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Reading roundup for Wed Aug 25: information overload, influencing voters with last-minute mobile ads, California’s nightmarish finances and more

Today, we’re reading how bite-sized pieces of entertainment (cell-phone games, quick news articles on mobile phones, podcasts while working out) are tiring our brains. Also see the New York Times’ excellent series on our age of information overload and what it’s doing to us.

Then, the city of Philadelphia now wants all bloggers in the city who enable advertising on their website to register as a business – and pay for a $300 license (also, a roundup of views on this). 

Finally, how a candidate for Florida Attorney General is using Google mobile ads to influence voters as they’re in the voting queue. (“…it’s really just the last ad people will see when they’re getting ready to vote…. It’s the last way some voters will look for info”).

In non-tech news, we’re looking at what’s become of the state of California’s finances. First, a Bloomberg report on how the state is ready to hand out IOUs instead of currency. The state’s revenues have been hammered by the downturn (especially the collapse of the real estate market and home foreclosures), but state Republicans have stubbornly refused to accede to Schwarzenegger’s proposal to increase taxes.

In anger, a professor of public policy at Berkeley writes to his students (from California) about how their generation has been swindled by the generation before them. (“..your parents and their parents lashed out at government (as though there were something else that could replace it) with tax limits, term limits, safe districts, throw-away-the-key imprisonment no matter the cost, smoke-and-mirrors budgeting, and a rule never to use the words taxes and services in the same paragraph”).