AOL is buying the Huffington Post for $315M. Some links about HuffPo through time...

Cables from 2007 released by WikiLeaks strengthen the argument that Saudi Arabia has overstated its reserves, meaning it has less ability than many have hoped to keep oil prices down. Peak Oil?

Duck Duck Go is competing against Google (Search Engine) on the basis of protecting your Privacy (no tracking) and blocking the Content Farm-s. They're giving prominent placement to Wiki How, over E How (which Wiki How's founder Jack Herrick sold to Demand Media). Lots of room for Game Playing in picking who to Black List.

The PalestinePapers leak is shaking up Israel-Palestine partisans. It is hard to tell who appears worst: the Palestinian leaders, who are weak, craven and eager to shower their counterparts with compliments; the Israelis, who are polite in word but contemptuous in deed; or the Americans, whose neutrality consists of bullying the weak and holding the hand of the strong. Together they conspire to build a puppet state in Palestine, at best authoritarian, at worst a surrogate for an occupying force. To obtain even this form of bondage, the Palestinians have to flog the family silver.

EBook sales have suddenly skyrocketed on Young Adult titles. (more)

Jabber is an Open Source Instant Messaging project. Unfortunately, it seems to me like there's too much attention being spent on forward-looking ideas like being an "XML router", and not enough attention paid to getting nice client apps and stable public servers. (more)

Wiki Hack idea Of The Day: have the content of a Wiki stored in a central Triple Store/Data Store, but have the WikiEngine sitting somewhere else (like a Desktop Web Server). (more)

Un Hosted is a WebApp framework with interesting positioning for a Personal Network Architecture: all JavaScript (so no AppServer) passing encrypted data to a commodity cloud Data Store (well, a Data Store that has a ReST/JSON API). (more)

Radio Frequency Identification (more)

creator of Jabber/XMPP (more)

Dating Market site (more)

aka US Department Of Defense (more)

Non-Profit foundation from Google (more)

Amazon.com is now selling more Kindle EBook-s than paperback books (Printed Book). Since the beginning of the year, for every 100 paperback books Amazon has sold, the Company has sold 115 Kindle books. Additionally, during this same time period the Company has sold three times as many Kindle books as hardcover books. This is across Amazon.com’s entire U.S. book business and includes sales of books where there is no Kindle edition. Free Kindle books are excluded and if included would make the numbers even higher. Hmm, so that would imply 100 paperbacks and 38 hardcovers (total 138) for each 115 Kindle sales. Right?

Physical culture is a term applied to health and strength training regimens, particularly those that originated during the 19th century. During the mid-late 20th century, the term "physical culture" became largely outmoded in most English-speaking countries, being replaced by terms such as "physical education", "fitness training" or simply "ExerCise". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_culture (more)

Craig Mod has developed some Biblio Type templates designed to make more-attractive Books In Browsers (esp on the IPad). He has a demo to see a little of FlatLand laid out this way. The iteration of Bibliotype released with this article is by no means hyper-exhaustive, but it is a fine start. I can read that chapter of Flatland at those three sizes, in those three states (bed, knee, and breakfast) more comfortably than I can with most other available iPad eReading software. Yes, the bar really is that low!

aka World Economic Forum (more)

most famous library in history (more)

Chet Richards reviews Martin Van Creveld's Defending Israel ISBN:0312328664 which supports the idea of a Wall, though one with a different design: This means withdrawing virtually all the settlements from the West Bank and absolutely all of them from Gaza Strip and building a wall "so high a bird can't fly over it." This produces two well-defined geographical entities with fairly short borders (much shorter than current Israeli plans for the wall would entail.) It would also remove the 120 or so settlements, which now require more force to protect than Israel used to defeat Egypt in the 1967 war. An interesting thought for creating Israel-Palestine peace. Also discusses potential Clean Water problems.

Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser support the (S.510) FDA Food Safety Modernization bill. But after being passed by the House of Representatives more than a year ago with strong bipartisan support, the legislation has been stuck in the Senate. (more)