The point is that my blog post drove a lot of value to Amazon that is not totally captured by the 40 purchases of Gretchen's book or even the 118 transactions that were done by those visitors in the past two days. The value of that link, in my opinion, is significantly greater than $25.20 and as a result bloggers and other users of affiliate services are getting under compensated for the value they are providing.

From Affiliate Marketing Undervalues The Link

2010 will mark the beginning of the end of US dominance of the web. I am not predicting the decline of the US Internet market, but rather its eclipse in size and overall influence by other centers of web economies. In essence, this is not an Internet prediction, but an economic one, as the web is simply a reflection of the world, and the world is clearly moving away from a US-dominated model.

Facebook's privacy pullback isn't just outrageous; it's a landmark turning point for the social network. Facebook has blundered before, but the latest changes are far more calculated. The company has, in short, turned evil.

Its new privacy policy have turned the social network inside out: millions of people have signed up because Facebook offers a sense of safety. For the last five years — as long as you're relatively careful about who you accept as your friends — what you do and say on Facebook for the most part stays on Facebook. Katie Couric's daughter first posted pictures of her famous mom dancing silly in 2006, but it took three years for them to leak to us. (Thank you tipsters!) But virtually overnight and without a clear warning, Facebook has completely reversed those user expectations. Their new privacy settings amount to making anything you post on Facebook to be public, unless you go to great lengths to keep your info private.

MySpace, Facebook, and many other businesses have realized that they can give away the tools of production but maintain ownership over the resulting products. One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few. It's a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing, not in making money, and, besides, the economic value of each of their individual contributions is trivial. It's only by aggregating those contributions on a massive scale - on a web scale - that the business becomes lucrative. To put it a different way, the sharecroppers operate happily in an attention economy while their overseers operate happily in a cash economy. In this view, the attention economy does not operate separately from the cash economy; it's simply a means of creating cheap inputs for the cash economy.

From Sharecropping the long tail

Wales speaks a language of corporate collectivism that would not be out of place in Rand's novels. Hyperbolically, it's where docile workers express joy that wonderful capitalists have provided the means of production, enabling glorious collective enterprises such as a laissez-faire market. This sounds strange to people who don't know about esoteric business-worshipping ideologies, and so mistakenly assume that phrases like "collective action" automatically indicate communism. Just think of a viewpoint which regards a powerless proletariat labouring to produce wealth for owners as being the highest social achievement, and the connections should be clearer.

Beware corporate executives posing as social visionaries. The hype may be about the fulfillment of human potential, but the reality is the exploitation of digital sharecropping.

From Wikipedia isn't about human potential, whatever Wales says

"Does art serve no purpose if it cannot serve an explicit agenda like “social justice?” In recent years, we have seen public service announcements by celebrities touting the benefits of arts education in elementary schools because it supposedly helps make better mathematicians or physicists out of children. Perhaps the point ought to be that arts education makes for better artists. Perhaps we ought to stop being so apologetic about art and not keep trying to wrap its trembling shoulders with that raggedy shawl of self-righteousness and instead advocate for public school funding that incorporates all aspects of education. Perhaps we ought to accept the fact that artists may produce work that is disinterested in social change, and put some of the burden back on the state to effect the kind of social change we want."

From, We, on the left, may not have the billionaires of the right via @adelenieves and @mamitamala

Their clear and open intent is to do all they can, however they can, to sabotage the new administration (and the economy to boot). They want failure. Even now. Even after the last eight years. Even in a recession as steeply dangerous as this one. There are legitimate debates to be had; and then there is the cynicism and surrealism of total political war. We now should have even less doubt about what kind of people they are. And the mountain of partisan vitriol Obama will have to climb every day of the next four or eight years.

We give Israel over $3 billion a year, almost automatically. The country has 7 million people. The US government gives Israel $428 per year per per Israeli. For comparison, recall the uproar in the US when the President gave tax rebates of $300 to the American citizens who paid the taxes in the first place.

Yes, America will get involved, and America should get involved. We bought the rights to meddle in Israel's affairs. We bought Israel the military they are using to attack others, and the United States shares the blame for the attacks from the victim's standpoint, even though the Us opposes those attacks. If Israel doesn't appreciate our involvement, they can return the money. I won't hold my breath.

[...] the press was supposed to be in the business of going out to find the real authorities and reporting back to what they said. This is why I always cringe when reporters call themselves experts. No, reporters are expert only at finding experts. Now to put this back in Twitter terms: Reporters don't have authority. They have attention and possibly influence because they have so many followers. But that doesn't give them authority.

How weird a year was it? Here's how weird:

• O.J. actually got convicted of something.
• Gasoline hit $4 a gallon -- and those were the good times.
• On several occasions, "Saturday Night Live" was funny.
• There were a few days there in October when you could not completely rule out the possibility that the next Treasury secretary would be Joe the Plumber.
• Finally, and most weirdly, for the first time in history, the voters elected a president who -- despite the skeptics who said such a thing would never happen in the United States-- was neither a Bush nor a Clinton.