NYTimes: As Lenders Hold Homes in Foreclosure, Sales Are Hurt

Over all, economists project that it would take about three years for lenders to sell their backlog of foreclosed homes. As a result, home values nationally could fall 5 percent by the end of 2011, according to Moody’s, and rise only modestly over the following year. Regions that were hardest hit by the housing collapse and recession could take even longer to recover – dealing yet another blow to a still-struggling economy.

Blogs, online journals, whatever you’d like to call them – they all have the same obvious goal of communicating. Blog software now comes installed on most hosting provider servers and can also be used free (like on MySpace) or for a minimal subscription fee (Typepad, Movable Type).
Blogging is as much of fad as a cell phones are. Sure, there are many people that jumped on the blogging bandwagon when articles started getting published in TIME and BusinessWeek, but bloggers were around loooong before it got popular and will be around long after the hype has died down.
I’m excited to see blogs coming out of creative agencies and studios (and other companies that don’t fit easily into a particular category) – excited not for their existence but for the quality of their content and design. They provide a much better home for inspiration, links, videos and photos than a couple dozen emails passed around the company group list.
Below are some of the better ones I’ve come across:
Company: Big Spaceship
http://www.motherboard.nu/
http://cs.bigspaceship.com/blog/
http://labs.bigspaceship.com/blog/
Company: Organic
http://threeminds.organic.com/
Company: Web Agent 007
http://labs.wa007.com/
Company: Analogue
http://www.analogue.ca/blog/
Company: Coudal Partners (their site has almost always been synonymous with their blog)
Company: Hi-ReS!
http://www.hi-res.net/blog/
Company: Adaptive Path
http://adaptivepath.com/blog/
Company: 37Signals
http://37signals.com/svn/

The State of the Union in Words – great use of Flash.
*on this note, check out Many Eyes (thanks quigga)
The Job Board Bubble
Web Design Contracts: Why Bother
Stop Design – “… the creative outlet of Douglas Bowman, who strives for simple, beautiful, efficiently-constructed design, and the balance of form and function.”

Hot nuggets for today:

NikeMashup.com – once again, top notch interactive from Nike.
Thinking Machine 4: Play the Game – amazing, it shows you what moves the computer is thinking of by drawing lines over the chess board. Dope!
Rip DVD’s with VLC – thanks LifeHacker
The web is dead, says co-founder of Flickr – why so glum? I can understand her point, but I’m not sure I agree with it.
Sitepoint discusses Microsoft Breaking HTML Email Rendering in Outlook 2007 and Campaign Monitor has some reactions here and here. It’s de ja vú all over again.

New Yorkers are busy people, but most of em are nice people too, but maybe not as nice as this guy:
New York Subway Hero

My friend Jory is a judge in this contest, so I want to get the word out!

I’m selling my blue loveseat on Craigslist. This is the perfect NYC couch – compact, stylish and spacially economic with a fold-out bed. It served me well at my East Village apartment, but now I no longer have room for it… so it needs a new home.

As of October 15th, 2006, my wife, my dog and I will be in our new apartment on Roosevelt Island, NYC. My 1.5 hour commute from Morristown, NJ is over.
Apartment hunting is never a fun process, and you always have to stay on point, ask the right questions and make sure you’re never getting suckered into anything. Many people turn to real estate brokers to do a lot of the leg work in finding the good apartments. Real estate brokers in Manhattan take approximately a 10-15% commission off of you. So if they find an property for you with a rent of say, $2000/month, this is the math:
$2000 x 12 months = $24,000 x .12 (12% commission) = $2,880
Maybe some of you are saying, “Eh, that’s not too bad.”
Fine, but remember that most of the time you’re going to have to factor in first and last months rent when you sign the lease:

Continue…

Nothing earth-shattering, but the crew over at Campaign Monitor were listening to my praise for their products.
For all you designers out there, Campaign Monitor is the best email campaign service out there. From launching email newsletters and blasts to resources on how to format HTML emails, their site has it all.
Set up a free account, as long as you’re sending out less emails to less than 10 or so people the service is free and you can see for yourself how dope their product is.