Ron Suskind's latest book, Confidence Men, is about the Barack Obama administration, hampered by a White House economic staff plagued by internal rivalries, a domineering chief adviser and a Treasury secretary who dragged his feet on enforcing decisions with which he disagreed... Mr. Obama’s decisions were routinely “re-litigated” by the chairman of the National Economic Council, Larry Summers. Some decisions, including one to overhaul the debt-ridden CitiBank, were carried out sluggishly or not at all by a resistant Treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, according to the book. (more)

The police shut down Occupy Oakland in a ham-fisted way. (Occupy Wall Street) (more)

Megan Garben considers the barriers a Book (not just a Printed Book) faces in achieving the Viral spread of its ideas. Books are great, definitely, at capturing ideas. Books are great at claiming cultural ownership of ideas. Books are great at generating speaking gigs based on ideas. Books are great at getting authors paid for ideas. But books are much, much less great at actually propagating ideas — particularly ideas of the relative nuance that EvgenyMorozov’s “Internet intellectuals” (Public Intellectual) tend to favor... The thing that makes books lucrative to authors and publishers — their ability to restrain ideas, to wall them off from the non-book-buying world — is antithetical to virality. How can books be expected to share ideas when the very point of their existence is containment? She notes how Jeff Jarvis' PublicParts is succeeding. The events’ net effect speaks to a new kind of object: the public book, defined as much by its publicness as by its bookishness. At the end of PublicParts, Jarvis mentions that his next project may not be a book at all, but rather a book-without-a-book: a Seth Godin-esque series of public events held both in person and online. “The book,” Jarvis writes, “if there is one, would be a by-product and perhaps a marketing tool for more events.” (Business Models For Information) Could a Book Server help? (more)

Alan Kay discusses the Bi Modal theory of Educating Kids. This got me to realize that it would be much better to find unusual situations with "normal" populations of learners but with the 1 in a million teacher or curriculum.

Matt Webb gave the kickoff at Reboot-11 on the Macro Scope theme. (Oddly, he never associates the term with Bucky Fuller. Though he does credit John Thackara, who used the term more recently.) (more)

Alan Kay gave a talk on Programming And Scaling.

Managed Hosting provider (more)

Want to get a Simplest Thing Splash Page up for solicitin prospects for Problem Interview-s, following Running Lean process. (more)

A city-state is an independent country whose territory consists of a city which is not administered as part of another local government. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City-state (more)

Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs is out. (more)

see United Arab Emirates

India is launching an Aakash Android Tablet. The 7-inch Android-based device will be distributed at a government subsidized price of $35, making it the world’s cheapest Android device. The general retail price will be $60, which is still remarkably cheap for such a powerful device. A contract between the Indian government and Canadian development partner Data Wind, should put between 10 and 12 million devices in the hands of students across India by the end of 2012, according to Computer World. A new OLPC competitor? Should Sugar UI be ported to Android? 2008-12-24-SugarToGnome

Fred Vogelstein in Wired Mag says Yahoo blew it with their WebAd business under Terry Semel's tenure. When Yahoo decided it was going to buy Overture in 2002, Overture dominated search-related advertising; its revenue was two times Google's. By the time the deal was actually announced in 2003, the two companies were neck and neck. Two years later, Google's revenue was 2.5 times Overture's.

Discussion Forum that became Yahoo Groups (acquired Aug'2000) (more)

Yahoo WebMail service (more)

Yahoo Mail is changing to use bits from OddPost. Now Cross Platform.

WikiLeaks says it may have to shut down, after 10mo of financial blockade by Credit Card-s, PayPal, and other payment companies. Some question where the money has been going.

Blogger is integrating with Google Plus. (more)

WebAd business/engine bought by Yahoo. (more)

DotCom Portal (more)