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Like most folks, I was aware that the FCC had mandated Feb. 17th, 2009 as the day that American television signals would be transmitted digitally, and would render TVs with analog reception as useless. What I didn’t know was that, this week, Congress was debating to extend the deadline for this switch to June. It seems as though nearly 6% of Americans were not yet ready for the switch, and there was hope that the extension would enable better promotion of the coupon program available for people to obtain the special converter box. However, just yesterday, the House failed to garner the necessary two-thirds vote to extend the deadline. So, February 17th – be digital, or listen to the radio. “Mr. Green, he’s so serene, he’s got a TV in every room . . .”

In just a few months, some of the largest public corporations in the United States will begin submitting their financial filings to the Securities & Exchange Commission using XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language.) In December 2008, the Securities & Exchange Commission mandated a phase-in period, starting June 15, 2009, of using interactive data, which uses XBRL, for financial filings made by public companies and mutual funds with the SEC. The use of XBRL is expected to reduce filing costs, increase productivity, improve data quality and analysis and allow for direct comparability. The SEC’s announcement included the following: "The availability of financial reports in the form of interactive data will transform how investors evaluate companies and securities and, more broadly, transform the relationship between the filer and the investor. Markets depend on and improve with better information, and even more so in difficult times. This action by the Commission is t

12 Breeds of Client and How to Work with Them by Jack Knight This article runs through a number of recognizable characters and offers approaches to dealing with them. This is geared to freelance designers but I think they are applicable across the board. Working With Difficult Clients: How to Handle a Loose Cannon without Getting Burned Buzzle.com By Elizabeth W. Gordon Published: 12/16/2006 More advice with practical tips for handling difficult clients. Raising the bar: How to get your difficult clients to willingly shape up or ship out! Entrepreneur by Lawrence, Kevin Canadian Manager • Fall, 2002 Tough love for troublesome clients.

Are you doing great things for the environment? Would $10,000 help you do more good? The “ Green Heroes Grant Program ” might be for you. Green Works natural cleaners is giving away five $10,000 dollar grants to recipients working to green their communities. You can nominate yourself or someone else. (On a side note – Green Works is a product line from Clorox, and according to TreeHugger , the line has been “snagging a 42% share of the market. What's even more interesting is that this has happened without eroding cleaning product sales for smaller green-product companies like Method and Seventh Generation. Instead, the products seem to be luring customers away from traditional cleaning products .”

A Startup.Biz article outlines five recommendations for "coupon success." Number one - naming a specific product or service - is extremely important. If a company is trying to offer $10 off a new $50 service, for example, and customers only know about a $150 service, the coupon is likely to be ignored. Possibilities that lie in the opposite direction are even worse. If people apply the coupon to a $15 service, the company will probably lose money. It risks being overwhelmed by bargain shoppers and losing more solid customers, too.

Does the White House Have Wi-Fi? By: Chris Dannen Is the White House more of a museum than a working office? Does it even have WiFi? Talk about culture shock. Apparently the Obama team are taking a step back technologically at least for the time being. At a time when we have reduced faith in the security of our technologies how do they manage in the White House? Apparently Obama won't part with his blackberry so I wonder what the compromise will be. And another story about the bumpy technological transition on Salon: You Don't Have Mail In the tech-challenged White House, the prez's Blackberry-savvy aides feel like they've stumbled into the Carter administration. By Mike Madden At least this is almost a guarantee that improvements to the system will be made and perhaps with improvements to internet security we can all enjoy.

Last August Roger blogged about word clouds (aka tag clouds) - visual representations of word frequency in a document, website, speech etc. ReadWriteWeb used a tag cloud generator to create images depicting several presidential inaugural speeches. Comparing the speeches of Obama, Bush, Clinton, Reagan and Lincoln yields quite different images and provides an interesting historical view of presidential speeches.