I’m trying out the new Flipboard Android beta test on my phone now – I can already tell the release version will be as mad awesome as its iPad brother, and that’s on a 2-year old phone.

Word.

I’m about to get my travel on to the land of safaris, biltong, big-ass waterfalls and really loud plastic horns. Maybe I’ll find a project using my mobile-strategy skillz while I’m there, but then Africa’s well on its way in that department.

With last week’s release of Android Instagram — catalyst of mass monocle-dropping by iOS elitists — I’ve taken to Instagram in a way I never would have if I were still limited to homebound iPad pics of my dog and an empty beer glass. The app also made it easy for me to kickstart what had always been a moribund Foursquare account and start getting my check-in on in tandem with photos. This all reminded me of a key social-media maxim: We don’t just want to tell people what we did and where we did it, we gots to show that stuff and make people acknowledge that yes, your experience was truly life at its realest. So not only was I there per this Foursquare check-in, I am showing you just how mind-blowingly much I was there in a one-click facsimile of your dad’s 1971 Polaroid camera.

Proust today would clearly be an Instagram hipster lost in the fray.

UPDATE 4/9: Seems I should replace “Foursquare” with “Facebook Places”. Super good for Instagram’s newfound hundred-millionaires; less good because nobody likes Places.

UPDATE 4/10: Jack Shafer conveys the same idea, but in the way I wish I had said it.

I’m writing this blog post from our iPad’s WordPress app. (Aside: this is an extremely rare example of a WordPress platform app that’s less user-friendly than I’d like. Normally the peeps at Automattic tear it up, such as on Android handset or the sweet redesigns to the dashboard and admin pages, but the iPad is a little “eh”.) But I’m not here to ungratefully complain about otherwise-amazing blogging platforms — instead, I come to add more praise for Flipboard.

The iPad version is my sole experience of Flipboard — no iPhone here — but it’s easily the coolest thing I’ve installed on here. The idea was to take the tablet medium and start from scratch when designing a way to read articles, view images and browse material, independent of big-browser design conventions and taking advantage of the way the tactile part of tablets. Result? A mad awesome interface for consuming news, features, tweets and photos. This is the first time anyone’s succeeded with a digital turn-the-pages interface, thanks to marrying the tablet’s physical features with clean, easy-to-read layouts.

Flipboard provides a big strategic insight for digital managers, too: if you want to broadcast your message out there, make sure your stuff is available in platform-agnostic. Some of the best Flipboard sites are repackaged RSS feeds (the revenge of 2003 technology), so those need full content within the feed to work well. This is true across all mediums – if you publish it, it’s getting consumed in all different ways, so ride the wave instead of constraining presentation. I would also hope by now that publishers know that while they’ve lost the simplicity of selling against a magazine story in standard print format, they’ve gained the opportunity of selling across print, digital, mobile and packaged in-text ads.

To sum that all up: if you own a tablet, try Flipboard.

Cross-posted at This Is How I Eat

St. Patrick’s Day approaches, trailing paper shamrocks, green-bedecked bagpipers and sloshed pre-yuppy kids in its wake. Our American observance of St. Patrick’s Day moves further every year towards a celebration solely of getting wasted in green T-shirts, leading most Americans to believe Ireland’s sole contributions to global haute cuisine are its attempts to perfect the art of brewing brown, alcoholic liquids. From what you’ll read, that’s 100 percent accurate, but it doesn’t mean we can’t celebrate Irish solid food, too.

The primary Irish dinner is exactly what you’d expect: Hearty, comforting, and boring. Having two Irish-immigrant grandparents, I’ve twice visited Ireland and eaten many meals with second cousins, most of which followed a plug-and-play culinary script: Well-done mutton/chicken/beef (pick one), boiled potatoes, boiled/steamed carrots, and boiled/steamed cauliflower. Seasoning consists solely of butter, salt and/or pepper. For dessert, there’s often trifle, which I’ve experienced as a bowl of canned fruit with cream poured on top. Preparation of this trifle is truly a fine, complicated process.

I jest, but the thing is, this meal is so well-suited to the cool, wet climate that you can’t help but crave a heaping plate of salted, boiled root vegetables each night after a day touring medieval ruins and gorgeous, windswept coastlines. You hop in the doss full, tired and ready to sleep a satiated sleep. You can also look forward to a morning of what actually is Ireland’s finest solid-food contribution to the world: the Irish breakfast.

“Irish breakfast” is a bit of a misnomer, as it makes the reader think Ireland is still a nation of ruddy-cheeked turf cutters filling up on salted meat before a day in the bog. Day-to-day normal-people Irish breakfast is a lot like most other Western breakfasts: cereal (often muesli), eggs, toast, jam, and tea laden with milk and sugar. (Always tea – Ireland is No. 2 in world tea consumption per capita. And based on this list, everyone in the UAE must hit the head really, really frequently). The full Irish breakfast, then, is for special occasions and tourists. Like most things for tourists, it’s popular for a reason: It’s damned good.

Each year at Christmas, my mom cooks up the Irish-breakfast meat melange: bacon (saltier but leaner than the U.S. version; American bacon is better, IMHO), bangers (lean and lightly seasoned; leaves American breakfast sausage in the dust), white pudding (pork-and-oatmeal sausage, fried and sliced), black pudding (same as white, plus pig’s blood – delightfully tangy), Kerrygold butter, toast and tea. We also like to throw in a side of fruit — you know, so it’s healthy. My grandma wasn’t much for cooking this, but she did like to order a package of Irish breakfast supplies delivered for her kids’ families as an occasional present. It may not originate with Grandma, but it’s nonetheless become my favorite family-food tradition.

I haven’t even gone into some of the other Irish edibles — soda bread, Finch’s orange pop, buttered-cucumber sandwiches — but I have fond memories of all of their assorted tasty blandness. When you responsibly sip your Tyrconnell whiskey this weekend, take a moment to remember those poor forgotten foods with their starchy, salty origins in an island far across the Atlantic.

This ongoing Rush Limbaugh nonsense has taken what was, for me, an unexpected turn: While generating outrage has usually been a highly profitable business for the guy, advertisers this time felt the need to flee the show on a wide scale and are hitting the still-hugely-rated show’s pocketbooks. (If you think this wasn’t the sole motivation for Saturday’s apology, I have some talk-radio shows built on positivity that I’d like to sell you. It seems that that half-assed “I’m the victim here” attempt only increased the rate of loss.) Allstate, AOL, ProFlowers, whatever that mattress company was — all tweeted and then followed through on their intentions to cease advertising. This flight didn’t happen in the wake of the dude’s many other outrage-inducing statements (see middle of CNN article), any of which could have easily been construed as equally offensive. The change this time is entirely due to Twitter’s huge growth in adoption in just a few years.

When it comes to advertiser activism, speed of response has gone from letter-writing campaigns to email campaigns to clicking the retweet button. Level of effort with Twitter, even more than Facebook, is so low that there’s little to stop a rapid-fire protest campaign and/or boycott as soon as negative news comes to light. What’s even more notable if you’re an advertiser is that most of these companies are likely contracting their radio campaigns to ad-buy middlemen with little evaluation of show content, so reality couldn’t be much further removed from a public perception of ProFlowers’ marketing department listening to Rush’s show and saying, “Wow, we really need to support this guy and all he represents.” Twitter usage should hit 28.7 million U.S. adults this year, so we’re looking at millions of users who easily join the campaign with one click.

While I agree in many ways with Malcolm Gladwell’s point that Twitter is a medium and isn’t tangible social activism, for marketing, the media is the only tangible space. When negative perception or boycotts — it takes very little effort to simply not buy something — come along, they suck up the company’s lifeblood like a sun-blotting swarm of tweeting mosquitoes. Allstate’s Twitter feed, I thought, went above and beyond to clarify the company’s situation, even if that involved copying and pasting the same text a few hundred times. It’s a digital message we frequently send at work: Keep the social-media pilots on alert, because you never know when you have to get your scramble on.

And in the meantime, here’s Louis C.K. brilliantly hating on Twitter culture.

If anybody can tell me of a better invention in human history than the ability to reach out into thin air and pull down any given portion of the cumulative knowledge of all humanity, I’d like to hear it.

Just got this SOPA-related response from Sen. Durbin’s office in my email, regarding my earlier email. Suffice it to say that this doesn’t go into any details about how “reasonable steps to cease doing business” is a can of worms big enough to fit, like, a really big number of worms, and it doesn’t sound like he fully changed his mind. Still, the bills are tabled for now, so it’s all good.

Mr. Patrick Stack
(MY ADDRESS WAS HERE SO I BLOCKED IT OUT)
(TOO BAD, STALKERS)

Dear Mr. Stack:

Thank you for contacting me about the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011 (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). I appreciate hearing from you.

The bipartisan PIPA bill (S. 968) was introduced to rein in foreign-based websites that have no purpose other than to sell or distribute pirated or counterfeit goods. U.S. law enforcement agencies already have authority to seize and shut down domestic websites that are dedicated to violating copyright or counterfeiting laws, and hundreds of sites have been shut down in recent years. However, our law enforcement agencies lack effective tools to stop foreign-based websites that are dedicated to the same illegal behavior. These websites deprive American innovators and businesses of revenue and result in the loss of American jobs.

PIPA aims to close the gap in our laws that enables rogue websites to simply locate themselves overseas in order to avoid accountability for stealing American intellectual property and selling pirated and counterfeit goods to Americans. The legislation would authorize the Justice Department to seek a court-ordered injunction against a foreign website if the court found the website to be dedicated to illegal piracy or counterfeiting. If an injunction were issued by the court, it could be served upon third-party payment processors, advertising networks, search engines and other companies who would then be obligated to take reasonable steps to cease doing business with the infringing website.

The drafters of this legislation tried to address the serious problem of foreign rogue websites in a way that respects due process, protects freedom of legislation, and preserves the vitality of the Internet. However, I have heard from many constituents that PIPA and a more expansive bill introduced in the House of Representatives, SOPA, fail to strike the right balance between the goals of combating illegal piracy and protecting the Internet. Both the House and the Senate have postponed consideration of these bills in order to engage in more discussion with stakeholders and achieve more consensus on a legislative approach. I support these efforts and hope that stakeholders can agree on a reasonable solution that addresses these important issues.

I will keep your concerns in mind as the Senate continues to consider these matters. Thank you again for contacting me. Please feel free to keep in touch.

Sincerely,
Richard J. Durbin
United States Senator

I love to see the Internet blackouts going on today in protest of SOPA and PIPA. The public needs to understand that this legislation could put the sites they use every day at risk of private-industry censorship without any due process. I wrote this email to one of my Senators, Dick Durbin, who’s currently still supporting the legistlation:

Dear Senator Durbin:

As an Internet professional and a near-continuous user of all the wonderful benefits brought to us by this amazing technology, I urge you to oppose the SOPA and PIPA acts currently being debated in Congress. As a former employee of several online magazines, I fully recognize the need to fight piracy of intellectual property, but this poorly written legislation will break the fundamental structures of the Internet and will serve as a dangerous permission slip for private-industry censorship of websites without any due process. Please vote to protect America’s most dynamic economic sector, the interactive industry, by opposing this legislation and any attempts to clamp down on the economic freedom of the Internet.

Sincerely,
Patrick Stack
Chicago, IL

So get on Google’s anti-SOPA/PIPA page and register your opposition. Take it from an Internet dude – you don’t want this to pass.

Tonight I briefly tuned in to Anderson Cooper’s show on CNN and quickly changed it away — the Iowa caucus was the story of the day, and I started hating on the candidates onscreen within seconds. Like Mary J. Blige, I too do not need no hateration, so off to hockey I went. I’ve also pre-emptively decided to avoid as much political TV as possible this year, possibly even the debates, in favor of reading about everything via digital media. Political TV, even mostly impartial news, just infuriates me in a way the Internet doesn’t. Why?

I’ve pinned it down to the fact that TV takes away the emphasis on idea exchange by adding in the visual element. If I’m making judgments about some proposed initiative that matters to me, I don’t want any of a number of talking heads all up on my screen trying to force me into thinking one way or another. Let me read what I want and process it rather than adding in the specific face I’ll end up wanting to punch — that just clouds my judgment. This argument isn’t to pretend that the Internet isn’t full of blathering, shouting morons, because any comments section is almost instantly infected by their vitriol and mistyped ooze. But when the most in-your-face communication these screamers can use is to type in all caps, it really doesn’t take much to brush past the bullshit online.

I’ll make the counterintuitive case that the Internet actually makes us more rational towards the issues than we were in the TV era — sure, it’s easy to fall into an echo chamber almost anywhere online, but how many people now are at least using some semblance of “facts” instead of who has better hair? Keep your face out of my face, and we all benefit.