Call me a crazy liberal, but I find it difficult to argue with the success and the good things that came out of the WPA. This article on Brainpicker got me thinking–while I agree with the idea of the stimulus, maybe we should’ve structured it a little more like we did way back when. Problem is, something like that would never happen today. It’s too much government power, it’s taking power away from the private sector. I can see conservatives now–they call Obama socialist already! What if he passed a package like this?

And of course that’s regardless of the results. There’s no doubt in my mind that a renaissance of the WPA to help us tackle the current crisis would’ve helped us recover more quickly than almost any other solution. But conservatives will be conservatives, and they would never in a million years even dream of support such a “radical” solution.

That’s not even to mention the cultural and artistic brilliance that came out of the era. Brainpicker said it best:

We just wish the political powers of the day would consider investing in such art-driven efforts the way the WPA did. What would $7 billion be, adjusted for inflation? Roughly $160 billion. And how does that compare to what today’s government is investing in war? As the kids say, just sayin’.

I couldn’t agree more. Check out some of the amazing posters on this Flickr set.

What do you think? Would you like to see this? Is it too “socialist” for you? I’m curious.

Hoping I can start giving you more regular photos, since I’m failing pretty bad at giving you guys regular, substantiative updates. I’ll try to give you an interesting pic as often as I possibly can.

This one I snapped today on campus. These pandas are all over campus, bought by the university a few years back as part of a charity auction. This one, somehow, got placed just by the giant metal and glass awning that collapsed, and then buried by about three feet of snow. Also, note the caution tape.

Warrior panda survived the #snom of 2010. Good job, Panda.

In other news, this week is insane already and not looking to slow down any time soon. Lots and lots-o-work on the desk, not to mention I’m reformatting my iPhone (damn thing’s been running like molasses lately), I’ve got my first intermediate statistics exam on Thursday, and plenty of research to catch up on for my capstone project. Ah well, I do it to myself.

On the more fun side of things, tomorrow night I’ll be headed to my first DC PR Flacks meetup and I’m so excited! It’s looking like it’s going to be a ton of fun and I’m thrilled to finally meet some of the people I’ve been talking to on Twitter for so long.

Quickly reading this article on TechCrunch about the new Tweetdeck update (my absolute favorite Twitter client), one section caught my eye and got me thinking:

You can now view more photos and videos inside TweetDeck, meaning that for some users Tweetdeck is going to start being the way they interface with rich media. Clicking on links to Youtube videos will now show the video in a TweetDeck preview window. Flickr image links will also now open in a preview, along with pictures from Posterous, Mobypicture and Twitgoo. Users can also upload to Mobypicture.

In other words, heavy Tweetdeck users are going to start finding they use their browser less to upload media to Twiter [sic] apps.

My question for the Web is this: how will this affect analytics? I know that on my blog, I can detect if a person is referred to my site from a client, but how will YouTube, Flickr, and even Twitter itself calculate analytics for content that comes from the API, instead of the Web site?

Now clearly, I’m not an analytics guy, by any means. But I do know that all the talk about Twitter peaking has gotten people talking about whether Twitter is a unique case of people actually accessing the site far more from third-party clients than via the actual Web interface. Perhaps people are simply using clients now, the argument goes, so hits aren’t showing up in site analytics. I dunno, kind of makes sense to me.

So how will this affect sites like YouTube and Flickr, in particular? Now that more and more content is driven by Twitter and more and more people are using Tweetdeck, will this result in lost site traffic by those sites? If this becomes a long-term trend, how will they find a way of getting these analytics? And how will they persuade advertisers that it’s still worth it to advertise on the site? After all, if people are using a client to watch a YouTube video, they certainly aren’t seeing any of the ads on YouTube.com. Who’s going to come up with the next big thing in analytics? Looks like it might be necessary sooner, rather than later.

[techcrunch]