Middle School-131 in NYC's China Town is running a "SchoolOfOne" pilot program over the summer. The program, conducted in a converted library, consists mainly of students working individually or in small groups on laptop computers to complete math (Basic Arithmetic) lessons in the form of quizzes, games and worksheets. Each student must take a quiz at the end of each day; the results are fed into a computer program to determine whether they will move on to a new topic the next day. (Educating Kids In Nyc, Educational Technology) Hard to tell from the article, but actual content sounds rather unremarkable. (more)

Co-Founder of Get Chute.com and LilGrams.com, previously VP Product at Klout, Social Product Hacker at large (more)

Stowe Boyd describes a "Nerdvana" Buddy List-Anchored Messaging (Universal Toolbox, Social Media) system he'd like to see. *Basically, EMail is pretty good at communicating with people when you don’t know them well, or people you don’t know at all. All you need is their email address and your emails will be treated pretty much like anybody else’s. But as a result, email doesn’t really do very much to help with the highest valued communication: communicating with the known. That’s where the paradigm of buddies, and the gated communities of instant messaging networks excel. But even technologies that I think are more useful in remaining in close contact with your circles of friends and colleagues don’t necessarily work together very well, if at all. (more)

Ross Mayfield notes the opportunity to integrate Twitter with an Instant Messaging system. (more)

Dave Winer discovered that Twitter is playing some Expanded Tweet games with some BigCo partners to show more of their info alongside the tweet. (more)

Stowe Boyd thinks the Team Is The Focus model is broken, in terms of IBM's Lotus Connections product family. Web 2.0 social tools (Social Media) - largely - work around a different model. Social Networking sites - explicit ones like MySpace and FaceBook, or implicit ones in Social Media - are really organized around individuals and their networked self-expression. (more)

Audrey Watters thinks anyone working in Educational Technology needs a grounding in the background of Educational Philosophy. (more)

former mayor of Milwaukee Wi (more)

Aaron Swartz has some WebPy plan - is it another Python Web Framework? (more)

a cooperative financial institution that is owned and controlled by its members, and operated for the purpose of promoting thrift, providing credit at reasonable rates, and providing other financial services to its members (more)

Move Your Money is a decentralized campaign to educate and empower people and organizations to move their money from the corrupt and "too big to fail" financial institutions that have crippled the global economy while being propped up by taxpayer dollars. (more)

*A community bank is a depository institution (Retail Bank) that is typically locally owned and operated. Community banks tend to focus on the needs of the businesses and families where the bank holds branches and offices. Lending decisions are made by people who understand the local needs of families, businesses and farmers. Employees often reside within the communities they serve. (more)

In an event titled “BankTransferDay” thousands are signing up to leave large Retail Bank-s in favor of Credit Union-s on or before Saturday, November 5, over what some call unethical practices. (more)

another Big Government HealthCare program (more)

a bank owned by its depositors - a CoOp? See also Mutualism (more)

Arianna Huffington wants you to Move Your Money from a Too Big To Fail Retail Bank to a Community Bank or Credit Union. *The big banks on Wall Street, propped up by taxpayer money and government guarantees, have had a record year, making record profits while returning to the highly leveraged activities that brought our economy to the brink of disaster. In a slap in the face to taxpayers, they have also cut back on the money they are lending, even though the need to get credit flowing again was one of the main points used in selling the public the bank bailout. But since April, Jp Morgan Chase, CitiBank, Bank Of America, and Wells Fargo -- all of which took billions in taxpayer money -- have cut lending to businesses by $100 billion. (more)

another rev (2011-2012) of Dave Winer WebLog writing/reading software/EcoSystem. (more)

Loic Le Meur-founded Start Up (more)

*Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. agreed to buy 63 Newspaper-s from Media General Inc. for $142 million, significantly expanding Berkshire's presence in the depressed newspaper market. (more)

Dave Sifry announced he was stepping away from the Technorati CEO role a while back. Now 3 other execs are on the way out. Outgoing CEO Dave Sifry announced the departures of Chief Technologist Tantek Celik (pictured above) and Vice President of Engineering Adam Hertz, but snubbed Product Manager Liz Dunn in the official post and left her to blog about her own resignation.