• This site is a curation of observations about what I can best call the intersection of tech and life. Yes, give me a better term.
  
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How the AOL-Time Warner Merger Went So Wrong (NYT): Retrospectives from people closely involved with the deal, including Steve Case of AOL and Jerry Levin of Time Warner.

Nil by mouth (Robert Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times): The film critic can no longer eat, drink or speak: “So that’s what’s sad about not eating. The loss of dining, not the loss of food. It may be personal, but for, unless I’m alone, it doesn’t involve dinner if it doesn’t involve talking. The food and drink I can do without easily. The jokes, gossip, laughs, arguments and shared memories I miss.”

‘Conversations with the Internet’ – Biz Stone of Twitter (The Rumpus):  “We realized we weren’t really using Odeo, we weren’t investing our own time creating podcasts. We were building a tool that was a great idea for some other people. That’s a dangerous way to go because if you don’t actually use it yourself and love it, then you aren’t going to be as fully invested in it from the start. That’s what leads you to doing side projects.”

Posthumous Hosting and Digital Culture (Zeldman): “…there’s gold among the dross, and there are web publications that we would do well to preserve for historical purposes. We are not clairvoyants, so we cannot say which fledgling, presently little-read web publications will matter to future historians. Thus logic and the cultural imperative urge us to preserve them all. But how?”

We have seen the future, and it doesn’t belong to you (The Register): “The coming decade is shaping up to be one in which we, as consumers and citizens, will see our control over choice and privacy eroded by business and government. Some of the effects will be mere annoyances, but others will transform society. And not for the better.”

Assassins of the Mind (Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair): “We live now in a climate where every publisher and editor and politician has to weigh in advance the possibility of violent Muslim reprisal.”

Is aviation security mostly for show? (Bruce Schneier, CNN): “When people are scared, they need something done that will make them feel safe, even if it doesn’t truly make them safer. Politicians naturally want to do something in response to crisis, even if that something doesn’t make any sense.”

The Messiah Complex (David Brooks, NYT): “It rests on the stereotype that white people are rationalist and technocratic while colonial victims are spiritual and athletic. It rests on the assumption that nonwhites need the White Messiah to lead their crusades. It rests on the assumption that illiteracy is the path to grace. It also creates a sort of two-edged cultural imperialism. Natives can either have their history shaped by cruel imperialists or benevolent ones, but either way, they are going to be supporting actors in our journey to self-admiration.”

My life offline (Aaron Swartz): “The usual sense that I’m never really here, I’m always worried about the million things around the corner: a todo list that goes for pages, a thousand emails to respond to, hundreds of blog posts to read, twenty open tabs, a dozen IM windows, a text message to answer, a Twitter stream to catch up on. I never used to think about these things as a benefit or a distraction — I didn’t think about them at all; they were just how life online was. This was the era of multitasking and I was its child.”

How to Destroy the Book (Cory Doctorow): Transcript of a speech on copyright at the National Reading Summit in Canada. Part Two of the speech is here.

The Big Zero (Paul Krugman, NYT): “…it was a decade of zero gains for stocks, even without taking inflation into account. Remember the excitement when the Dow first topped 10,000, and best-selling books like “Dow 36,000” predicted that the good times would just keep rolling? Well, that was back in 1999. Last week the market closed at 10,520.”

Philip Greenspun writes about what politico-economic system could replace the (flawed) one it has in place today: “…the biggest question that Americans grappled with was what kind of economic system would be best. Whatever system prevailed through 2008 (see below for my characterization) was obviously flawed. Just as in the Great Depression, this opened the door to considerations of alternatives.”

For India and China, a Climate Clash With Their Own Destiny (NYT): “India and China are encouraged to balance their internal duties as developing countries with their external responsibilities as emerging giants. They are told to short-circuit history, to avoid tactics for growth that the West now sees as errors, to assume obligations that rich lands took on only when they became much wealthier.”

The meaning of Open (Google’s Official Blog): An email to Google’s Product Mgrs from the SVP of Prod. Mgmt. “…you are building something that will outlast all of us, and none of us can imagine all the ways Google will grow and touch people’s lives. In that way, we are like our colleague Vint Cerf, who didn’t know exactly how many networks would want to be part of this “Internet” so he set the default to open. Vint certainly got it right. I believe we will too.”

Why banks are suddenly repaying their TARP funds (Newsweek): “From the outset, healthy banks were eager to get out from under the TARP because they wanted to avoid discussions about appropriate levels of executive compensation.”

Mag+, a concept video on the future of digital magazines: “The design has an eye to how paper magazines can re-use their editorial work without having to drastically change their workflow or add new teams. Maybe if the form is clear enough then every mag, no matter how niche, can look gorgeous, be super easy to understand, and have a great reading experience.”

Is the American Dream over?: David Brooks and Gail Collins of the NYT debate if the current crisis is an indication that American Life is inherently unsustainable, or merely another manifestation of the problem of inequality of skills.

PayPal Taps the Developer Community to Build Next-Gen Payment Apps: How PayPal is extending its APIs to let developers build payment into web & mobile apps for the future.

How Apple’s internal organization is different because of the CEO’s obsession with great design. Inputs from senior Apple alumni.

Morgan Stanley’s Mobile Internet Report Dec 09 [PDF]: 92-page ‘key themes’. Noteworthy: the ‘mobile internet’ could be bigger than the ‘desktop internet’ in 5 years.

A car and a bicycle: John Gruber on Chrome OS – “The idea of a computer that does a lot less — leaving out even things you consider essential, because you can still do those things on your other, primary computer — is liberating. That’s the opportunity, and that’s the idea behind Chrome OS and Litl and even Android and iPhone OS.”

On The Shortness of Life: An Introduction to Seneca: Tim Ferriss presents a translation of Lucius Seneca’s letter – ‘It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested.”

In defense of readers: “Despite the ubiquity of reading on the web, readers remain a neglected audience. Much of our talk about web design revolves around a sense of movement: users are thought to be finding, searching, skimming, looking… [w]e concern ourselves with their travel and participation—how they move from page to page, who they talk to when they get there—but forget the needs of those whose purpose is to be still”.

Local Governments Offer Data to Miners: “A big pile of city crime reports is not all that useful. But what if you could combine that data with information on bars, sidewalks and subway stations to find the safest route home after a night out?” I can imagine several ways in which this sort of open government combined with mobile access could improve everyday urban life – even in India.

Social Media Implications for business: IBM’s Irving Wladawsky-Berger recounts the highlights of a panel discussion. The portion about old media’s reaction to the new media ‘revolution’ is particularly notable.

The death of the URL by Chris Messina: “…a future without URLs and without the infinite organicity of the web frightens me. It’s not that I know what we’ll lose by removing this artifact of one of the most generative periods in history… the ability for anyone to mint a new [URL] and then propagate it is what makes the web so resilient, so empowering, and so interesting”

Open as in water by Paul Buccheit: “The basic pattern of openness is that better access to information and better systems lead to better decisions and better living. This general principal is broadly accepted, but we’re just now discovering that it also applies to the minutiae of our lives.”

After Cheney: NYT Magazine’s profile of Vice President Biden. Conjecture is that with resposibility for cleaning up the US’s Iraq mess, Biden could be the second-most powerful VP after Cheney.