Another round of "RSS is dead" discussion, esp around traffic leads for Tech Crunch. (more)

Business Model that tries to "capture" the customer. (more)

Q And A-based Discussion Forum (more)

always having your computer tools/data local, not dependent on the Always On Network (and its providers/gatekeepers) (so you can use it Off-Line). (more)

Amazon.com has taken down the WikiLeaks web site under what appears to be pressure from the U.S. government. Senator Joseph Lieberman issued a statement saying that Amazon.com has informed his staff that the company has ceased hosting Wikileaks... As we reported earlier this week, Wikileaks appears to have moved its main site to AWS in an attempt to thwart a denial-of-service attack against its servers that began last Sunday. Why your Dark Net needs to be P2P. (more)

John Robb notes some Open Farm Tech (Open SourceEcology) projects that could provide local Resilience: Open Source DrillPress, CEB (Compressed Earth Brick), Soil Pulverizer. (more)

Cal Newport says Extrinsic Motivation can work. Richard Ryan and Edward Deci then present a continuum of extrinsic motivation. On one end is what they call external regulation of motivation. This is where you do work only to avoid a punishment or achieve a reward. Not surprisingly, this is not a sustainable strategy... On the other end of this continuum, however, is integrated regulation. When you experience this type of regulation, you’re still doing work for reasons outside of the work itself, but two other properties now also hold: your reasons for the task match your deeply-held values; and your approach to the task is self-determined, not something someone imposed on you. (more)

Skype had huge amounts of downtime today. Raises into question its P2P architecture? (more)

investment analyst (more)

*On October 26, 2010, popular Gnutella servent LimeWire was ordered shut down by Judge Kimba Wood of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York when she signed a Consent Injunction which LimeWire and recording industry plaintiffs had agreed upon. This event may have caused a notable drop in the size of the network because, while negotiating the injunction, LimeWire had staff add remote shutdown of gnutella access and file transfers as some users installed affected versions. When the injunction came into force versions later than 5.5.10 left the network or were disabled as users started them. (more)

Venkatesh Rao wonders how David Hackett Fischer's Folk Way-s Model matches up with Globalization. So what exactly is a folkway? It’s an interrelated collection of default ways of conducting the basic, routine affairs of a society. Fischer lists the following 23 components: speech ways, building ways, family ways, gender ways, sex ways, child-rearing ways, naming ways, age ways, death ways, religious ways, magic ways, learning ways, food ways, dress ways, sport ways, work ways, time ways, wealth ways, rank ways, social ways, order ways, power ways and freedom ways. (Kinda reminds me of a Culture. Or a Pattern Language.) (more)

Glenn Greenwald: For more than six months, Wired Mag's Senior Editor Kevin Poulsen has possessed -- but refuses to publish -- the key evidence in one of the year's most significant political stories: the arrest of U.S. Army PFC Bradley Manning for allegedly acting as WikiLeaks' source. In late May, Adrian Lamo -- at the same time he was working with the FBI as a government informant against Manning -- gave Poulsen what he purported to be the full chat logs between Manning and Lamo in which the Army Private allegedly confessed to having been the source for the various cables, documents and video which WikiLeaks released throughout this year. In interviews with me in June, both Poulsen and Lamo confirmed that Lamo placed no substantive restrictions on Poulsen with regard to the chat logs: Wired was and remains free to publish the logs in their entirety. (more)

When making Web Services call from your Ruby On Rails WebApp, you'll want to spin those off as ASynch calls to insulate the user from slow/timeout cases. (Flip-side risk: if the Web Services call gets rejected because of data quality, you've lost the chance to have the user make a fix.) (more)

a NoSQL back-end (more)

Zed Shaw won't use TOR. But all of this is just unsubstantiated and could be hypothetical, what actually worries me is Jacob Appelbaum works on Tor and works for WikiLeaks... Wikileak's job is to take people's secrets and show them and who's hiding them to the world. Tor's job is to do the inverse. The two project's goals don't align, and having one dude do both gives me the willies. Hmm, that seems a little crazy. WikiLeaks' job is to expose the secrets of the powerful, and Tor's job is to hide the secrets of the citizen.

Doing some research on the best way for Spinning Off Asynch Rails Processes For Web Services Calls.

A semi-secret government contractor that calls itself Project Vigilant surfaced at the Def Con security conference Sunday with a series of revelations: that it monitors the traffic of 12 regional Internet service providers (ISP), hands much of that information to federal agencies, and encouraged one of its “volunteers,” researcher Adrian Lamo, to inform the federal government about the alleged source of a controversial video of civilian deaths in Iraq leaked to whistle-blower site WikiLeaks in April.

Bought my EwiUsb Midi Wind Controller.

Venkatesh Rao considers good and bad visions of the End Of The World: Singularity or Collapse? The true antipode to the Singularity view is what I call Garbage Eschatology. A Party Game of 7 questions. Then the 8th: What would you save?

Damian Kulash of Ok Go on how to Make Money in the new Music Industry. So if vanishing record revenue isn't being replaced by touring income, how are musicians feeding themselves? For moderately well established artists, the answer is increasingly corporate sponsorship and licensing—a return, in a sense, to the centuries-old logic of Patronage... We had complete creative control in the (Video) productions. At the end of each clip we thanked the company involved, and genuinely, because we truly are thankful. We got the money we needed to make what we want, our fans enjoyed our videos for free, and our corporate Medicis got what their marketing departments were after: millions of eyes and goodwill from our fans. While most bands struggle to wrestle modest video budgets from labels that see videos as loss leaders, ours wind up making us a profit. (more)