Mike Shatzkin says Book Publisher-s are unbundling their "author services". All of this sidesteps another important component of successful publishing: the coordination of all these activities. Successful publishing is the result of a lot of very small decisions.

Status Net is transitioning to Pump Io under a new company name of E14N, and will be shutting down its SaaS service/accounts. (more)

DanNorris thinks we're crazy to build consumer web Start Up-s. Option 1 – Impress 1 person (DayJob Management), earn a shitload and be looked up to by your peers. Option 2 – Impress half a million people, earn next to nothing and more than likely fail... I need to get over half a million new engaged people to my site in order to scrape through on tight bootstrapped costs. Any normal person would say no. Entrepreneur-s say yes. Why? Please let me know in the comments what you think. My only conclusion is: Because we are idiots.

Glenn Greenwald on the Freedom Of The Press Foundation: The primary impetus for the formation of this group was to block the US government from ever again being able to attack and suffocate an independent journalistic enterprise the way it did with WikiLeaks. Government pressure and the eager compliance of large financial corporations (such as Visa, Master Card, Bank of America, etc.) has - by design - made it extremely difficult for anyone to donate to WikiLeaks, while many people are simply afraid to directly support the group... I'm very excited to have participated in its formation and will serve as an unpaid member of the Board of Directors, along with the heroic whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, 2012 Mc Arthur-fellowship-receipient and Oscar-nominated documentarian LauraPoitras, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation John Perry Barlow, the actor and civil liberties advocate John Cusack, Boing Boing co-founder Xeni Jardin, and several other passionate free press and transparency activists... We intend to raise funds ourselves and then distribute it to the beneficiaries we name... The second purpose is to ensure that truly independent journalistic outlets - devoted to holding the US government and other powerful factions accountable with transparency and real adversarial journalism - are supported to the fullest extent possible. Along those lines, we have selected three other organizations along with WikiLeaks as our initial beneficiaries: MuckrockNews, Up Take, National Security Archive. (more)

one of my PetPeeves: a Non-Fiction book with no index (if I notice this before buying, I put it back on the shelf) (more)

a tax on stuff you buy (more)

see Blog Thread

an integrated application for reading and writing all types of content/data. Universal Inbox, Thinking Space, Universal Canvas, and more. EMail client and PIM? RssAggregator. Instant Messaging. (more)

creator of Kid Template Language (more)

Ryan Tomayko shows the Management style he's trying to use as director of engineering at GitHub. I vehemently refuse to tell people what to do... I show people how to plan, build, and ship product together. Essentially, I try to create little mini-managers, each responsible for managing a single person: their self... I actually don't show people how to make decisions and ship product in any real direct way. There's no How To Ship Product training class or anything like that. Instead, I just do work... The only thing that may be unique and interesting about the way I do it is that I insist on being extremely visible (Transparency) throughout the entire process. That means removing sidebar conversations, private meetings, face time, IM, private pairing, and anything else that limits the visibility of work and process... It's often cited that GitHub doesn't have managers. In my opinion, a better way to describe the phenomenon would be to say that everyone at GitHub is a manager... Imagine what would happen if 100% of your "workforce" were "decision makers". (more)

SalonCom is trying to sell the WELL again. It's under 3k (paying) members now! (more)

Stewart Brand reviews George Church and EdRegis' Regenesis about synthetic biology (NBIC). It is now possible to contemplate curing AIDS permanently; bringing extinct species back to life; devising microbes to manufacture complex materials and convert sunlight directly into fuel; heading off all viral disease; and even building “mirror life.” The technology is already far along. The book gives an inside report on the International Genetically Engineered Machine (IGEM) competition, where every fall for eight years teams of undergraduates have been creating novel micro-organisms (and ever more sophisticated DNA components [called](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bio Brick) Bio Brick-s); this year 190 student teams from 36 countries invented tiny new life forms with amazing capabilities. The prospects of synthetic biology are so exhilarating that many may find them frightening. Accordingly, practitioners in the field are at pains to discuss publicly how their technology works and all the ethical and hazardous dimensions of what they are working on and what they see coming on the horizon. Church’s book is an exciting exemplar of that outreach.

Chris Dent imagines MTC, which could be framed as "TiddlySpace without the Tiddly Wiki baggage". No immediate plans to create this thing, but thought I better write it down.

Wiki For CollaborationWare focuses mainly on shared document editing, which covers a lot of ground. But all unstructured data. For handling Structured Data, let's consider Wiki For GroupWare. (Update: there are now Structured Wiki engines.) (more)

Last week, we released an exclusive first look at TimothyFerriss’s The Four Hour Chef to help the author fight the Barnes And Noble boycott. By the end of today, Tim’s BitTorrent Bundle will have been downloaded over 300,000 times. The book’s Amazon page will have received an additional 85,000 visitors. And users like you will have made history: the first BitTorrent bestseller.

Back in 2010 Fred Wilson noted/supported a trend of Mobile First/Web Second development. The thing I like about these kinds of apps is they are with you all the time and can be used in moments of downtime. As such they lead to higher levels of engagement. I've always preferred Mobile Web models unless you really need closed-FatClient features: Off-Line use; strong interaction with phone hardware (beyond what PhoneGap will give you). (more)

Car Service dispatching service, aiming at Taxi-level pricing. (more)

http://www.everything2.com/ (more)

I just noticed that Twitter has some GeoTag data. Mostly from IPhone entries. (more)

Project A119, also known as "A Study of Lunar Research Flights", was a top-secret plan developed in the late 1950s by the United States Air Force. The aim of the project was to detonate a nuclear bomb on the Earths Moon to boost public morale in the UnitedStates after the Soviet Union took an early lead in the Space Race. The existence of the project was revealed in 2000 by a former executive at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Leonard Reiffel, who led the project in 1958. A young Carl Sagan was part of the team responsible for predicting the effects of a nuclear explosion in low gravity... The project was eventually canceled by the Air Force in January 1959, seemingly out of fear of a negative public reaction and the risk to the population should anything have gone wrong with the launch. Another factor, cited by project leader Leonard Reiffel, was the possible implications of the nuclear fallout for future lunar research projects and colonization... Later reports show that a corresponding Soviet project did indeed exist, but differed from the scenario reported in the press. Started in January 1958, it was part of a series of proposals under the codename "E". Project E-1 entailed plans to reach the Moon, while projects E-2 and E-3 involved sending a probe around the far side of the Moon to take a series of photographs of its surface. The final stage of the project, E-4, was to be a nuclear strike on the Moon as a display of force. As with the American plan, the E series of projects was canceled while still in its planning stages due to concerns regarding the safety and reliability of the launch vehicle.