Gather Weekly: unemployment, piracy stocks, health care

This week's Gather articles (12/1-12/5):

Health care reform

• Senate Dems seek to limit tax deduction on compensation for health insurance executives
• Politics, Lumbergh style: Senate will vote on health care bill amendments this weekend
• Glimmer of bipartisanship: several Dems join GOP in health care bill amendment
• But what about the death panels? AARP backs Dems' health care bill

Web

• Mashable's Pete Cashmore on 10 Web trends to watch in 2010
• Explosive growth of social networks: infographic

Sports

• The Importance of the World Cup 2010 Draw: Preview and Breakdown

Economy

• Is the tide turning for unemployment? Initial jobless claims fell to one-year low last week
• The new green economy: marijuana market booming in Humboldt County, CA
• The 10.2% solution: Obama hosts jobs summit today at White House to address unemployment

Politics & legislation

• Duct tape legislation: House bill will fix deadline glitch in unemployment benefits extension bill
  
• Gay marriage bill defeated in New York state Senate
• Capitol Hill's taxing agenda: Congress ponders tax legislation to end 2009
• Democratic leaders advocate additional unemployment benefits extension
• House to extend unemployment benefits, estate tax break before Xmas; jobs bill delayed until 2010

International

• Somali pirate "stock exchange" lets investors fund, profit from piracy

Books

• Christmas gift ideas: NYT Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2009

Enraptured

Apture might just be the new killer blog app. It's a small plugin that allows you to easily integrate multimedia into your blog posts. I'll start with a simple link to the Apture website. I can easily throw in a video demo right off their site including some related media:




Interested in visiting their office in person? Boom:



Basically Apture lets you search the web within the app itself for any kind of media - video, sound, images, websites, files - and create a link or embed the actual media right in the post. It can be pretty cumbersome to do Google searches and collect, say, an album cover image, a link to a band's page, a sound clip, and maybe a photo from a concert for a music review - Apture lets me accomplish all that within one app without leaving my blog post in an easy, streamless app.

Here's a little Dispatch for your listening pleasure, just because it's been in my head for the last couple weeks.

Locating and integrating all the above diverse media into this post took me far less time than it would have without using Apture.

Really excited about this.

Disqus Test Post

I'm testing out Disqus, a new comment system that allows for a lot more integration, interactivity, and schtonk. We shall see...