I recently had the chance to combine my love for retro computing and Softalk magazine with a "homework" assignment required for a Decision Support Systems class I've been taking. We needed to exercise our skills in model-based forecasting, so I saw a great opportunity to use this assignment to take a much closer look at the time-series of data represented by the famous Top 30 software sales charts at the back of every issue of Softalk (except the first).

Print media pages come in all levels of complexity from a simple page with only one large text block to a complex page with text, tables, graphics, photos, advertisements, lists, and more. Most of the pages in the 48 issues of the Softalk magazine can be considered moderately complex, some are very complex.

We're using the amazing GoFundMe.com platform to solicit donations to support sending STAP Research Director Jim Salmons (that'd be me) to the Museums and the Web 2014 conference (MW2014), next month in Baltimore.

Museums and the Web is the premiere conference where hundreds of museum and archive professionals from around the world gather to exchange ideas, train newcomers into the field (that'd be us), and network to establish collaborations that will empower their research and visitor agendas throughout the year.

This conference is the BEST place to establish valuable collaborative relationships to support The Softalk Apple Project and the FactMiners social-game platform.

I have been very quiet during the year-end holiday and throughout January. That is because I have been busy in the 'deep weeds' of moving the FactMiners social-game ecosystem forward. Quick summary... The FactMiners game is the means we will use to create an incredible 'Fact Cloud' of all the information in all 48 issues of Softalk magazine. It is an ambitious mission, but one that is guaranteed to be "serious fun"– especially when we create a crowdsource game technology and community (that's the ecosystem scope of this).