Derek Powazek wonders If Social Networking is Not a Profitable business. Either advertiser interest wanes (FlickR), or we coast on our investment (Twitter, TumblR), or we give in and let the advertisers run the show (pretty much everyone else)... What if we all realized that social networks are a societal good (at least as good as a local Alt Weekly Newspaper) but not necessarily good businesses?.. What if we designed a social network to be small, self-supporting, and independent from the outset? How would it look, work, and feel? I bet it would come out looking nothing like the ones we’ve got now.

ReST/Declarative evangelist (more)

Discovered this subculture at HOPE. (more)

Paul Boutin on DIY BioWar for Dummies. Experts used to think that distributing a killer germ would require a few vats and a crop duster. Brent and I have a different idea. We'll infect a suicidal patient zero and hand him a round-the-world plane ticket. But we need a dangerous virus - smallpox, maybe. We won't be able to steal a sample; we'll have to make our own... Enough raw material to build, say, the Small Pox genome would take just over $200,000. The real cost of villainy is in overhead. Even with the ready availability of equipment, you still need space, staff, and time. Brent guesses he would need a couple million dollars to whip up a batch of smallpox from scratch. No need for state sponsors or stolen top-secret germ samples... Three years ago, Eckard Wimmer headed a team of researchers at SUNY Stony Brook that made live Pol Io virus from scratch, part of a Defense Department project to prove the threat of synthetic bioweapons... Every hands-on gene hacker I polled during my project estimated they could synthesize smallpox in a month or two. I remember that game from my engineering days, so I mentally scale their estimates using the old software manager's formula: Double the length, then move up to the next increment of time. That gives us two to four years - assuming no one has already started working

processing of passing network requests through a single point, which passes them along to one out of a cluster of ultimate servers (more)

Political science professor at George Washington University. (more)

Teen Hacker, UnSchooling advocate, RDF advocate (and advisor to Creative Commons). (more)

rules that protect owners/investors of a BigCo from being punished for its actions (including, from paying off its debt if the corporation runs out of money) (Liability) (more)

Aaron Swartz on what it takes to provide decent To-Do List software. Some interesting ideas. (more)

OReilly invitation-only Hacker UnConference (more)

Aaron Swartz was arrested and indicted for downloading millions of academic articles from JSTOR via an MIT account. Has not never distributed those documents to anyone else. (more)

Just (re-?)discovered the Book A Futurists Manifesto collection of essays assembled by Hugh McGuire and Brian O Leary. It was created in Press Books, and is available free online, and as paid EBook and Printed Book. Parts were released in 2011, and other parts more recently. I'm wondering if it's worth $10 just to be able to save highlights. (more)

OLPC has developed the "Xo Learning System" which runs on top of Android and will be licensed to other Tablet makers. Sakar/Vivitar has the exclusive right to sell the XO Tablet to leading U.S.retailers for both in-store and online sales - they will be selling through WalMart, among others, "this year". Every child has dreams and XO Learning directs the child’s passion, creativity and energy for these dreams into a new user interface that has 12 dreams. Such dreams include “I want to be” an artist, a musician and a scientist. Each dream features a rich learning experience and applications, books, games and videos that allow children ages 3 to 12 to naturally explore their dreams and learn at the same time. Content within a dream has three levels, so as the child advances in his/her learning, there is no need to pay for additional apps or content. Every dream features a “hero”, a real person who personifies the dream. I hope/assume these tablets will also run Sugar and Nell. Also, can these software bits be downloaded by a regular Android Tablet owner? I Commented to ask. (more)

In response to some people accusing the Occupy Wall Street protesters of rich-envy, Matt Taibbi lists Bail-Out-s and other sweet deals the banks get. We have a massive police force in America that outside of lower Manhattan prosecutes crime and imprisons citizens with record-setting, factory-level efficiency, eclipsing the incarceration rates of most of history's more notorious police states and communist countries. But the bankers on Wall Street don't live in that heavily-policed country. There are maybe 1000 SEC agents policing that sector of the economy, plus a handful of FBI agents. There are nearly that many police officers stationed around the polite crowd at Zucotti park. (more)

Am writing some Python code to synch my Private Wiki notes with the SimpleNote cloud. See 2012-07-13-SimplenoteAndNotationalvelocityDumpingLocalNotes for background. (more)

super-high level of Intelligence or Talent? (more)

Joi Ito will be the next head of the MIT MediaLab, despite being a Drop Out! (more)

I think Wiki For CollaborationWare is hugely important. It's the right HyperText repository to document ideas/issues, their resolutions/changes, and track progress. (more)

Marc Andreessen says Software Is Eating The World: 2011-08-21-AndreessenSoftwareEatingTheWorld (more)

I do most of my online reading-discovery through RSS. Currently through Google Reader. With lots being read on my Archos70 Tablet, with GReader synching to Google Reader. (more)