Twitter's Creation Myth needs updating to include NoahGlass (and others). veryone agrees that original inkling for Twitter sprang from Jack Dorsey's mind. Dorsey even has drawings of something that looks like Twitter that he made years before he joined Odeo. And Jack was obviously central to the Twitter team. But all of the early employees and Odeo investors we talked to also agree that no one at Odeo was more passionate about Twitter in the early days than Odeo's cofounder, NoahGlass. (more)

Mobile App version of Freemium. (more)

Stop SOPA! (more)

NetBook that runs Google Chrome OS. (more)

variation on Free Stuff, where core/lite product is Free, but "special" version costs money. (more)

anti-piracy bill - evil child of COICA - big example of War On The Net - initiated Nov'2011, killed Jan'2012 (more)

Pardon my Conspiracy Theory.... (more)

NGO founded Sept'2010(?) by Aaron Swartz and David Segal (more)

Nina Munk admired (Jeffrey Sachs), too. In 2006, she was commissioned by Vanity Fair to write a profile of him. She shadowed him for months as he launched the Millennium Villages Project, a bold experiment that would use a handful of African villages as his test cases. She was so inspired that she even thought of giving up journalism to join the cause. Instead she decided to write a book. “I wanted to write about Africans who live in extreme Poverty,” she explains. “I wanted their stories to be heard.” Above all, she told her publisher, she wanted to write a story of hope. The story she wound up writing is quite different. The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty is a devastating takedown of Mr. Sachs’s technocratic fantasies. It is essential reading for anyone who thinks that brilliant people with the right interventions can save the world. (Africa)

Amazon has bought Good Reads. Bummer (Monopoly). (more)

non-AlphaDog

French Libertarian (more)

Zed Shaw has moved from NYC to San Francisco. This is the most important part of my decision to move: Technology in San Francisco is infinitely better than in New York. The companies there get it, the hackers there are into it, and the things they work on are interesting. More importantly, the general feel of the technology scene in SF has almost zero douchebag in it... When it comes down to it, the primary difference between the companies who contacted me in SF vs. NYC is this: NYC prospects were looking for a badass/ninja/rockstar Beta Male "techie" employee to make them rich creating lame applications for giant Finance/Fashion/Marketing companies; SF prospects were looking for a partner (not-really-CoFounder) to get rich with them creating great products for customers. Now obviously the SF companies are all really looking for an employee to make them rich. The difference is in their approach and how they don't say it so blatantly or in such a gigantic douchebag way. Their touch was lighter, more collaborative, and definitely not with the attitude of me being some "Beta Male" to their "AlphaDog". That lack of cocky dickwad douchebag in the SF technology scene will be refreshing and interesting. (more)

EBook reader app with emphasis on Social Reading. (more)

EBook reader app for Android. (more)

Cory Doctorow imagines how Evil Google can get. No, I'm not looking at your searches," the man said in a mocking whine. "That would be unconstitutional. We see only the ads that show up when you read your mail and do your searching.... "Top of the light pole there; don't look," she said. "That's one of our Municipal Wifi access points. Wide-angle WebCam. Face away from it when you talk."... "We brokered a compromise with the DHS (Homeland Security)," she said, reaching for the milk. "They agreed to stop fishing through our search records, and we agreed to let them see what ads got displayed for users."... Once you get pulled aside for secondary at the border, you become a "person of interest" - -and they never, ever let up. They'll scan webcams for your face and gait. Read your mail. Monitor your searches."... "DontBeEvil? Come on, Greg. Our lobbying group is that same bunch of crypto-fascists that tried to Swift Boat John Kerry. We popped our evil cherry a long time ago."... "It started in China," she went on, finally. "Once we moved our servers onto the mainland, they went under Chinese jurisdiction."... Did you know if you have 15 Orkut (Social Networking/Meta Data) buddies, it's statistically certain that you're no more than three steps to someone who's contributed money to a "terrorist" cause?... "My parents left East Germany in '65. They used to tell me about the Stasi. The Secret Police would put everything about you in your file, if you told an unpatriotic joke, whatever. Whether they meant it or not, what Google has created is no different." And you thought 2007-05-01-CanadianBlockedFromUsDrugGoogle was scary.... (more)

Charlie Stross says: It seems to me that one of our besetting problems these days is that there's a shortage of Utopia-s on offer. (more)

Umair Haque has been using the word Evil to describe things ranging from FaceBook to the Credit Crisis 2008 Macro Pocalypse 2008-04-08-HaqueEdgeStrategy. (see also Credibility Crises) (more)

Tim Bray [asks](http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/03/23/Twenty Five) whether Java will be a 25-year language to replace COBOL. I vote for Python instead. See 2003-05-15-GrahamHundredYearLanguage (more)

CoFounder who does the stuff the Hacker doesn't. (more)