Jeff Matthews, the  Connecticut-based author and investment advisor, has the best ever title for a blog. He also can be prescient.  Yesterday he wondered why the SEC was ignoring Apple Computer’s non-disclosure of the health problems of Steve Jobs. Today, it appears the SEC will investigate.

Matthews has been entertainingly analysing Wall Street’s best (he’s just published a book about Warren Buffett) and the worst (his blog entries on almost everyone else) since 2005.

At noon today the Presidential website changed. The differences are not just cosmetic, but promise new priorities: communication, transparency and participation.  There is now a blog with an RSS feed and a weekly video address. Under the hood there are big improvements in how search engines can access the site.

There is also an as yet unfulfilled promise to post President Obama’s Inaugural Address. You can read it or view it here, and compare it to the other addresses here or here.

Juan Cole’s insights into events in the Middle East and the Islamic world are informed by his deep knowledge of their languages, culture and politics. He reads and understands the Arabic language media and often can correct the simplistic picture of events presented in the American press. He is a professor of History at the University of Michigan and his historical perspective is at its most incisive today in showing the complex links between Martin Luther King, African colonialism and Barack Obama.

On Fridays, TheStreet.com‘s Gregg Greenberg rates the most egregious examples of greed, arrogance and stupidity in the world of business and finance. This week‘s crop of low-hanging fruit is so abundant he has to double up–putting Bank of America’s Ken Lewis and Apple’s Steve Jobs in the same item. He goes on to list Mrs. Bernard Madoff’s jewels, Lennar’s lawsuit, Bob Rubin’s resignation from Citibank and Price Waterhouse’s performance with Satyam.

Mr. Greenberg has an easy job these days.

Harrat Khaybar Volcanic Field, Saudi Arabia

Just as NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day reveals the marvels of the heavens, its Earth Observatory shows a spectacular new view of the surface of the our planet. Alan Taylor’s Big Picture blog on Boston.com has a collection of some of the the most beautiful.

Every day, Garrison Keillor narrates a five-minute broadcast celebrating the birthdays of poets, novelists and essayists. The finale of each program is a contemporary or classic poem narrated in Keillor’s cool, calm baritone.  The Writer’s Almanac is available as a blog, a broadcast on local public radio, and a podcast. They all end with the encouraging advice  “Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.”

Slashdot today links to John Dvorak on the the 30th Anniversary of VisiCalc, the original computer spreadsheet program. When Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston created VisiCalc for the Apple II in 1979, it was, as Robert X. Cringely noted,

the last element required to turn the microcomputer from a hobbyist’s toy into a business machine.

In retrospect,  it was an astonishing invention. 27,520 bytes of code, running in 32k of RAM, it was about one-thousandth the size of the current version of Excel and had about 90%  of the functionality most people use today. Dan Bricklin offers a free download for Windows PCs.

George Orwell’s daily diary entries from seventy years ago (beginning after the publication of Homage to Catalonia) have followed him from England to Morocco, where he was convalescing from his wounds in the Spanish Civil War.  He comments on politics, of course, but also on farming techniques, wildlife and weather.

For the past few dozen entries, he has been obsessing about the number of eggs his flock of Moroccan hens are laying each day. The many commenters have started to mirror his monomania.

Suddenly, everyone is paying attention to Nouriel Roubini. For several years, the NYU economics professor has been issuing dire warnings about the economy  which were generally ignored or derided.  Now his forecasts are taken very seriously, and they are not encouraging:

But unfortunately, the worst is not behind us. This will be a painful year. Only very aggressive, coordinated, and effective action by policymakers will ensure that 2010 will not be even worse than 2009 is likely to be.

The Trolls at CHFF have strong opinions about beer, food and football. They are funny, self-deprecating and vulgar.  The discussion of beer is comprehensive and insightful, the suggested recipes are so mouth-watering they are prefaced with health warnings,  but it is their original analysis of football that makes them unique.

CHFF’s Quality Rankings consider only games teams play against teams with winning records–they make a good case that this is the best predictor of future success. Whether CHFF is right or wrong, it is consistently the most passionate, provocative and readable analysis of football on the web.