By Mona Nomura of Pixel Bits (FriendFeed/Twitter)

I completely suck at numbers. I could give a crap about the stock market. I tune out politics since I'm sick and tired of the same old rhetoric. And if you're like me, you most likely skip over all the panicked headlines about how the $700 billion bailout got kicked from Congress.

I mean really - why would all this junk be relevant to regular people like us? The headlines are too damn depressing and most importantly - we don't have power, money or stature for any of this to really matter anyway - right? Wrong.

Listen to me, you guys: Now is not the time to tune things out.

Why is this important for people like us? Because well... I kinda sorta wanna know if I should close all my bank accounts and hide the cash under my mattress - don't you? It's also ... uhhh... election year, too. And as much as I want to turn the other way, this time, I can't. All the signs are pointing to: our country is in deep s--t.

I'm not sure if you've noticed, but the rest of America doesn't seem like they know what's going on either. Just ask someone to explain the stipulations of the 110-page bailout and how/what we (Americans) need to do to protect ourselves moving forward. Or the presidential candidates' action plans to rectify this economical disaster. I guarantee not everyone can - regardless of who they are or what their pedigrees are.

So you see, now is the time - moreso than ever, that we the regular people, need to come together. And if enough of us get together, our voices WILL matter. How do we do that? It's all about information.

Yes, I know reading the headlines is depressing, but educating ourselves so we're aware of the current happenings is a must; so we can get involved to make differences. How do we get involved? Well that's up to you - the reader to decide.

But what I CAN do for you, is provide resources to keep and stay informed. Hubs, if you will, so you don't have to dig through and search to stay involved. Please remember, to take account all sides, know your options, and if and when action is called - don't hesitate and go for it. Whether it be by voting, informing people around you, or just informing yourself, knowing and keeping up with the current situation means you have power to decide what to do with the knowledge.

So without further ado, I present to you:
"Mona's Top 5 Resources to Stay "Smart" - the Lazy Way"

1. NPR's Planet Money:
   NPR tags all articles pertaining to the financial crisis. It's just one click, and it pulls up all recent articles. The layout is easy on the eyes and there's no hunting or pecking through a mountain of pages to stay up to date.
   
   
2. Google News: Top Stories:
   I prefer Google News over Yahoo News because it's
   • Customizable
   • I can personalize it
   • Easy on the eyes
   All the top headline news from various sources are aggregated there. Pretty neat.
   
   
3. Harvard Business Online's Guide to the Downturn:
   A bunch of articles from really super smart people that are free. Plus the layout is nice, easy on the eyes, and surprisingly, the information is relevant to normal people, too. Don't be fooled, go check it out. Even if you think it's irrelevant, you can namedrop like I do. "OH YEAH? Bet you don't know what HARVARD professors are saying!" - or something close to that. ha!
   
   
4. Google Power Readers:
   Explore news sites read by McCain, Obama and political journalists, and see articles the campaigns and political pundits are sharing with Google Reader. What's better than knowing what they're reading and sharing!
   
   
5. Aggregation Sites like FriendFeed
   Since signing up for FriendFeed, I've been exposed to a lot of new blogs, different views, from so many different sources. The best part is, you can see what others are sharing, and choose if you want to read it or not. If you see the same headline shared by numerous people, it's a sign telling you: "READ IT, STAT!"

That about wraps it up. I hope this can help you, as much as it's helped me.

And remember, this is an election year. Our economical and country's future is dependent on us - We the people.

Update: Head on over to Scripting News. Dave Winer has a great write-up: "The US Economy After Katrina".

Read more by Mona Nomura at Pixel Bits.

The Google Mac team seemingly doesn't get to play with all the fun toys its Windows counterparts do. While the Windows team got to use Desktop long before we Mac users did, and thus far, holds a monopoly on the Chrome Web browser, it looks as if their hands weren't completely idle - as on Monday, they announced the release of a tool called Top Draw, which creates complex imagery and has the option to replace users' desktops. While an automatic background refresher isn't exactly innovative, as Apple has had this capability built into its system preferences for years, the new tool offers up compelling images that had me checking out my new desktop time and again.

Top Draw comes with integrated scripts with many preloaded image types, from Grid to Plasma to WavyGlow, for example.

The small viewer simply lets you select what Script type will run and how often it will refresh. For me, I have it running on randomly chosen scripts, every two minutes.

While not all the resulting images are postcard-perfect, a great deal of them surpass the bundled desktop patterns and pictures provided by Cupertino. A few examples are below:







It's one of those small products that piques the interest throughout the day. Also piquing the interest is wondering just what the Google Mac team is working on that would require this kind of engine, and if we'll soon get to see some serious Mac software and not just flashy toys that hearken back to decades-old screensavers.

The go-go days of the 1990s stock market, combined with the ease of online brokerages like eTrade, brought the world of Wall Street home for many people who previously saw it as a world outside their own, with high-priced brokers and a busy exchange floor. Along with the debut of CNBC, and the consumerization of financial news, including TheStreet.com and CBS Marketwatch, the potential world of day trading was brought home for millions. While the dotcom crash killed off many people's hopes at retiring rich from behind their computer monitors, most everyone has at least a passing understanding of the stock market, and many see themselves as experts - offering advice to any who will listen, even as we enter what looks like a scenario never seen before in our history, a time that will bring new challenges. Some "tried and true" solutions could work again in this trying time, and others will undoubtedly fail.

Today, after using the same methods I've used in the last seven years following the dotcom crash, I saw my personal portfolio take a hit of almost eight percent in one trading session. I've always typically invested in stocks where I feel I know the companies well, which typically sees me overweighted in the technology sector - Apple included. Of course, Apple took more than its fair share of the dive today, losing almost 20 percent of its value - which didn't help matters.

• To some, today's dive marks yet another milestone in a long, steep drop downward. The word "depression" is even being thrown around.
• To others, today's dive is a buying opportunity, giving you a chance to get stocks for cheap, down ten or twenty percent from where they were just a few short weeks ago.
• To some, buying stocks on the way down constitutes trying to "catch a falling knife", a move fraught with risk.
• To others, buying falling stocks allows them to "average down".

So now, we get advice from all sides. Buy stocks before Congress passes any version of the bailout bill, which is sure to raise stocks. Sell all your stocks and go to cash, as it's the only "safe" place. Get your cash out of the bank and into gold. You name a theory, and it's out there.

After being bitten by holding stocks long term around the beginning of the decade, I changed my methodology, holding stocks for days, or only weeks, tops. While others worried about taxes for short-term sales, I just tried to make a small portfolio larger. Often, this trading has worked, like it did when I bought AIG at $3.10 on September 16th and sold it for $4.84 on September 22nd, or when I bought Sirius Radio for 74 cents and sold it for 95 cents on those same dates. But, many other times, it hasn't, as the expected bump hasn't taken place. My bull-headedness typically sees me holding onto those losers for way too long, until those losses approach the accumulated gains from winning trades. So, despite my experience, I know I'm no expert. And the current market situation is unprecedented.

The fact that so many factors are coming into play at one time means that no single person has all the data. It's not clear who will be bailed out when, how much it will cost, how the presumed crisis will effect consumer or enterprise spending, and how it will change things in the short term or the long term. But it's not too uncommon for people to give advice without qualifications. You can see it when they say "buying on the way down will be profitable in the long run", or "get ready to buy, buy, buy" or that "smart investors (will) clean house and get ready for this amazing buying opportunity". I've seen every single one of these comments just on FriendFeed alone - which in theory wouldn't be where I'd head for investment advice.

The very tenets of what many of us have used to guide our buying and selling should always be in question. Even the concept of making a profit on every single trade is flawed, as it could make sense to sell one lot of shares at a loss to free up cash to make even more on another stock. And while I look at today's portfolio and see a bunch of red, it's not clear if tomorrow will be the beginning of a turn-around, or more of the same. With twins now, and my wife not working, at least this year, the idea would be to accumulate as much cash as I can, to prepare for tomorrow's expenses, but when I see an entire year's college tuition evaporate in a week, it's got me thinking I need to start making new approaches to guide my behavior in a time when nobody has the rule book. This could be a long learning process for all of us.

At the end of August, BackType launched an interesting tool to track individuals' comments across the Web - no matter the commenting platform and no matter the blog, and letting you subscribe to other BackType users to see their comments, wherever they were. In the last few weeks, BackType launched alerts, letting you follow search terms, and today, they launched widgets which enable you to show the places you are commenting around the Web from a single place, most likely your own blog.

As the world of blogging is changing, tweets on Twitter and comments on blog posts are becoming nearly as important as dedicated posts themselves, and BackType has served as a way to find out what other blogs people you follow read and comment on, or to show who is more likely to launch a new story, yet not participate in the following discussion. The service also serves to show if bloggers tend to only participate in the comments on their own site, and not around the Web - something I myself have been guilty of in some weeks.


BackType's New Alerts and Widgets

Alerts

After logging in to BackType, go to http://www.backtype.com/home/alerts to see how you can follow individual words or search terms, and have them deliver e-mail alerts each day, each week, or in real time. You can even choose to follow terms but keep them on your dashboard, without spawning an e-mail.

Widgets

Just about every service has widgets these days, and the new challenge as a blogger can be which ones to install at the expense of others. If you've got the real estate, BackType's new widget shows you comments you've made across the Web, with a favicon of the blog, and its recency - showing how fresh the comment is. Interestingly, clicking on the widget takes you to the actual comment within BackType, and from there, you can click through to the blog post in question.

In case that wasn't enough, Christopher Golda of BackType says more features are planned. BackType has been expanding their coverage through scouring more and more blogs, has been improving the service's search engine, and they're developing an API. Hot on the heels of Disqus' launch of their own public API. it should be interesting to see how innovation in the comments space is developing.

You can find me on BackType here: http://www.backtype.com/louisgray