footage from the ocean floor suggested the gusher was 12 times more powerful than estimates offered so far by the Coast Guard or BP.

Its analysis was conducted by Steve Werely, an associate professor at Purdue University, using a technique called particle image velocimetry, a method was accurate to 20%. That puts the range of the oil spill from 56,000 to 84,000 barrels a day.

Werely told The Guardian he based his estimate on techniques which track the speed of objects travelling in the flow stream.

"You can see in the video lots of swirls and vortices pumping out of the end of the pipe, and I used a computer code to track those swirls and come up with the speed at which the oils is shooting out of the pipe," he said. "From there it is a very simple calculation to figure out what is the volume flow."

He said he had use the method for 15 years, and elsewhere it had been in use for 25 years.

Scientists had spent the day scouring the video footage of the gushing pipe on the ocean floor to try to arrive at estimates.

Eugene Chiang, an associate professor at the University of California Berkeley who teaches a course on measurement, said he had been copied on an email which set it as a science challenge for academics.

"It was just like estimating the number of jelly beans in a can, it had that kind of a feeling – but of course with much more serious consequences," he told the Guardian.

Chiang said he used relatively "back of the envelope" calculations to put an estimated rate for the spill at 20,000 to 100,000 barrels a day.

Chiang studied the angle of the flow of oil and gas from the leaking pipe, and made calculations about buoyancy and gravitational acceleration.

"I estimated that it was moving 100cm per second going up as a very rough estimate, so then all I needed to know was the area of the pipe." His guess turned out to be very close to the measurements released by BP.

"This was just based on back-of-the-envelope scribbling and looking at the vide; but even within that range you can already infer that this is a huge disaster exceeding the magnitude of the Exxon Valdez spill by quite a large margin," he said. "The calculation is uncertain, but I am confident enough to say that this is one of the big ones. It is not 5,000 barrels a day. That much I can say."

However, these estimates made no impact on BP. "We have said from the begining there is no way to estimate the flow coming out of the pipe." said Mark Proegler, a spokesman for BP. "Our estimate was provided by the coast guard and Noaa (the ocean and atmospheric agency) and it is based on satellite imagery, overflight observations, and on water observations."

The size of the spill has long been contested territory. In the initial 48 hours after the rig went down, the Coast Guard offered repeated assurances there was no evidence of a leak from the crumpled pipe on the ocean floor.

The Coast Guard later admitted its initial assurances were based on data from BP's robot submersibles. The Coast Guard then suggested the ruptured well was leaking at 1,000 barrels a day before revising upwards to 5,000 barrels a day.

But marine scientists have been warning of a much more extensive spill, and have been demanding BP release data gathered from its remote operating vehicles, such as the video footage released on Wednesday.

BP officials last week laid out a worst case scenario of 60,000 barrels a day when they were in a closed-door briefing with members of Congress in Washington DC.

But the release of the first video from BP's submersible cameras – under growing pressure from scientists and news organisations – could help scientists arrive at independent estimates.

Timothy Crone, at the Lamont-Doherty earth observatory, part of Columbia University in New York, a scientist who has spent years studying natural jets on the ocean floor, said that he would be able to produce an independent estimate of the leak by analysing the video and information from BP on the diameter of the leaking pipe.

"If they took about 20 or 30 seconds of video with a very specific purpose of measuring flow rates, which means having the ROV [remotely operated vehicle] stay completely still or parked on the bottom, and you got video of the plume close to the leak, and if it was illuminated and with high resolution, then you could get pretty good estimates of the flow rates," Crone said.

The scientists say access to the video from BP's ocean-floor vehicles could become even more crucial in the next few days for gauging the success of various devices to clog the leak.

BP engineers today began the slow process of trying to fit a smaller tube inside the crumpled riser pipe on the ocean floor to try to siphon oil to the surface. Officials said it could take 12 hours to insert the tube into the pipe without running into debris. Engineers are also considering a smaller version of a failed containment box. The original device was abandoned because it trapped hydrate crystals which could clog the pipe.

"One of the really critical things is, if you don't know the flow, it is awfully hard to design the thing that is going to work," said Norman Guinasso, director of the geochemical and environmental research group at Texas A&M University. "This has been going on for weeks and we are just assuming the flow rate is the same."

The Deepwater Horizon Unified Command (set up by the Marine Board of Investigation to report on the explosion on 20 April which caused the leak) posted the first clip on Wednesday. It said the oil and gas were flowing from the larger of the two known leaks on the riser.

"This leak is located approximately 460ft (140 metres) from the top of the blowout preventer and rests on the sea floor at a depth of about 5,000ft."

Initial investigations by Congress and government agencies in Louisiana have pointed to a series of equipment failures on the rig, and a culture of lax regulatory oversight of the offshore drilling industry.

Deepwater Horizon has heightened sensitivities for offshore drilling world-wide. Off Venezuela, an offshore natural gas platform leased to the national oil company sank early today, and within hours Hugo Chávez, the president, was on Twitter offering reassurances that all 95 crew were safe and that there was no risk to the environment. Officials said that a tube connecting the rig to the gas field was disconnected and the safety valve sealed.

• This article was amended on 14 May 2010. The original referred to the Coast Guard's assessment of leakage at 1,000 gallons a day before revising estimates to 5,000 gallons a day. This has been corrected.

• Postponer — Read it Later is a tremendously useful service for keeping on top of the latest writing in your field. Stumble across an interesting sounding article but don’t have time to read it now? Save it to your Read It Later list so you can check it out later, from any computer. If you have an iPhone, you can sync your Read It Later list with the phone, meaning you can catch up on those articles when you get a spare moment while on the go. Unfortunately, there’s no official Read It Later extension for Chrome, but Postponer, a pair of extensions, does the job admirably.
• After the Deadline — This useful extension has been available for a while as a Firefox add-on, so it’s good to see it released for Chrome. It’s a fairly comprehensive spelling and grammar checking tool. It can highlight misspelled words, misused words (“weather” instead of “whether,” for example), grammar and style issues. It’s certainly not perfect — it won’t catch all of your mistakes and it’s also quite a hefty extension — but as a quick sanity check, it works really well. I find it especially useful as Chrome’s built-in spell-checker doesn’t seem to work with WordPress (please see the disclosure at the bottom).
• Clip to Evernote — Note-taking app Evernote is a tremendously useful tool for writers. You can capture and access your notes wherever you happen to be, on pretty much any device. The official Chrome extension lets you swiftly clip interesting snippets of web content and save them to your Evernote account, without having to open new tabs or mess about with bookmarklets.
• Word Count — Word counts are crucial for many writers. Word Count’s a simple extension that enables you to highlight some text on a web page and hit a toolbar button to get a word and character count without having to waste time copying and pasting the text into a word processing app.
• Webpage Screenshot — This is another simple but extremely useful extension if you often need screen grabs. On my Mac, I normally snap screenshots using OSX’s built-in tool (Cmd+Shift+4), but if the page or image that you need to grab is bigger than the current window, this extension comes in handy. It can take a screen grab of an entire page, or just the current window.

Disclosure: Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Enabling the Web Work Revolution

Ben Elowitz (@elowitz) is co-founder and CEO of Wetpaint, a platform for social web sites, and author of the Digital Quarters blog. Prior to Wetpaint, Elowitz co-founded Blue Nile, the online retailer of luxury goods. He is also an angel investor in various media and e-commerce companies.

Last week, I explained why the traditional ways of judging “quality” in published content are useless in the digital age. Judging by readers response to that piece, those dated values (which I labeled credential, correctness, objectivity and craftsmanship) are still sacred to many people. But here’s the problem: They simply aren’t enough to win audiences, drive financial success, or, for that matter, ensure viability. The demise of institutions like Newsweek proves that—and shows that publishers that don’t move beyond these anachronistic measures of success will perish.

So this week, I’m offering part two of the changing definition of quality in published content. Here are the four new rules of quality that publishers must obey to flourish. The biggest difference between the old and new definitions of quality are who’s doing the judging. In the era of Publishing 1.0, when production costs were high, alternatives low and time ample, the editor deemed something quality or not. But today, content isn’t scarce at all—in fact, it is in oversupply. And it is the audience that judges quality directly, dozens of times per day.

So, according to the audience, what is quality?  It comes down to these four characteristics:

—Relevance. When users are skimming thousands of pages from a hundred sites per month, without question the most important factor is whether your content is relevant to the audience. Relevant often means timely, as TMZ demonstrated when it covered news of Michael Jackson’s death hours before others, or when Janis Krums tweeted his photograph of Captain Sully’s US Airways flight 1569 on the Hudson. (As he said in his blog a couple of days later, “it is incredible that anyone at any point can have such an impact by simply posting a picture online.”) 

But more than that, it means that it matches what’s interesting to the audience. Increasingly, relevant means focused – and the modern web model that works is highly fragmented, addressing niche audiences with a whole deep site about every topic under the sun. Engadget had earned a huge reach of 6.2 million users a month for AOL (NYSE: AOL) by covering all the insider details of edgy devices and inventions for its tech-forward readers, while thebachelorshow.com gets millions of pageviews by garnering the audience that just can’t get enough of another famous pilot, Jake Pavelka. Regardless of what you personally may think of these sites, they are high quality because they’ve got the right goods for their audiences. 

—Make experiences, not content. In old media, the editors made the content and that was the product. Not any more.  Technology and content today are fused like peanut butter and chocolate in a Reese’s, and together they go by the name of “experience.”  Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Maps literally redefined its category, adding interactivity and features like street view and traffic that make it far superior to the same content available elsewhere. In good, old-fashioned text content, Twitter’s 140-character limit has created an experience that is all about freshness and scanability, and in the process become a destination that relies 100% on third-party content. The New York Times (NYSE: NYT) makes incremental steps in this direction, with innovative applications and interactive graphics. Even Wikipedia – with its driest-of-dry content and lack of interactivity – did its part to improve experience over other web pages by offering an experience of endless exploration through massively hyperlinked pages and a comprehensive collection. Just as wit consumer products, the packaging of content is part of the experience.

—P.O.V. information is proprietary for a few minutes, and then – if it’s valuable – it spreads like a cold in a grade-school. While a minority of publishers build a business around sourcing proprietary information, the vast majority offer something far more valuable and ownable: perspective. In digital media, that is far more important, as the same information appears in hundreds of places. The Huffington Post has a paucity of proprietary reporting, and yet earned an audience of 23 million monthly U.S. users by offering points of view that are meaningful to its progressive audience, while ABC (NYSE: DIS) News has tons of original reporting but less than half the online viewers. And Sugar Inc. has expanded its network to over 15 sites by offering points of view to its female audience. Over time, it’s the POV – and how effective that perspective is with the audience – that creates a publisher’s brand relationship. 

—Distribution. In the old days, content was assigned and written to appear in one place. Now, it appears everywhere—in blogs, in Facebook, in Twitter, and in search engines. This distribution ability is built-in to the content itself. The words in the writing determine whether it will show up at the top of Google or on page 10. The names you drop in the content determine whose vanity Google Alerts will be set off, beginning a chain reaction of tweet and retweet.  And the style and hook of the content and its headlines will determine its virality. Content that has no destination draw, no passalong, and no search indexability is plain and simple dead-end content. And like a tree falling in the forest, even the most beautiful content is irrelevant if it’s unseen or unheard. 

The social game publisher Zynga recognized the importance of distribution by weaving its games like Farmville into Facebook’s distribution network for phenomenal success. And famous-for-being-famous celebrity Julia Allison has mastered the art of building promotion into her content: her bio devotes as many words to where she has appeared as to who she is. The content is the network.

Huffington Post exemplifies POV and relevance for their audience by using their entire home page to say what’s important right now for their audience. With affiliated contributors and great outreach through the social networks, they take their experience to where people already are – and reaches 40 million users per month.

When publishers adopt this framework for quality, amazing things can happen. Cheezburger Networks (disclosure: I’m an investor), which publishes Failblog and ICanHasCheezburger, creates fun, light content that makes its way through the internet virally. It delivers content that puts a smile on viewers’ faces, and has a ridiculously strong and unique point of view on what’s funny. Its content – largely pictures of cats who can’t spell so good – flies in the face of any old-school rules of quality. But the audience loves it—to the tune of 340 million page views a month. 

In every category, ranging from humor to opinion to video, there are opportunities to create new and successful digital media properties like ICanHasCheezburger, Huffington Post, and YouTube. But these new-media empires are dependent on letting go of the old rules of quality and adopting a new mindset: that quality is in the eye of the beholder.

Related

• Traditional Ways Of Judging 'Quality' In Published Content Are Now Useless
• The NYT's Metering Plan Doesn't Go Far Enough—Here's The Rest Of The Solution
• Memo To News Sites: There Is No Future In 'Digital Razzle Dazzle'
• Think Technology Trumps Content? Well, You're Wrong
• L.A. Story: A Battle Between Old And New Media With A Surprise Ending
• What Many Media Companies Don't Get About Building An Audience
• In The New Content Economy, Consumers Want Access Not Ownership

Dmitry Orlov“Really, there’s no
one at the helm now,” Dmitry Orlov says nonchalantly. We are talking about the economic crisis and
the way that the destructive system of our economy operates without anyone
really leading it. It’s a perfect
statement from a man who has traded in his house and car to live on a sailboat
full-time, with an excellent argument for the safety and sustainability of the
water-based nomadic existence to back up his decision.

Not much seems to
ruffle Orlov, who describes his work as the “comparative theory of superpower
collapse.” Russian-American and fluent in both cultures, Orlov has made his
name on his blog ClubOrlov with beautifully reasoned comparisons of the collapse of the Soviet Union in
the 1990s and the coming collapse of the United States (already underway,
depending on how you view the recent economic crisis).

Orlov is a collapse theorist’s
collapse theorist. He isn’t out to impress anyone with the facts behind peak
oil or climate change—he leaves that to colleagues like Richard Heinberg and James Howard Kunstler. You
can read him or leave him—he doesn’t believe people are persuaded by logic
or evidence.

“Contemporary
mainstream culture and unbridled growth ... is not now and was never a rational
proposition. It is the realization of dark, irrational, self-destructive urges,
which were programmed into us through some evolutionary accident, and which are
now, and for a short time longer, being given their fullest expression by the
availability of cheap and abundant energy,” he explains in one of his essays, “The Despotism of the
Image.”

It’s not cheerful
material. What makes Orlov more interesting than the many gloomy and
over-credentialed scientists, sociologists, economists, and environmentalists
producing a steady stream of books about climate change, peak oil, and economic
collapse is his way of thinking things through with cool logic and telling
detail.

For example, in “Thriving in the Age of
Collapse,” Orlov describes the predicament and options of several typical
Americans, including a middle-aged couple named Mike and Mary, with grown
children:

Mike
and Mary should brace themselves for some bad news. The first piece of bad news
is that their retirement is going to be cancelled ... If Mike and Mary’s plan
is to live out their golden years in a suburban house, driving to and fro, then
they clearly do not have a plan and will gradually lose control of their lives.
Almost immediately, their house will become too expensive to heat. Next, it
will become impossible for them to continue driving, due to gasoline rationing
and shortages. Next, electricity will be cut off. For a time, they may continue
to be supplied with food by some community-based service.

At
some point, if they are lucky, they will be evacuated to some hastily organized
compound—most likely a dormitory or a barrack with cots and a television set
in the corner, which is mostly off due to lack of electricity, and plenty of
blank walls to stare at.

Just when you are
thinking Orlov is heartless and a bit smug in describing the futures of most of
us hapless Americans, he switches to a brighter mode. Mike and Mary might very
well rise to the occasion of the crisis, putting their career skills as a
teacher and businessman to work in their community by creating a school in
their home, negotiating a rainwater-capture system for their neighborhood, and
organizing rent strikes against absentee landlords. Orlov’s faith in human
resilience is variable, but present.

At his best, Dmitry
Orlov paints very credible visions of the future, many of them based on his
observations of Russians in their time of crisis. Like almost every European I
meet these days, he presumes that we all accept that Americans are foolish,
coddled, and naive. (I usually just duck my head and nod humbly.) It’s worth
the shaming to read some of the gems of his observations, like this one, from “Social
Collapse Best Practices”:

My
grandfather had a donkey while he was living in Tashkent
in Central Asia during World War II. There was
nothing much for the donkey to eat, but, as a member of the Communist Party, my
grandfather had a subscription to Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, and so
that’s what the donkey ate. Apparently, donkeys can digest any kind of
cellulose, even when it’s loaded with communist propaganda. If I had a donkey,
I would feed it the Wall Street Journal.

Orlov has written two
books—Reinventing Collapse, which recently won a silver medal Independent Publishers Award (watch for a second edition in the spring), and the
samizdat Hold Your
Applause. Most of his essays can be found on his blog ClubOrlov.  He says his future includes more writing, and—as soon as his sailboat is properly refitted—setting out on a sea voyage
with no set point of return. He does not seem worried.

Related Links:

Russia’s public conservation lands under threat

A Cleveland mall turns lost retail space into farm stand

U.S. slips in Environmental Performance Index

Scientists fear chemicals used in oil clean-up can cause genetic mutations and cancer, and threaten sea turtles and tuna

Chemicals used to break up the Deepwater Horizon oil spill before it reaches shore could do lasting damage to the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, environmental scientists say.

By BP's own account, it has mobilised a third of the world's supply of dispersant, so far pouring about 140,000 gallons (637,000 litres) of the cocktail into the Gulf as of today. Some of the dispersant has been injected directly into the source of the spill on the ocean floor, a technique never deployed before, deepening concerns about further damage to the environment.

The dispersants are designed to break down crude into tiny drops, which can be eaten up by naturally occurring bacteria, to lessen the impact of a giant sea of crude washing on to oyster beds and birds' nests on shore. But environmental scientists say the dispersants, which can cause genetic mutations and cancer, add to the toxicity of the spill. That exposes sea turtles and bluefin tuna to an even greater risk than crude alone. Dolphins and whales have already been spotted in the spill.The dangers are even greater for dispersants poured into the source of the spill, where they are picked up by the current and wash through the Gulf.

The high demand for dispersant carries an additional risk. As BP runs through stocks of the chemical, called Corexit, scientists fear it will fall back on older stockpiles in the developing world that are more toxic than those approved for use in the US. "You are trying to mitigate the volume of the spill with dispersant, but the price you pay is increased toxicity," said Richard Charter, a scientific adviser to Defenders of Wildlife. "There are no good answers in a mess of this size."

Chait joins the externalities debate. Drum adds:

If you were to sum up the cost of IQ losses from leaded gasoline (now gone, of course, but the effects live on), the asthma epidemic among today's kids, military protection of the Middle East, global warming, garden variety smog, plus all the more prosaic things like traffic jams and so forth, I wouldn't be surprised if the real cost of a gallon of gasoline would have to go up by three or four dollars to pay for it all.

Map on per capita state gas consumption by Martha Kang McGill of Infrastructurist.com.

VENICE, Louisiana (Reuters) - The United States suspended fishing across a wide swath of its Gulf of Mexico waters on Sunday as a spreading oil slick gushing from a ruptured undersea well threatened an environmental catastrophe.

Escambia County has declared a local state of emergency, as has the State of Florida, in anticipation of an oil slick arriving from the Gulf of Mexico by early next week.

The county has formulated a plan to keep the oil out of bay, bayous and other inland waterways. The plan calls for placing about 30,000 feet of boom stored at Pensacola Naval Air Station to form a barrier in a v-shape to catch the oil at East Pensacola Pass. With additional barriers at Fort McRae and Perdido Pass, oil should be blocked from Pensacola Bay, according to county officials.

The oil blocked by the booms will be collected and skimmed from the surface of the water. The booms would be in place about eight hours per day, and they would be removed when the tide flows out.

The following is the latest information from the Escambia County Emergency Operations Center:

State of Florida

• A state of emergency was declared by Governor Crist today, Friday, April 30.
• The state emergency operations center activated to a level 2 today.

Escambia County Board of County Commissioners

• A local state of emergency was declared by the Board of County Commissioners at an emergency meeting at 2 p.m. Friday, April 30.
• The emergency operation center will activate to a level 2 on Saturday, May 1 at 9 a.m. CST. This is a minimal activation with only specifically involved agencies activating at that time.

Citizen Information

• Citizen information phone lines will open at 9 a.m. on Saturday, May 1 for questions from residents may have. The number will be (850) 471-6600.

Operation “Clean Sweep”

• An “Operation Clean Sweep” will be held on the beaches to clean them of any debris before the oil spill reaches the shores to prevent additional contamination. This is a preventative measure that everyone can participate in.
• On Pensacola Beach, the cleanup will be held Sunday at noon, please meet at the Gulfside Pavilion at Casino Beach.
• On Perdido Key Beach, the cleanup will also be held Sunday at noon, please meet at the Perdido Key Chamber.
• Anyone may participate in this pre-cleanup event; please bring your own garbage bags and gloves.

Volunteer Opportunities

• BRACE, United Way and First Call for Help are organizing volunteers for cleanup after the oil reaches the shores. Please call 595-5905 to register to volunteer. Please call 595-5905 between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. on Saturday, and 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Sunday to register to volunteer.

Volunteer Training

• Sign-up to be trained for post-beach clean-up, call 595-5905 between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. on Saturday, and 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Sunday.
• Registration is required for a four-hour health and safety training classes for handling petroleum-contaminated materials.
• Classes will be held beginning Sunday at 1 p.m. at the Pensacola Civic Center.

Important information

• Although oil has not yet touched Escambia County shorelines, citizens are asked to stay away from oiled areas and keep a safe distance away from oil containment booms.
• Report oiled shorelines to 866-448-5816. Report oiled wildlife to 866-557-1401.
• For more information, see the official Escambia County disaster response site, www.EscambiaDisasterResponse.com.