The Sam Sung Galaxy Tab 7" Android Tablet has launched, well not really. The tablet will be out in Europe first, possibly with Italy as the first to nab it (in September), and the US will come later down the line. (more)

Stowe Boyd has dropped DisQus for Back Type for his blogs. But the Disqus comment system just doesn’t gibe well with TumblR, or my increasingly Twitter-oriented world.

A few weeks ago, at the insistence of the Securities and Exchange Commission, New Jersey agreed never again to fraudulently hide its underfunding of the state’s public pension system. Meanwhile, in Albany, Harry Wilson, the Republican candidate for state comptroller, has asserted that — if you do the math the way any ordinary financial analyst or economist would — NewYork’s Pension system is underfunded by tens of billions of dollars and that, as a result, the state is essentially insolvent.

The Haystack Anti-CensorShip project has imploded.

Stowe Boyd examines the new Co Human Issue Tracker. Dependency-based prioritization, smells like PERT-lite (which isn't a bad thing). Though I'd never use an Issue Tracker without it being a Issue TrackerWiki anymore (unless I had a WikiProxy to give me the same effect...).

Anil Dash ponders the Culture of the Fork, as reinvigorated by Linus Torvald's Git. One of the best ways for Wikipedia to reinvigorate itself, and to break away from the stultifying and arcane editing discussions that are its worst feature, could be to embrace the idea that there's not One True Version of every Wikipedia article. Some interesting comments, re Wisdom Of Crowds. (more)

== Anti-CenshorShip software == (more)

The Barnes And Noble "nook" has been upgraded to v1.3. It has a Web Browser now (will only work on WiFi, not 3G): kinda weird to have to navigate via the lower color TouchScreen area. (more)

Blog Lines is shutting down. Bloglines has lost much of its popularity, partly due to neglect and also to a movement to alternate news-reading experiences, like Social Networking sites.

Umair Haque on why he wouldn't have invested in Zynga. Including response from Fred Wilson: i did invest in Zynga and it is the best investment i have ever made in twenty five years of venture capital investing.

Hmm, Shawn Carlson of LabRats (Exposing Young Kids To Science) and the SocietyForAmateurScientists seems to live in Naperville Il - roughly an hour from Barrington Il.

Jeff Vail has a series of posts on his Diagonal Economy thinking. I initially planned to use the phrase “ParallelEconomy,” but that sounds too much like a mere shift to black and Gray Market-s, instead of addressing the more fundamental, structural shift that I predict away from hierarchal organization to a flatter, peer-to-peer form of organization that I have called “RhiZome” (Network Economy) elsewhere. Perhaps “envision” is a better word than "predict"—I advocate for this shift, and think that it makes sense from several perspectives (fulfilled ontogeny and true sustainability in particular), but what I am not doing is suggesting, like some Marxist prophecy, that this shift is somehow our civilization’s destiny. I think this shift will occur on some level, but that it will meet powerful resistance. In the end, it is primarily a set of tools that will become increasingly available to those who wish to shape their own future. Here, I think that “diagonal” best captures this shift—movement along one axis (energy consumed and scale) and along a second (degree of hierarchal order of organization). The term also draws from a discussion (using the same label) in the Intermezzo section of Antonio Negri’s and Michael Hardt’s “Empire.” So what is the Diagonal Economy? Ultimately, I see it as a structural response to the various forces that will increasingly shape the coming century and beyond. A limited list includes Energy Descent (Peak Oil); other resource constraints; imminent ecological and climatic pressures; the limits of human ontogeny; information processing burdens; and the breakdown of the Nation-State system. (more)

On GitHub as Lean Startup. As far as numbers go, we have hundreds of thousands of users, tens of thousands of paying customers, and almost a million repositories – with thousands more added each day. All in just over two years... The real office, the place everyone shows up every day, is our CampFire room... Do we make web apps, or just do source control? What do we pay our employees? Should we speak at conferences? How do we approach customer support? All of these might seem like isolated questions, but they’re all directly related to the philosophy of the company. Once you know what the company stands for they’re all much easier to answer. We were having a hard time answering each question individually before we really figured out what GitHub the company was all about (Shared Vision). (Git)

This is the first time I've heard of a Personal Learning Network (PLN), contrasting to a PLE. A Personal Learning Network is a structure that reflects relatedness to other people. Information sources (such as Google or databases) can be part of a PLN. A PLN is grown by adding new people or connections. A PLN is a reflection of social and information networks (and analysis methods). Introduction to Personal Learning Networks provides a short overview of PLNs. Connectivism?

lawyer http://www.vail-law.com/ (more)

Nathan Lewis believes (scroll down) in the ChemTrails Conspiracy Theory. (more)

Stephen Vescio on designing WebApp-s for the IPad. I don't know how much of this is relevant to the IPhone and Android Mobile-s. (more)

Gary Metcalfe's Critique of Social System-s Theory. Hard science approaches and methods, such as those of physics, have continued as the standard by which all other disciplines are judged, despite the obvious failure of these in the social arenas. The development of an adequate and effective approach to social systems is likely to require the inclusion of other ways of knowing, possibly even more ancient approaches that were dismissed by science along the way. (Haven't read it yet, that quote sounds silly.)

In Bath, Maine. (more)

author of the Collapse Of Complex Societies (more)