Fred Wilson notes that Union Square Ventures has invested in Skill Share to transform every community into a campus, every address into a classroom, and every neighbor into a teacher and student. The average class costs around $20. To make money, Skillshare shaves a 15 percent fee from the cost of the class. Even so, Mr. Karnjanaprakorn says that some teachers are able to make upward of $1,000 per class that they teach through the site. (Education Market)

Ross Mayfield on how the quality of a Wiki's Search Engine changes its use. Making it fast, expanding it's scope to include MsOffice enhancements, or limiting it's scope by tag let's you discover what may be relevant... The dumping ground use case for wikis is not just accessible, but valid. Good search enables people to get past form applications, even get pass formality of contribution practices. It let's us simply contribute, knowing that we can recall later. Others can recall, edit it, link or tag it, and it will pop back to top of mind if it is important. We can forget when immediately processing what crosses our desk when we have confidence in rapid recall.

So it's time to get my Time Capsule working with UVerse. (more)

Jon Udell thinks of tags as DIY shared buckets for "URL-s as grains of sand". This isn’t even tagging in the conventional sense. Set aside, for now, the clusters that can form around that tag on Del.icio.us, or on Word Press, or on FlickR, or on Twitter, or even at the intersection of all those tag-oriented services. Consider only what can happen when you make up a never-before-seen term, utter it in a document placed on the web, and invite others to utter it in documents that they place on the web. When we enact this scenario we are, in effect, creating an ad hoc web service that we can use to make and share collections of things related to (in this case) a particular dam project in a particular town. Of course tag-oriented services enhance our ability to make and share such collections. But even without them we can still do it. In the realm of virtual things, names are as plentiful as grains of sand. But they aren’t inert. We can wake them up and use them to co-ordinate our activities. WikiWord As Tag Google Whack!

see Technological Revolutions And Financial Capital (more)

metal (more)

aka School Reform

In a recently published article in the journal PLoS One, researchers at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory claim to have developed a new drug that has the potential to cure nearly all types of viral infections ranging from the common cold (Flu And Cold) to highly deadly hemorrhagic fevers. The new drug, known as DRACO (double-stranded RNA activated caspase oligomerizer), is able to discriminate between healthy cells and those infected by viruses. It essentially signals the infected cells to die, preventing the virus from replicating and moving into other cells, all while leaving adjacent healthy cells completely unaffected. Furthermore, scientists believe that it would be difficult for viruses to develop a resistance to this kind of treatment.

Joshua Schachter Start Up started 2010.

Tasty Labs (Joshua Schachter) has launched its Jig Market. Tell us what you need. Get help with those needs. Pretty simple.

Britt Blaser said the Enlightenment was caused by Coffee House-s and free land (Real Estate, HomeStead). Later he changed to Coffee itself and the Pamphlet-s born of cheap PrintingPress-es.

as Media increasingly becomes Digital Media, you may want a Home Server to "manage" it all (more)

meta-comedian (more)

another spin on Transparency (more)

Now generic term for merging your various streams (in out and?) - Life Streaming. (more)

A former senior analyst at Moody's has gone public with his story of how one of the country's most important Credit Rating agencies is corrupted to the core... William J Harrington has made his story public in the form of a 78-page "comment" to the SEC's proposed rules about rating agency reform, which he submitted to the agency on August 8th.

HealthCare philosophy that doesn't treat user as an NPC Consumer/Patient. (more)

Steve Blank likes to define a Job Spec/Job Description, and evaluate candidates against it, by Pie Chart. (Job Market)

Kathy Sierra gave a session at OsCon on CreatingPassionateUsers (Passion), essentially encouraging a Virtual Community/EcoSystem. There are interesting summaries by Geoff Broadwell and Sean Mountcastle. To form a rich, vibrant community, the product has to have a long term richness and depth, so that a progression forms from newbie to master. As in various programming communities, a rich ecosystem of knowledge will form around this progression. Some users will spend all of their energy climbing the ladder of Mastery; others will act as mentors, or evangelists, or trivia collectors, or what have you. The more depth a subject shows, the richer the community can be. The ladder of skill (Learning Curve) is itself important; as Computer Game designers know, many users just want to be able to reach the next level to be able to say that they have. (more)

a Learning Organization/Learning Community/Network Of Learning that cuts across formal organizations