Dave Winer and Robert Scoble took time out of their media maven lives to take a San Quentin field trip. Yep, San Quentin prison.  Dave and Robert spent time visiting prisoners and staff inside one of the most famous prisons in the U.S.

Dave shared his take aways on his blog. He titled his post “Our all-you-can-eat lifestlye.” And this quote makes his revelation clear.

We expect so much, and we get it. We live the all-you-can-eat lifestyle. But just a few miles away reality is very different.

Dave is right of course. We live in a world where we gripe not about being fed, or having Internet access, but how our smart phone misbehaves and the sushi prices are high. Even the most modest of my friends has a phone that supports messaging and has access to the net.

I’ve never been in prison but as Dave points out, it’s a drastically different life. He met a man who was unfamiliar with any of our modern conveniences. Heck, no Twitter for that guy.  Today in contrast a friend and I talked about trying to bring others on board with Twitter.  In a couple of days I’m co-leading a class on Twitter for real estate agents.

Dave’s article makes me stop and be reminded of how wonderful a time we live in, and what a wonderful set of circumstances, especially here in the States.

So this week, while you’re out riding the waves of the net, take a few minutes to read Dave’s take. Come back here, go there, or comment on your own blog.  One step better – go visit your own local prison, poor house, or orphanage.

Dave Winer, one of the longest lived folks on line, is bringing a new facet to link love, 40-twits. 40-twits is simple. It’s the last 40 links that Dave shared on Twitter ranked in order of the number of times they’ve been clicked through to. (say that three times fast)

Not much to look at from the clip but it’s not much to look at on the 40-twits page either. The value isn’t in the colors or the pretty looks but in what it shares. The columns include the link title, what site the link is to, the age in hours of the link, and finally the number of clicks.

This page is updated every five minutes via a script, and it only covers links created with tr.im. That URL shortening service provides an API to gather data about links visit through the short URL.

As with any URL shortener, this is a risky proposition to base a long term service on.

I look forward to perhaps using something like this myself. I’m defaulting all of my URL shortens to tr.im for the time being.

Give it a look. Try it out yourself. Let me know what you think.

Todd/tojosan