"In our opinion, Valdes nails it on the head. Twitter has raised tens of millions of dollars that allows them to focus on building the product. They do not need to rush into a business model, especially with their eye-popping growth. Prematurely implementing a business model could upset millions of users and put a halt to Twitter’s success quickly."

"While demurrage is a natural feature of private commodity money it has at various times been deliberately incorporated into currency systems as a disincentive against hoarding of money, as well as to achieve other perceived benefits. In particular, with regards to long term investment financing it has the effect of changing the dynamics of net present value (NPV) calculations. All else being equal, a currency system with demurrage places an increased emphasis on the value of long term returns on an investment. As such it may create an incentive to invest in initiatives which offer more in the way of longer-term returns."

"Here's how it works: I'm going to donate a bunch of money, but I want random people on the Internet to decide where it goes."

"But the point, I hope, is clear.
The old means of control don’t work.
The old categories don’t work.
The old ways of thinking won’t work.
We all need to come to terms with that.

Fundamentally, the old media won’t control news dissemination in the future. And organisations can’t control access using old forms of accreditation any more."

"You may hope that this bone-headed decision will push millions of people into the warm embrace of Opera, Safari, Chrome, and Firefox, but it probably won’t. Most people, especially most working people, don’t have a choice about their operating system or browser. Ditto their corporate email platform."

"This piece nicely argues that it's not the loss in income that matters to most Americans (we can adjust) but the loss of certainty. We can always belt-tighten and money only makes you so happy (no rise in happiness above $20k per capita per year–the world over), but this sense that we don't know what's coming next in the economy is truly paralyzing."

"The State, South Carolina's dominant newspaper, had a collection of (barely printable) emails between Sanford and his honey six months ago, and didn't publish. Remind me again why we need newspapers? Oh, yeah, I remember: to protect us from stuff we don't really need to know."

"We need more than the passive ideal of easy access to published knowledge; we need the active ideal of improved methodologies for advancing knowledge. In the Enlightenment Francis Bacon had the boldness to call for a Novum Organum, a "new instrument" of knowledge (in contrast to Aristotle's old Organum); similarly, we must devise new instruments of knowledge to match our cyber environment. Ours is a knowledge revolution on par with the introduction of empirical research itself or even the codification of the scientific method. But are we conceptualizing and establishing the new methodologies to the same degree that we are fighting for the free circulation of traditional materials? We are not. That's why we need Scholarly Inquiry Optimization."

"See, this is the problem with Amazon's Kindle—even they can't tell their customers exactly how the DRM works. They blame the publishers, but we're not sure that publishers have ever been given adequate information either. (We know the press hasn't.) From what we understand, publishers are contractually forbidden to share any information about their licensing agreements with Amazon, which creates a convenient way for Amazon to redirect all inquiries into a black hole of "it's the publisher's fault.""

"Welcome to Al Zimmermann's Programming Contests. You've entered an arena where demented computer programmers compete for glory and for some cool prizes.

I run one or two contests per year. Each contest asks that you come up with your best solutions to a set of related computationally intensive problems. Although I speak of "programming contests", technically you don't need to write a computer program to enter. You can enter whether you use a computer, manual calculations, or tea leaves to solve the problems. You send me solutions, not programs."