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The world of the RSS reader has become a hot­bed of com­pet­ing products. Whether you opt for read­ers built into your browser, AJAX desktops or a stan­dalone pro­gram, the options are almost bewildering.

Into the fray steps Spec­tra, msnbc’s very pretty effort that allows you to select from a range of colour-coded chan­nels. These then build into a slow-moving tor­nado of news (or a tornado-speed tor­nado if you set it in the prefs). You can then flick through your selec­tions to get an over­view of what’s hap­pen­ing and click to get a pop-up with the full story. So far, so pretty.

There are two things that kill Spec­tra as a news­reader for me:

1. Des­pite the swirl­ing eye-candy of stor­ies, actu­ally nav­ig­at­ing them means using a slider at the bot­tom of the screen and going through them one at a time in order. As a user, I’d expect to be able to hover over the tor­nado items and pick a story I want to read without trawl­ing through the rest.

2. Spec­tra is restric­ted to msnbc’s con­tent (and syn­dic­ated feeds). While this makes per­fect sense for msnbc, there’s no way I would want to be lim­ited to a single news source. Add to this that, as men­tioned above, the num­ber of unres­tric­ted news­read­ing options is huge and I can’t see people flock­ing to Spectra.

Per­sonaly, I opted for the stan­dalone free­ware Vienna which allows me to cat­egor­ise any feed I want to cre­ate my own chan­nels, run per­petual searches on us, our cli­ents, even myself (although the pump­kin carving guy with the same name always wins out on that one), plus it has a built in browser. And for full on eye candy, I still like Jonathan Harris’s 10 x 10.

Shame, Spec­tra is awfully pretty.

Today’s prob­lems are rarely simple (even decid­ing what to have for din­ner can gen­er­ate a bewil­der­ing array of options). And many of today’s mar­ket­ing chal­lenges present prob­lems within prob­lems. A lack of vis­ib­il­ity is endemic. See­ing the actual prob­lem is dif­fi­cult let alone find­ing a solution.

Tricky prob­lems are, of course, par for the course for the world’s spooks. And when they are not devel­op­ing nuc­lear deterrents in the shape of wrist­watches, they also come up with some pretty nifty approaches to prob­lems in general.

The fol­low­ing is the Phoenix List, an approach developed by the CIA to help agents with cent­ral intel­li­gences pick apart the prob­lems they face. It’s split into two sec­tions, one for the prob­lem, one for what to do about it.

Defin­ing the problem

1. Why is it neces­sary to solve the problem?

2. What bene­fits will you receive by solv­ing the problem?

3. What is the unknown?

4. What is it you don’t yet understand?

5. What is the inform­a­tion you have?

6. What isn’t the problem?

7. Is the inform­a­tion suf­fi­cient? Or is it insuf­fi­cient? Or redund­ant? Or contradictory?

8. Should you draw a dia­gram of the prob­lem? A figure?

9. Where are the bound­ar­ies of the problem?

10. Can you sep­ar­ate the vari­ous parts of the prob­lem? Can you write them down? What are the rela­tion­ships between the parts of the problem?

11. What are the con­stants (things that can’t be changed)?

12. Have you seen the prob­lem before?

13. Have you seen this prob­lem in a slightly dif­fer­ent form?

14. Do you know a related problem?

15. Can you think of a famil­iar prob­lem hav­ing the same or a sim­ilar unknown?

16. Sup­pose you find a prob­lem related to yours that has already been solved. Can you use it? Can you use its method?

Com­ing up with a plan

1. Can you solve the whole prob­lem? Part of the problem?

2. What would you like the res­ol­u­tion to be? Can you pic­ture it?

3. How much of the unknown can you determine?

4. Can you derive some­thing use­ful from the inform­a­tion you have?

5. Have you used all the information?

6. Have you taken into account all essen­tial notions in the problem?

7. Can you sep­ar­ate the steps in the problem-solving pro­cess? Can you determ­ine the cor­rect­ness of each step?

8. What cre­at­ive think­ing tech­niques can you use to gen­er­ate ideas? How many dif­fer­ent techniques?

9. Can you see the res­ult? How many dif­fer­ent kinds of res­ults can you see?

10. How many dif­fer­ent ways have you tried to solve the problem?

11. What have oth­ers done?

12. Can you intu­it­ively cre­ate a solu­tion? Can you check the results?

13. What should be done? How should it be done?

14. Where should it be done?

15. Who should do it?

16. What do you need to do at this time?

17. Who will be respons­ible for what?

18. Can you use this prob­lem to solve some other problems?

19. What is the unique set of qual­it­ies that makes this prob­lem what it is and none other?

Of course, launch­ing your next product is unlikely to have the same com­plex­ity as over­throw­ing an unfriendly state or stop­ping Ethan Hunt abseil­ing in and nick­ing your secrets but some of the above might prove useful.

Just remem­ber: you didn’t get it from me.