If you're building a P2P app, esp for a Dark Net... (more)

Is Bruce Sterling's 'Holy Fire' Our Future? (more)

The Pandigital Novel is a color EBook reader with TouchScreen and WiFi. Built in partnership with Barnes And Noble. Only $200!? (more)

Patrick McKenzie thinks a Lean Startup that's not doing direct Selling (like where Steve Blank's experience comes from) needs a Customer Development iterative plan to succeed. Some tactics he notes: (more)

A draft screenshot of the future Ny Times PayWall door has surfaced. (They won't implement their paywall until Jan'2011.) I Commented to ask if there's a "standard" term for this "get some articles free, then pay for rest" model: how about Metered Pay Wall? (more)

meme: attempt to broaden the perspective of Interaction Design (more)

Roderick T Long defends Libertarian Anarchism (Anarcho Capitalist) against 10 objections. Well, there's a popular nineteenth-century theory of the origin of the Nation-State that you find in a number of different forms. It's in Herbert Spencer, it's in Oppenheimer, and you find it in some of the French liberals like Comte and Dunoyer, and Molinari - who wasn't really French, he was Belgian ("I am not a Frenchie, I'm a Belgie!"). This theory - they had different versions of it, but it's all pretty similar - was that what happens is that one group conquers another group. Often the theory was that a sort of hunter-marauder (Hunter Gatherer) group conquers an agricultural group (Agriculture)... I think another origin you can see of some states or state-like things is in the same sort of situation but in cases where they succeed in fending off the invaders. Some local group within the invaded group says: we're going to specialize in defense - we're going to specialize in defending the rest of you guys against these invaders. And they succeed. If you look at the history of England, I think this is what happens with the English monarchy. (more)

a place to share, find and discuss learning and teaching ideas and experiences. (more)

society that hasn't reached it's Industrial Age yet (more)

The Atlantic Magazine was profitable this year, for the first time in over a decade. Since 2005, revenue at The Atlantic has almost doubled, reaching $32.2 million this year, according to figures provided by the company. About half of that is advertising revenue. But digital advertising — projected to finish the year at $6.1 million — represents almost 40 percent of the company’s overall advertising take. In the magazine business, which has resisted betting its future on digital revenue, that is a rate virtually unheard of.

intellectual Magazine

Steven Johnson reviewing Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate. The most compelling attempt to date to build a thorough inventory of humanity's basic toolbox comes from the anthropologist Donald E Brown. Inspired by Noam Chomsky's idea of a "universal grammar" - the deep syntax shared by all human languages - Brown set out to document the basic social patterns, beliefs and categories shared by all known human societies, without exception (Human Universals). Pinker devotes an entire appendix to Brown's list, which has a strangely moving, abbreviated style: "cooking; cooperation; cooperative labor; copulation normally conducted in privacy; corporate (perpetual) statuses; coyness display; crying; cultural variability; culture; culture/nature distinction; customary greetings; daily routines; dance; death rituals..." ... Darwinian anthropologists have argued that the most alienating environment possible for a mother - the one furthest removed from the ancestral Hunter Gatherer lifestyle our brains evolved in - is the stay-at-home suburban mom, disconnected from Extended Family, Cooperative Work and the social bonds of tribal life. As Matt Ridley argues, during a discussion of labor divisions in Hunter Gatherer communities: "None (of this material) says anything about the woman's place being in the home. After all, the argument goes that Men And Women both went out to work in the Pleistocene, one to hunt, the other to gather. Neither activity was remotely like trooping off to an office and answering telephones all day. Both sexes are equally unsuited to that."

Jonathan Rauch in The Atlantic on simulating societies (Simulation, Human System). Unable to interrogate or observe the real Long House Valley Anasazi, they set about growing artificial ones.

A broad list of Educational Technology companies, in categories: (more)

continent of misfortune (more)

Kevin Carson makes Actionable recommendations to create true Free Enterprise (Free Market), vs the Corporate Capitalism we have now. So I’d love to issue a challenge to those “free enterprise” hucksters in the Chamber of Commerce: Let’s have genuine “free enterprise,” and let’s have it now. That means repealing the DMCA, WIPO Copyright Treaty, drug Patent-s, and all other “IntellectualProperty” law — and telling the RIAA, MPAA and Microsoft where to get off. It means cutting the AutoMobile-highway complex, the Military Industrial Complex and agribusiness (Big-Ag) off from the taxpayer teat. It means eliminating all regulatory barriers to the competitive issue of low-interest credit through Mutual Bank-s, against people’s own property or their future earning power. It means ceasing to enforce all absentee titles to vacant and unimproved land. And it means an end to an American Foreign Policy whose main goal is to make the entire planet safe for corporate power. (more)

Great interview with Advertising-legend GeorgeLois, best known for his Esquire Magazine covers. Lois wholly or partially created some of the most exceptional and memorable ads in history. For better or worse, behemoths of consumerism such as Tommy Hilfiger, Jiffy Lube, ESPN, MTV, and many others have ingrained themselves in American culture because of his indelible campaigns. (more)

Adrian Fenty lost the primary bid (to Vincent Gray) for re-election of Mayor of Washington DC. (more)

HTML-v5 has a "VidEo" element that will allow browsers to play video without a plugin. Google is playing with a version of YouTube that takes that approach. There are other advantages, too. (more)

Vinay Gupta thinks there's plenty of room for innovation in Social Software, starting with EMail. Omni Mail? God knows OmniGraffle is worth about 10 points of IQ. Imagine what a mail client could do if we started from scratch assuming a Life Streaming environment! I'd hoped that Mozilla Raindrop would fill this niche.