Eric Ries says Don't combine your Start Up Product Launch with a Marketing Launch. Do your Product Launch first. (Do your Marketing Launch later. He gives conditions for doing the Marketing Launch.) Don't chicken out and do a closed beta; get real customers in through real renewable channels. Start with a five-dollar-a-day SEM campaign. Iterate as fast and for as long as you can. Don't scale. Don't Marketing Launch (until you pass his tests). (Customer Development) (more)

Dmitry Orlov's guest Gary aims to predict the timing of the Collapse of the US Empire (Peak Oil leading to Peak Empire). As the recently deceased analyst Chalmers Johnson explained, the US is an “empire of bases”, not an empire of colonies... Looking at US military spending below, it has continued to rise, despite the recent decline in acreage under management. This is entirely consistent with JosephTainter’s theory of declining marginal utility to expanding empires, as imperial overstretch becomes more and more expensive, and returns to expenditures begins to decline, and even become negative. It would be entirely consistent for the expenditures to continue to rise as the empire attempts to hold onto its existing level of military acreage, until interest on the debt causes a default, and then expenditures also collapse.

Patrick McKenzie on his own development/deployment process. Staging Server, Version Control System workflows, deployment scripts, etc. You’re not going to get the Joel Spolsky Test 2010 here, mostly because I’m not Joel and there is no particular reason any company should judge its development practices relative to mine. What I would like to give is some practical pointers for implementing three practices which, if you’re not already doing, will greatly improve the experience of writing software for the web.

Rob Paterson is getting good results with a Caveman Diet.

Venkatesh Rao is a big fan of Quora. Quora might well become as fundamental to the Web as Google, Facebook or Twitter. Everybody asks and answers questions after all... To understand the Quora phenomenon, you have to think about the phenomenology of Q&A. Consider the different types we encounter in everyday life: (list of 20)... This fluidity of relative status in Q&A is what makes it a fundamental kind of messaging transaction. Status shifts strongly, but locally, during the process of asking and answering questions. Which makes sense, since status shifts generally occur in response to truly new information being injected, and Q&A models are optimized to draw new information in. (more)

http://radio.userland.com/ (more)

Charlie O Donnell on the hotness of Recommendation System-s (Personalization). Yet, at the end of the day, it’s not clear to me that technology is really solving the problem nearly as much as plain old experts and content. Technology was supposed to be the great equalizer, democratizing recommendations and killing off the need for Zagats, critics, etc—yet I find that solutions that take critics into considerations often to be the most useful. Sure, the definition of a critic has widened—like a music or food blogger—but getting recommendations from people with an intense and nearly fulltime focus on an area is hard to replace, and effective to productize... I think the big issue is that context is important—why do I want a particular recommendation at any given time and how much info do you have about my situation? Am I looking for a mystery book? A happy hour bar with a chill atmosphere? Do I even know what the heck I want and can I be trusted to give you enough data in the request?

Venkatesh Rao says everyone should write a book. *Writing A Book is an act that transforms you. I’d go further. It transforms you in a way almost nothing else can... If you write anything that weighs in over 25,000 words, and has a Coher Ent Narrative through it, it’s a “book” as far as I am concerned. Keep in mind though, that it can only transform you if you have the courage to let others choose whether to read it. Self-publishing and vanity publishing are legitimate in my mind. Non-publishing is not.

Dmitry Orlov's presentation on the coming Collapse. We all have to prepare for life without much money, where imported goods are scarce, and where people have to provide for their own needs, and those of their immediate neighbors. (more)

Union Square Ventures is investing in Joshua Schachter's new Tasty Labs venture. (more)

There was a pdfleaks Personal Democracy Forum events discussing WikiLeaks.

series of War Game-s performed in summer'2002 - something of a preview to the War On Iraq (more)

Back in July the Wall St Journal launched a "What They Know" series about what data websites/advertisers are gathering about their users (you). I found it unreadable because of its unwillingness to distinguish the obvious/old/mundane like site-specific cookies (which they called "tools") from much creepier behaviors. (more)

The DailyNews revealed yesterday that more than 500 teachers who nobody wanted to hire are working as overpriced subs and fill-ins for salaries as high as $93,416, costing taxpayers more than $37 million a year, plus millions more for benefits. But teachers are not the only unwanted school employees collecting public paychecks. A list of unwanted principals and assistant principals obtained by The News shows 56 administrators earning as much as $108,000 a year - and who collectively cost taxpayers $5 million annually. (Educating Kids In Nyc, Teachers Union) (more)

SalesforceCom is buying Ruby On Rails-hosting-service Heroku.

Giles Bowkett is giving a talk on NodeJs. Lisp is a programming language which allows you to manipulate its abstract syntax tree directly. The popular quote about every other language being a partial implementation of Lisp is not just snark; all programming languages use an abstract syntax tree, so Lisp is literally and mathematically either equal to, or a superset of, every other programming language. However, if you've wanted to build anything actually useful with Lisp, you've historically been in the position of having no vibrant, powerful Open Source community to draw on. Not many people enjoyed this tradeoff, but fortunately, it is no longer the case. Sibilant is a Lisp written on top of NodeJs, a new server-side JavaScript library for writing servers. Node has an active open source community, and it runs on the lightning-fast V8 JavaScript interpreter (written and supported by Google). Thanks to V8, Node, and Sibilant, it is now trivially easy to write web servers, command-line utilities, and applications (server-side, client-side, or both) in a fast, well-supported Lisp. This talk will show you how. There may be slides. There will definitely be GitHubs.

*Mr. Julian Assange was arrested by officers from ScotlandYard’s extradition unit when he went to a central London police station by prior agreement with the authorities, the police said. (more)

A Google Nexus S Android Mobile is [expected](http://www.engadget.com/tag/Nexus S/) to come soon, from T-Mobile. Interesting, after the Nexus One being discontinued... (more)

founder of WikiLeaks

Tom Evslin credits Bernie Sanders with forcing the Federal Reserve to document its Credit Crisis 2008 Subsidy (Bail-Out) programs. You would expect the Fed to be more active in a banking crisis than in normal times (although you might have also expected the Fed to see some of the problems which led to the crisis). What you would not expect is to find that the chairman of the NY Fed at the time, Stephen Friedman, was a director of Goldman Sachs, which hit the Fed up for help 52 times and had a high balance of $18 billion after quickly turning itself into a bank to qualify for aid. It does not help that he was given a waiver by the Fed to continue as chair AND that, according to the NYTImes, he bought shares in Goldman while that bank was being bailed out by the Fed. BTW, two of the other nine members of the board of the NY Fed were the chief executives of GE and J P Morgan, both of which also received Fed support. Other interesting information is that the Fed apparently felt that it also had to bailout investment funds headquartered in the Cayman Islands (where people and funds go to escape taxes), the Korea Development Bank, and the Arab Banking Corporation based in Bahrain (over $23 billion in loans at rates as low as .25%). Oligarchy.