As of now, Julia is still in it, having correctly spelled “crucial”.

And also, here’s when Julia appeared on the morning show. Matt’s story about her comes first, but if you just watched that, you can skip ahead:

The point of a website, when you get right down to it, is to provide compelling content so advertisers’ ads show up on the page and people (maybe) click on them*. Facebook has very non-intrusive ads on their site, and Twitter doesn’t have any (at the moment).

Now, I’m a power internet user — as most of my colleagues at 11Alive will attest. Instead of going to Facebook.com and Twitter.com whenever I want to know what’s going on with my friends, I go instead to my RSS application, Google Reader, and open a folder that has all of my friends’ status updates in both Twitter and Facebook.

At least, it used to. But in a single day, both Twitter and Facebook have made changes to their sites that prevent me from doing it this way. From a business standpoint, this makes perfect sense — now I actually have to go to Facebook’s site or Twitter’s site to see what’s going on.

Or do I?

Facebook and Twitter both make a big deal out of the fact that they’re great for people on the go — you can update your status and upload your pictures from your mobile phone with relative ease. I do it all the time. And, unlike their on-the-internet counterparts, the Facebook Mobile App and the TwitterFon app for iPhone have not changed their interfaces at all since I downloaded them.

So instead of going to Facebook.com, I’ll hit the little blue-and-white “F” on my phone to see what’s going on on Facebook. Instead of going to Twitter.com, I’ll hit the little blue-and-white “t” on my phone to read and reply to my friends’ tweets**. I won’t see any Facebook ads, and as for TwitterFon… well, that’s free to begin with, but it’s such a useful app to me that I’d probably pay the programmer 99 cents if he started charging.

There are a lot of ways to consume web content — going to sites, reading or watching video on your phone, aggregating everything into an RSS reader (my preferred method). But no matter what, companies should never do anything that makes their web-based consumers go somewhere where ads can’t be seen. Facebook? Twitter? You just pulled that off marvelously.

* Don’t lie. You know you’ve clicked on a few ads this month. We all do it.

** A “tweet” is a status message on Twitter, like “Josh is posting a blog on 11AliveBlogs.com”.

a sign on Georgia 400

Chris Sweigart, 11Alive’s Commuter Dude, wants to hear about your commuting headaches.

Take this off-ramp to get to the Commuter Dude’s page, where you can send questions or just vent about what drives you nuts on your ride to and from work.

Gas on sale for $5.20/gallon in Cumming on September 12, 2008.

This evening, on my way to work, I saw gas in my area for $1.47 to $1.55. I drive a hybrid anyway, so it’s not like I spent a ton of money on fuel in the first place, but believe me, I’m enjoying filling up for under $20 a tank.

The first story on the list is from July 10. Jerry Carnes interviewed people who went to a Norcross gas station to get in on a $1.99/gallon promotion at a time when gas was at or above $4.00.

A couple of months later, Jerry caught gas on sale for an alarming $5.20/gallon in Cumming. The high prices were courtesy of Hurricane Ike.

Finally, I have this story from Kevin Rowson, which was filed on October 23. Gas at that time was in the $2.30 to $2.50 range.

It’s interesting to me to see the wild swings in gas prices. Even before I drove a hybrid, it was more about curiosity than money-saving (although once it got over $3.50 even I started to worry). Now that gas prices are back down to manageable levels, though, I still think about trips in terms of dollars, not miles. As I wrote last May:

Last Saturday, we celebrated Memorial Day at a friend’s house in Decatur. He lives 40 miles from us (each way). I get about 250 miles per tank, with a 14-ish gallon tank, so about 18 miles per gallon. (When I bought the vehicle, gas was $1.50 a gallon and actually going downward a little.)

That means my trip to Decatur not only was 80 miles and about 100 minutes of travel but also cost me about $19. And we couldn’t even stay for dinner because it was my daughter’s bedtime.

What I’ve noticed over the years as a member of the news media, a PR writer, and a semi-professional blogger is that, once behaviors are changed, be they on a personal level or a business level, they are unlikely to change back. Did you change any behaviors during the gas price crisis? Did you change back now that the crisis is — at least for now — averted? Or are you keeping your gas-saving behaviors in case there’s another gas panic or price increase?

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Wondering what’s up with the new look of 11Alive’s blogs? Click here for a brief explanation.

“You don’t really pay for things with money, you pay for them with time. ‘In five years, I’ll have put enough away to buy that vacation house we want. Then I’ll slow down.’ That means the house will cost you five years; one-twelfth of your adult life. Translate the dollar value of the house, car, or anything else into time, and then see if it’s still worth it. Sometimes you can’t do what you want and have what you want at once because each requires a different expenditure of time. The phrase ’spending your time’ is not a metaphor. It’s how life works.” -Charles Spezzano

Several months ago, during the height of the first gas crisis, I wrote a blog entry about how you should consider how much money your trip will cost you, not how much gas or how many miles. Now that gas is below $2 (at least, it is where I live), people are a little less worried about how much it costs to drive somewhere.

That quote above may be even more telling.

Science fiction plays with currency a lot. From Star Trek’s gold-pressed latinum to Walter Jon Williams’s use of calories as money in The Green Leopard Plague (a really interesting novella, by the way), as a sci-fi fan I’ve seen a lot of alternative currencies and ways of measuring costs. But I think, in the end, that time is probably the best one. I’m a busy person — this job, plus exercise, plus my child, plus writing, plus cooking, plus cleaning, plus time to relax… how much am I spending by doing everything that I need and want to do? How much time do I spend just sitting around paging through RSS feeds? What should I be spending my time on instead?

Probably not writing a blog entry lamenting about the time I’m spending.

Police said the 70-pound cougar attacked a 16-year-old girl in Northwest Miami-Dade County Saturday afternoon.

The cougar, named Chaos, was secured in the back of a home on Northwest 84th Avenue when Anthony Zittnick decided he wanted to show off the big cat to a friend, neighbors said.

Why is there a cougar in the backyard of a home in South Florida? A cougar that’s apparently someone’s pet, not one of those wild ones brought in by the destruction of their natural habitat. And what’s a 16-year-old girl doing near it? It only looks like a kitty, kid.

At least it’s aptly-named. “Chaos” the cougar. Can’t beat that.