Good insight mixed with dry humor is a winning combination any day.

He dictated the whole article. (Though it’s not as cute as the video review he did for Dragon 11 for Windows.)

What a craft. Bob Kramer, who used to be a clown for Ringling Brothers, now forges about 5 handmade knives a week and is one of only 114 master bladesmiths in the world.

Spoiler: flip the word upside down.

And this reminds me of a similar trick I learned a while back for proofreading a bit of text against spelling and grammar: read each sentence in reverse.

(Via Cameron Moll.)

So here’s an extremely clever, free, and useful service. Sending an email to someone that requires a response? You can CC or BCC [email protected] and you or both of you will get a reminder about the email. Very smart, and apparently very easy to use.

I often use Things to keep track of my follow-up needed email conversations, but FollowUpThen looks like a much more streamlined way to handle those. (Via swissmiss.)

A beautiful new iPad app from Oliver Reichenstein and Information Architects and designed with the sole purpose of being a top-notch writing environment:

Many professional writers use SimpleText or Textedit because these are the only writing programs that are totally distraction free. But text editors are not perfect. That’s why we made Writer.

Additional cleverness involves a monospace font optimized for the iPad, Nitti Light, and syncing with Dropbox.

Susan Orlean’s advice for aspiring writers which is now no longer relevant. So I guess you should start a blog or something.

Perhaps. But not today. Case in point? This Etch A Sketch iPad Case.

Tim Civan gets some stunning, vintage-looking images of modern-day New York. (Via Jim Ray.)

Khoi Vinh:

The old equation for news used to be: journalism (the reporting and editing) + presentation (laying out the news or preparing it for broadcast) + distribution (delivering newspapers or broadcasting news over the air).

Now the equation for news is: journalism + presentation + user experience + distribution. Hence, the reason attention and trust are so much more valuable now whereas they used to be somewhat inconsequential as it related to distribution.

Khoi’s 30-minute presentation, which is the basis for his above blog post, can be seen on swissmiss. A lot of great gems of wisdom in his presentation — especially if you’re involved with any sort of content distribution.

Here’s a handy and free application for text cleanup. It does much of the no-brainer editing and formatting for you. For example, CleanHaven will fix your wrong or missing capitalizations, repair a paragraph that’s full of erroneous line breaks, and even correct words that are are written twice in a row.

(Via Patrick Rhone.)

A visual look at the changes in each United States County’s unemployment rate over the past 2.5 years. The national average has grown from 4.6% in January 2007 to 9.7% as of August 2010. (Via Noah Stokes.)

A concise reminder (or overview) of what’s what from The Internet Grammar of English. (Via Ian Broome.)

Another link to another great article by Scott Berkun. Required reading for anyone who leads and manages a team, especially if it’s a creative team.