True, Sweet, Delightful, Agonizing

One minute and 45 seconds of news reporting that would be cute and funny if it didn't hurt all of us. (Well, okay, 99% of us.):

Bet Against The American Dream from Planet Money on Vimeo.

The looniest meta-writing idea EVER!

I had what must be the looniest meta-writing idea ever. Meta-writing is when you write about writing, when you plot out your story, or do the index card thing where you write down plot events and character notes and so on.

On the other hand, as a user experience developer, one of the principle tools is something called a "story card." I typically have those as post-it notes across the top of my desk's upper shelf, where I keep my copies of the dictionary and DHTML in a Nutshell and so forth. A programmer story card describes what a person coming to the site should experience:

• A subscriber sees a story on the home page and wants to read it now.
• A non-subscriber sees a story on the home page and wants to read it now.
• A subscriber comments on a stoy
• A subscriber sees if anyone has replied to his comment
• An author reviews how many people have read her story in the past week
• An author elects to receive a weekly email update of readership

... and so on. A programmer's job is to write code that satifies a story, but does so in a way that does not block the development of other stories.

I wonder if you could write "story cards" for a story from the reader's point of view? "The reader gets a laugh." "The reader receives a clue about the twist ending," and so on. Now that would be looney.