• Post-Medium Publishing. [Paul Graham]
• What if People Don’t Take the Bait to Go Paperless? [New York Times]
• Ours, Theirs and the Bloggers’ Zones: Compatible, Yet Different. [Nieman]
• Can You Trust Crowd Wisdom? [Technology Review-MIT]
• Who Controls Data About Public Transportation? [EFF]
• The People’s Republic of Google. [I,Cringely]
• A Day In The Life Of An Information Worker. [Forrester Research]
• Will the web mean the end of the contemplative mind? [BBC Digital Revolution]

Non-linearity of technology adoption. [cdixon.org] Great piece about complement effects and technology adoption by Chris Dixon. I’ve learned more about business, investing, and entrepreneurship from VC bloggers than perhaps I could have from any MBA program. Okay that’s a stretch, but I heave learned a great deal from investors like Chris Dixon, Fred Wilson, and Brad Feld. And if you want to throw in the kitchen sink (as I did) check out Larry Cheng’s Global VC Blog Directory.

What would you want to tell Washington DC about startups? [Lessons Learned] Eric Ries hit the nail on the head in suggesting health care reform on his short list of entrepreneur-friendly policies. We have an option with COBRA but insurance premiums are too high, and the fear, if not the risk of losing your insurance in pursuit of a career as an entrepreneur might be too high. This is especially true if you have children or a pre-existing medical condition.

DNS, the ultimate in number portability. [BitWorking] There are many added benefits in using third party SN services and blogs (ease of use, built in community, they’re free etc…) in place of a self hosted blog, but what happens when those services die? What if your favorite service gets acquired? What do you do when your social network  devolves into a kluge of messy micro-services? What if your service unilaterally cancels your account? Joe Gregorio acknowledges the fact that we rent our domain names, but consider the following statement “The nice part about owning a domain name is the utility. You don’t just get email portability, but all the services that you can hang off of a domain name are subject to the same level of redirection.” How true.

The Future of Reporting. [Due Diligence] Tim Oren makes a number of refreshingly insightful observations about the changing news reporting industry. You’ll enjoy this article. It’s also worth reading Google developing a micropayment platform and pitching newspapers: “‘Open’ need not mean free” from from Neiman Journalism Lab. The title says it all. A partnership in the making? The irony.

Music and Money. [tbray.org] A thoughtful piece covering recorded music, the concert experience, subscriptions, radio, and yes…patronage! Much like the the news reporting industry, the on-going trials and tribulations of the music recording industry are laughable. Further, record executives have been trying to figure this out for the past ten years. The industry is dead. We’ve given them enough time. It’s simple. I love music, I want to own it not rent it, I want to share it without DRM, and I want it portable. For that I will pay. While we’re on the subject it’s worth reading Anil Dash’s piece The Day the Record Industry Died. His blog reads like a good book. Enjoy.

Great news about RSSCloud from Dave Winer’s camp today. ReadWriteWeb: “All blogs on the WordPress.com platform and any WordPress.org blogs that opt-in will now make instant updates available to any RSS readers subscribed to a new feature called RSSCloud. There is currently only one RSS aggregator that supports RSSCloud, Dave Winer’s brand-new reader River2. That will probably change very soon.”

If you are an avid supporter of RSS, as I am, and perused the diatribes from tech news pundits stating “RSS is Dead” you probably found yourself struck with the sudden urge to chime in on the debate. Or perhaps do a bit of finger pointing following today’s news. But was this really a debate to begin with?

Twitter, the micro-messaging service, has become far more transcendent than we could have imagined a few years ago. Look no further than the activity on Twitter during the Iranian election which, along with coverage of other real-time news events, further legitimized Twitter as a real-time news delivery service. What’s more, the news is powered by people – bootstraps on the ground so to speak.

It seems almost overnight that Twitter went from pop culture phenomenon touted by the likes of @APlusK and @Oprah, to the streets of Tehran, and from IAmdiddy to the very real-time murder of Neda Agha-Soltan. We witnessed the outrage in Iran first hand, and in turn expressed our own outrage, empathy, and sorrow surrounding that awful event, in very real time, on an international scale.

During the days and weeks following the Iranian election, Twitter was the only place to get real-time news updates from Iran. 24 hour news organizations reported the news from Twitter. The Associated Press, Reuters, the New York Times and RSS simply could not keep pace with the flow of information reported on Twitter. There is no debating that point. And with that in mind, in defense of punditocracy, as Anil Dash so eloquently put it, the pundits were 100% right. RSS was dead. If you cared about real-time news, you weren’t looking to RSS as your primary method of delivery. Now all of that is about to change.

The actions of Wordpress today ensure that, in the very near future, the position those very pundits took will be tested to the happy tune of 7.5 million blogs. That assumes of course, they wont do an about face. After all, with the real-time web, our collective memory is rather short-lived.

Congrats to Dave Winer.

• Tease! Tease! Tease! [Dave Winer] 9.7.09
• RSS in the Clouds. [Wordpress News] 9.7.09
• WordPress Just Made Millions of Blogs Real-Time With RSSCloud. [Read Write Web] 9.7.09
• Say Cheese. [Tech Crunch] 9.5.09
• RSS Is Alive And Well [AVC] 9.4.09
• Oh, RSS Is Definitely Dead Now: Feedburner CEO Dick Costolo To Become Twitter COO. [Tech Crunch] 9.2.09
• RSS: A good idea at the time but there are better ways now. [ZDNET] 8.25.09

Dad’s Rants Become a Twitter Hit. [Wall Street Journal] Let’s start with some fun. This one is absolutely hilarious! Daily quotes from Dad Says on Twitter. “Don’t touch the bacon, it’s not done yet. You let me handle the bacon, and i’ll let you handle…what ever it is you do. I guess nothing.” - (NSFW) @shitmydadsays.

Storystreaming and the Future of News – A Case Study on the Austin Statesman Project. [Lifestream Blog] Interesting experiment by Austin newspaper The Statesman by soliciting photo submissions from readers using Posterous to help document the summer heat wave. News is participatory. The experience is shared.

As Internet Turns 40, Future Keeps Net Pioneer Guessing. [PC World] It was Sept. 2, 1969 when computer scientists at UCLA created a network connection between two computers. They set up the first node of what has become today’s Internet. Sharon Gaudin recounts our brief history with Leonard Kleinrock. Great story.

Forrester’s Annual Update on North Americans’ Technology Uptake: Americans Continue To Adopt Digital Lifestyle. [Forrester] If you consider Forrester a trusted source than it’s definitely worth checking out their Benchmark Overview post about consumer’s technology adoption and attitudes. It’s a snapshot upsell for the pricey $1749 report but worth reviewing. Oddly Forrester’s eReader report got more traction in the media this week.

Intelligently Filtering Journalists’ (Crowd) Sources. [Wikinomics] Great quote from the article written by Mark Drapeau (I’m a huge fan). “In a world where transparency is the new objectivity, audiences increasingly want to get information from accessible, authentic, gonzo subject matter experts.” It’s also worth reading his O’Reilly piece Bantamweight Publishing in an Easily Plagiarised World.

Ten Characteristics of Great Investors. [Only Once] In a follow up to Fred Wilson’s (AVC) post Ten Characteristics of Great Companies, Matt Blumberg, a technology and marketing entrepreneur in New York City, listed 10 characteristics of great investors. My personal favorite. “Great investors show up for meetings on time and don’t spend the meeting using their smartphone.”

A Casualty of the Technology Revolution: ‘Locational Privacy’ [New York Times] If you have ever considered your privacy rights while using your smartphone, metrocard, or gym membership and you believe that we should use cryptography and anonymization to protect locational privacy, as New York Times writer Adam Cohen suggests, then you’ll love this article.

The future of news in 4 dimensions: Charting new kinds of news orgs. [Nieman Journalism Lab] The economic crisis in the news reporting industry is well documented. In this post C.W. Anderson discusses new kinds of news organizations. As an aside, look at Yahoo and the number of journalists they’re hiring.

100 Voices 100 Days. [UK in USA] This is worth following. In the 100 days before international climate change negotiations open in Copenhagen, 100 Voices 100 Days will highlight the voices of 100 people who feel action must be taken to prevent dangerous climate change. Great concept, check out Eco-vending.

Does less evening Internet mean Europeans lead better lives? [Ars Technica] Interesting question. I was surprised to see a rather precipitous drop (compared to the US) in internet usage by Europeans after 8:00PM. However, as Nate Anderson points out, I’m not convinced you can quantify a “better life” by less use of the internet during evening hours.

• Privacy in Online Behavioral Tracking and Targeting – It’s Time to Protect Consumers. [EFF] The Electronic Frontier Foundation can do no wrong in my book. EFF and a coalition of other consumer and privacy groups called on Congress today to protect Americans’ privacy from invasive online behavioral tracking and targeting.

• The Internet has not transformed civic engagement… yet. [Ars Technica] Best quote of the day by Matthew Lasar of Ars Technica. “If there is any subject that optimists and pessimists love to bang heads over, it’s the Internet. To follow the experts, we’re either on the cyber-road to utopia or going to alt-hell in an iPhone app handbasket, depending on what day of the week it is.”

• The Library of the Commons: Rise of the Infodex. [O'Reilly] Good read, fresh perspective, arguably tough to implement.

• Help Me Investigate is a platform that helps users organize and pursue questions of public interest that they think should be investigated. I haven’t tried the service yet (I don’t have anything worth investigating right now), but a number of submissions seem like straight up Q&A. Never the less HMI is an interesting service. We’ve seen structured investigative crowdsourcing projects work well in the past – i.e.  The Guardian’s crowdsourcing MP expense report project.

• Internet providers seek low broadband bar. [Reuters] A conservative definition of “broadband” is nothing more than watered-down standards. ISPs arguing for minimum speeds that are substantially below many other nations. How about that.

Newsworthy:

• eBay Inc. Signs Definitive Agreement to Sell Skype in Deal Valuing Communications Business at $2.75 Billion. [Yahoo Finance]
  Coverage: New York Times, Silicon Alley Insider, VoIP & Gadgets Blog, Skype Journal, GigaOM.

• Today’s Gmail Problems. [Gmail Blog] Gmail went down today. Tough times indeed.
  Coverage: TechCrunch, CNET News, Technologizer, Data Center Knowledge.

• Global Search Market Draws More than 100 Billion Searches per Month. [Comscore]
• In Defense of the Punditocracy. [Anil Dash]
• It’s not AT&T. It’s not Apple. It’s just Twitter. [Stardust Global Ventures]
• Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On. [Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle]
• Wikipedia Looks Hard at Its Culture. [New York Times]
• Lines are blurring in strange new world of journalism. [Philip Meyer]

Shared Items

The blogosphere is up in arms on this one. If you’re not familiar with Cybersecurity Bill S. 773 it would permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a “cybersecurity emergency”. Reporter Declan McCullagh (CNET) obtained an excerpt of the 55-page revised draft stated:

“The new version would allow the president to “declare a cybersecurity emergency” relating to “non-governmental” computer networks and do what’s necessary to respond to the threat. Other sections of the proposal include a federal certification program for “cybersecurity professionals,” and a requirement that certain computer systems and networks in the private sector be managed by people who have been awarded that license.”

Aside of course from the rather alarming tone of S.773 and the potential impact on the private-sector, what interest me online debate surrounding the proposed bill. Comments are worth your perusal on this one.

• S.773 revised draft excerpt (via CNET).
• S.773 draft, referred to Senate committee.

News Articles:

• Bill would give president emergency control of Internet. [CNET]
• Senate Proposal Gives President Authority Over Internet. [CBS News]
• Proposed law would give White House ‘cybersecurity emergency’ powers over the Internet. [CrunchGear]
• On Cyber Bill, Skepticism Warranted — But Nuance Needed. [The Atlantic]
• Bill would give President emergency control of Internet in his dreams. [VentureBeat]
• US Senate cyber security bill sparks debate, “internet takeover” fears. [BoingBoing]
• Wouldn’t The Last Thing We Want During A ‘Cybersecurity Emergency’ Be For The Gov’t To Take Over Private Networks? [TechDirt]

Daniel Jacobson and Rob Bole presented NPR’s API to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) explaining what API’s are, why they are useful, and the particular reasons why NPR built the ones that they have. What’s amazing about the presentation is the growth numbers, with nearly 30M requests since launch and API activity almost doubling between June and July ‘09. Astounding, congrats NPR.

• No More Beta Codes: Lazyfeed Is Open for Everyone. [Louis Gray]
• Hyperdistribution. [Buzzmachine]
• New Study Finds Grassroots Enterprise Social Media Often Works Best. [Craig Newmark]
• Interview With William Patry: Understanding How The Copyright Debate Got Twisted. [TechDirt]
• GooseGrade Uses Crowdsourcing To Edit Website Copy. [Tech Crunch]
• The Government and the Web. [NYT]
• Arterial, crowdsourced traffic info comes to Google Maps. [Ars Technica]
• Newspapers find a new way to monetize their journalists. [Neiman Journalism Lab]

Shared Items

• Truly social data. [FluidDB]
• Marching through quicksand. [Lessons Learned]
• Time to retire the term “blogger”? [Scott Rosenberg, Wordyard]
• Is Being In the Mobile Biz License to Ignore the Internet? [John Battelle]
• Why Free Thought Is Sexy But We Hate It. [How to Split an Atom]
• How Whole Foods boycott groups are using social media to organize. [Bloggasm]

Shared Items