Thomas De Zengotita suggests (not online yet) a Progressive Talk Show (more)

Mark Bernstein pointed to a Jeff Noon manifesto (Jan'01) for the Post Future Novel. By dismissing the textual adventures of James Joyce, British writers stayed true to the old pleasures of straightforward Story Telling. This leads to our current situation, where the vast majority of novelists are still intent on drawing a single narrative thread through a complex world. Yet we live daily in a web of connections, all of us becoming adept at riding the multiple layers of information. This is the fluid society. Tracing pathways through this intricate landscape needs a different kind of narrative art. It is in this spirit of adventure that I envisage the post-future novel... House, Hip-Hop and garage recordings contain elements of remixing, scratching and sampling. We can also look at the branching Narrative-s of Computer Game-s, at the strange connections that HyperText links reveal on the internet, at the games played with image and text in a Graphic Novel. All of these are fluid mediums, for a fluid society... It will be Raymond Chandler writing Ulysses, James Joyce writing The Big Sleep. It will move away from lazy cynicism and nihilism. Post-futurism reveres the narrative imagination.

WiFi run by a Local Government to provide cheap/free service everywhere to everyone. (more)

Mark Goldblatt claims he's being "whiteballed" for writing a novel (AfricaSpeaks) satirizing African American-s. For, to return to my original point about the effect of Sat Ire, no one nowadays needs to be satirized more than African Americans. If not for the French - who've retired all such trophies - African Americans would currently rank as the most hypocritical, most paranoid, most pretentious group of people on the planet... African-American political leaders are, nowadays, with rare exceptions, a ragtag crew of racial arsonists, conspiracy mongers and corporate shakedown artists. Their intellectual leaders are, with rare exceptions, purveyors of absurd mythologies of perpetual victimization - and the exceptions, in this case, are without exception shunned by their own communities... And I tried to "keep it real" - in the sense that many of the more grotesque passages are taken directly from conversations I overheard on the streets, or quotes from Hip-Hop magazines, or rants on PublicAccess television. (Racism? Politically Correct)

CoOp that founded the Minnesota New Country School. (more)

Matt Welch on WebLog variety vs Politically Correct Alternative Newspaper Publishing. "And if there's anything we all agree on," Richard Karpel said with a smile, "it's that we're antichurch."... The original alternative papers were not at all this politically monochromatic, despite entering the world at a time when Lenny Bruce was being prosecuted for obscenity, Tom Dooley was proselytizing for American intervention in Vietnam, and Republicans ruled the nation's editorial pages... And these Amateur-s, especially the ones focusing on news and current events, are doing some fascinating things. Many are connecting intimately with readers in a way reminiscent of old-style metro columnists or the liveliest of the New Journalists. Others are staking the narrowest of editorial claims as their own - appellate court rulings, new media proliferation in Tehran, the intersection of Hip-Hop and Libertarian-ism - and covering them like no one else.

There's been lots of consolidation in Mass Media/Old Media/MSM. (more)

Venkatesh Rao linkblogs Gregory Rader on "the" FourEconomies: Transaction Economy, Gift Economy, Attention Economy, Relationship Economy. Clearly we need a better way to frame these concepts. What is alternative currency? What is a gift economy? What is the attention economy? How can we systematically explain the economic impact of user-generated content or peer-to-peer exchange? The terms, ‘user generated’ and ‘peer-to-peer’ might as well be defined as ‘not professional’ and ‘not corporate’, respectively. (more)

blogger on Network Economy, etc. (more)

used by many as a model for New Economy market models because it uses Project Based Organization Models (and deals with private Capital Market that way, too). (more)

E Campaign tool? (more)

Email List broadcasting essays of Venkatesh Rao. (more)

an open-source collection of integrated, but reusable apps for Django - While our initial development is focused around a demo Social Networking site, we are also working on number of editions tailored to Intranet-s, learning management (LMS?), Software Project Management and more. (more)

*Kenneth feels the weight coming down on him again. What he doesn’t understand just yet is that he will come to look back on these days as the uncomplicated ones, when his scary-smart son was into simple things, like rocket science. This is before Taylor Wilson would transform the family’s garage into a mysterious, glow-in-the-dark cache of rocks and metals and liquids with unimaginable powers. Before he would conceive, in a series of unlikely epiphanies, new ways to use neutrons to confront some of the biggest challenges of our time: cancer and nuclear terrorism. Before he would build a reactor that could hurl atoms together in a 500-million-degree plasma core—becoming, at 14, the youngest individual on Earth to achieve Nuclear Fusion. (more)

FON has 5 Million WiFi HotSpot-s around the world. Much of Fon’s growth can be attributed to strategic partnerships with companies like SFR, British Telecom, and Belgacom, all of whom have folded support for Fon’s network into their consumer-facing hardware.

type of Nuclear Energy (more)

Stewart Brand summarizes a Dialogue between Peter Schwartz and Ralph Cavanagh on Nuclear Power. Cavanagh asked, "What about the storage of nuclear waste?" "We defined the problem wrong," Schwartz said. "Storage for thousands of years is not needed. The present storage on site in concrete casks is working, and the "waste" is available as a further energy source with later technology."... Schwartz asked Cavanagh about the large government subsidies (Subsidy) for Solar Power research while there have been none for nuclear (except Nuclear Fusion). Cavanagh said the subsidies were declining, and should. There should be more funding for R&D in biofuels and other alternatives (Alternative Energy), but the main role for government should be in setting emission standards and then let the private sector duke it out for the best solutions.

I was reading about Elon Musk. Though he is only 35, Mr Musk has already made surprising progress toward the three modest goals he set for himself when at college: to transform the internet, make a breakthrough in Clean Energy and propel mankind towards inter-planetary travel. He arrived at Stanford University intending to do a doctorate on batteries for electric cars, but dropped out to jump on the internet bandwagon. He struck gold when he sold PayPal, the online payments firm, to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. (more)

Venkatesh Rao believes we will end up with a Steady State Economy whether we want to or not. (more)

aka Alternative Energy, Clean Tech