consolidated Retail trade - WalMart, [StarBucks], etc. (more)

B2C - selling products directly to consumers (more)

consumer electronics chain of stores

useful way to measure food production (Family Farm, Agriculture). See related PermaCulture, Aquaculture. (more)

Anil Dash notes the failure of the "POPS" model in NYC to create truly Public Space-s. He then makes the analogy to online spaces, e.g. Social Networking (FaceBook) and MicroBlogging (Twitter) services. But his conclusion is that we should challenge the big networks to actually change their policies to make some of our shared online spaces truly public. I Commented: isn't that the equivalent of challenging private building owners/developers to make their POPS spaces truly public, ergo a likely-to-fail approach? (more)

Apple Computer's free-standing physical Retail chain. (more)

Twitter is buying Posterous! (I've been increasingly annoyed by the 140char limit of Twitter. I wonder if this will relate.) (more)

Andrew Clear: Thoughts on Principles of Product Development Flow, Part 2 (more)

Gary Stager believes Learning happens best through Real experiences (Real World, D And D). *When building and programming robots, the kids are engineers – not contemplating a career for a dozen years later... Time is the rarest of currencies in school. Therefore, time should be focused on authentic experiences, not meta experiences... Affective qualities like collaboration, passion, curiosity, perseverance and teamwork are certainly desirable for teachers and students. However, these traits may be developed while engaged in real pursuits, even within the existing curriculum. All that is required is a meaningful project (PBL)... Dennis Littky tells the story of making Time Magazine because as a school principal he greeted students when they entered school in the morning. Have we lowered our expectations so much that knowing students is some sort of awesome systemic accomplishment? Humane, thoughtful, even casual interaction between teachers and students does not require an NSF grant or special class... (more)

Various trends in the Blogosphere make some people nervous (in 2003). What's involved? (more)

Name for Nick Denton's BlogBiz activities (c 2003).

see Publishing Industry

KurtGriffiths looks at a couple Python stacks vs NodeJs (for serving Web API-s). When it comes to deploying web APIs, my preference is to use something lean-n-mean for managing local sockets and WSGI workers, leaving macro Load Balancing, SSL termination, rate limiting and general HTTP heavy-lifting to the big guns (e.g., Sting Ray, NginX, H A Proxy, Stud)... Considering that UWsgi and GUnicorn are both Pre-Forking WSGI servers, and given other design similarities, I couldn't help but wonder how each would perform in the ring... with an optimized web framework and uWSGI on your side, it looks like Python apps can hold their own against Node.

production-quality WSGI server (more)

Pretty much done with v1 of Simplest Thing, time to put up on a Hosted Server. (more)

Jack Baty [has](http://baty.net/Posts/2013/02/Digital Recordkeeping.html) pushed himself to cut down to 3 Thinking Tools. TinderBox is my NoteBook. EverNote is my junk drawer. Devon Think is my filing cabinet.

Aaron Swartz killed himself, exactly 2 years after being arrested for the JSTOR mess. I never met him f2f, but so sad that someone who had accomplished so much and was clearly such an idealist couldn't make peace with the world. A victim of the War On The Net? Why was the Secret Service involved? (more)

The first interactive marine science Text-Book for the IPad is called Cachalot (French for “sperm whale”). It’s a free, app-based book that covers the latest science of marine megafauna like whales, dolphins and seals with expert-contributed text, images and open-access studies. Through an Open Source digital publication system called FLOW, the book also offers students Note Taking tools, Twitter integration, Wolfram Alpha search and even National Geographic “critter cam” videos. FLOW isn’t the first or most feature-rich publication tool, nor is Cachalot the slickest interactive textbook on the market (a market in which Apple just announced its interest). But DavidJohnston’s title is an easy-to-update, “good-enough” product that didn’t require millions of dollars and years of effort to create and manage. A cadre of Duke University computer science graduates, in fact, built the platform in one semester on a $5,000 budget. (more)

Everyone Is Special (more)

Clay Shirky sees College Education's dismissal of the Disruptive Innovation of MOOC-s to be similar to the Music Industry's discounting of MP3-s. Any sentence that begins “Let’s take Harvard as an example…” should immediately be followed up with “No, let’s not do that.”... The possibility MOOCs hold out is that the educational parts of education can be unbundled. MOOCs expand the audience for education to people ill-served or completely shut out from the current system, in the same way phonographs expanded the audience for symphonies to people who couldn’t get to a concert hall, and PCs expanded the users of computing power to people who didn’t work in big companies... Open systems are open. For people used to dealing with institutions that go out of their way to hide their flaws, this makes these systems look terrible at first. (more)