a Market/Market Place (more)

Currency that exists only within a Virtual World (more)

Forbes Com will have sponsor-owned blogs that will run alongside those of the Journalist-s. Science Blogs redux?

Django doesn't persist connctions to your Data Store. Wow that's a lot of overhead.

Art Kleiner's history of magazine formats. In a systematic way, since about 1890, the slick Magazine style has been refined as a corporate formula for grabbing readers, for enticing them to look at everything (especially the Advertising) and for allowing them to forget everything once they've read it. (more)

The universe is not just weirder than we imagine, it's weirder than we can imagine. (more)

Donald Vandergriff suggests various Public Policy changes to plan for the Long Emergency and resulting Scarcity. He does make a good point that supporting Immigration, while it might make sense under "normal" conditions, might not be a good idea if you belief we're going to have huge global resource problems (and prefer to protect those born here).

Blog Comment service. (more)

Amazon has been granted a Patent written in 2004 for charging readers for the ability to pre-view subsets of a book before buying it. The new patent says the pay-to-preview model could also extend to "magazines, newspapers, newsletters, manuals, guides, references, articles, reports, documents, etc." This smells more like a general Metered Pay Wall to me.

see Purple Numbers

Big Agriculture poster-child (more)

Fabius Maximus on the potential future Side Effect-s of major Mercenary use that we've done for our War On Iraq and Afghanistan adventures. (more)

As part of my Book Server thinking, I should document current non-random practice of how various non-retailers (e.g. authors, publishers) generate sales (Printed Book and EBook). Do publishers sell themselves? Do they also point to Amazon and others? Do authors point to their publisher's site (if that publisher does self-selling), or point to retailers? (Business Models For Information) (more)

Big Agriculture, aka AgriBusiness (more)

in particular "Extraordinary Rendition" (more)

In a 6-5 ruling issued this afternoon, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals handed the Barack Obama administration a major victory in its efforts to shield George W Bush crimes from Judicial Review, when the court upheld the Obama DOJ's argument that Bush's Rendition program, used to send victims to be Torture-d, are "StateSecret-s" and its legality thus cannot be adjudicated by courts. (more)

I've driven past the Sears Centre arena/Sports Stadium in Hoffman Estates Il a couple times, and wondered what's going on. (more)

commander of war in Afghanistan until MichaelHastings' Rolling Stone article. (more)

Barack Obama will be losing a number of top advisers soon. Rahm Emanuel is widely expected to run for mayor of Chicago, and David Axelrod is likely to leave this spring to prepare for Obama's 2012 reelection effort. Obama will soon lose other top advisers. His chief economic adviser, Larry Summers, announced that he will return to Harvard, where he is a professor; Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina is expected to join Axelrod in Chicago; and national security adviser JamesJones is said to want out by the end of the year. (Plus Christina Romer already left.)

Monocle is an Open Source Browser Based Ebook Reader. 25kb of JavaScript, uses CSS-3. Monocle is designed for EPub. Well, ultimately it doesn't care if the source of the text is zipped up, DRM locked down, whether your TOC is in the NCX or plucked from a YAML file — it doesn't handle unwrapping all the packaging. But the core tenets of the standard: XHTML files with a defined linear progression, and optionally a nested hierarchy of sections or chapters — that's supported. In full colour. What's better than a browser for rendering XHTML? (more)