Daily Ideas

We often talk about the impact of policy uncertainty on firms, and one gets the sense that marital and family instability has similarly doleful effects on the propensity towards risk-taking and investment in human capital. If you’re going back to school, it helps to have someone you can trust to look after the kids.

For men in particular, seeing a naked woman can really help them focus, look deeply into themselves and speak their minds openly.

In 2011, we’ll see open acknowledgement of what has long been understood about the traditional desktop web as a platform for consuming news content — it sucks.

The desktop web has been a revolutionary platform in terms of access to information, the democratization of publishing, and the socialization of media. But as a medium for consuming news content, from a user interface and user experience perspective, it’s problematic at best and downright awful at worst. News consumption has begun a major shift from the traditional desktop web to apps for touch tablets for a simple reason — the user experience and user interface are so much better, as the recent RJI survey of iPad users reflects. Consumers are choosing tablet apps over the traditional desktop web based on the quality of the user experience and the overall content “package.”

One estimate pegs the number of U.S. Facebook users who die annually at something like 375,000. Academics have begun to explore the subject (how does this change the way we remember and grieve?), social-media consultants have begun to talk about it (what are the legal implications?) and entrepreneurs are trying to build whole new businesses around digital-afterlife management (is there a profit opportunity here?). Evan Carroll and John Romano, interaction-design experts in Raleigh, N.C., who run a site called TheDigitalBeyond.com, have just published a tips-and-planning book, “Your Digital Afterlife,” with advice about such matters as appointing a “digital executor.

Google will deal the content farms a big blow by tweaking its algorithms to drive down their search rankings. But the company will be opaque to the point of catatonia about exactly what it did and why it did it, reflecting its reluctance to be drawn into qualitative judgments about content. There will be talk of lawsuits by the spurned content farms and no small amount of jawing about Google’s power, lack of transparency, and whether or not it’s being evil. But even those worried about Google’s actions will admit that search is a much better experience now that results are less cluttered with horribly written crap.

Starbucks will begin offering free WiFi in July … What’s more, the coffee shops will allow free access to partially paid content like the Wall Street Journal and a free Apple iTunes download every week.