“… It’s long been our belief that REST and Roy Fielding has been palling around with Hypermedia. He barely denies it. But, my friends, let me tell you that no washed up PhD dissertation will dictate our request/response. He says it, in his own words – he talks about ‘constraints’, he toys with the idea of a transfer of ‘state’. My friends, in these times of economic crisis we need less State involvement, not more. REST doesn’t understand. Let’s give state transition back to the hard working people of the USA. Enough with this hypermedia socialism. … ‘For the bureaucrat, the world is a mere object to be manipulated by him.’ – Karl Marx …” – more

Congratulations Mimi!

Thomson-Reuters raises the stakes and then calls the bluff of the Academy.

“For my part, I’m going to refuse to use Reuters’ software in future, strongly discourage graduate students from buying EndNote, and try to get this message out to my colleagues too (at least those of them who aren’t using Zotero or some BibTex client already). If I taught any classes where Thomson printed relevant textbooks, I would be strongly inclined not to use these texts either. I encourage you to do the same”

It will be interesting to see if they can organize an sufficently vigorous response.  The Academy has quite a number of extremely expensive suppliers.  Somebody once said in my hearing “… for whom we act as tax collectors.”

Finally actionable advise on how individuals can address the current market turmoil:

If you had purchased £1000 of Northern Rock shares one year ago it  would now be worth £4.95, with HBOS, earlier this week your £1000  would have been worth £16.50, £1000 invested in XL Leisure would now  be worth less than £5, but if you bought £1000 worth of Tennents Lager  one year ago, drank it all, then took the empty cans to an aluminium  re-cycling plant, you would get £214. So based on the above statistics  the best current investment advice is to drink heavily and re-cycle. — here

Sometimes there is too much news.  The southeastern US is suffering from serious shortages of petrol.  I wonder what it would take to get them to lower the speed limit; organize some ride sharing; provide some discounts on public transportation. I’m reminded of how in the depths of the recent and horiffic drought in that same region they were unable to organize a collective response to lower thier consumption.  Small government at work.

Clay Shirky spends a few pages (p286..290) in his book digging into how as it becomes easier to communicate with others value of each message declines.  After a while everything looks like spam.  He mentions some examples of ways to work around that.  If a few thousand people show up for a political rally, if fans send a few tons of peanuts to the TV network, if activists send flowers the signal value is restored.

As far as I know there is not a good name for this.  “Hard to forge signal” might be good name, but clearly somebody needs to come up with a good tag line for this.

All of which suggests to me that there is money to be made in a service that creates hard to forge signals for a cost.  Such services exist.  There are plenty.    You can go to AbeBooks for example, order a book and send it to your recipient.  You can go to postful.com and send them a color postcard or a letter.  You can send tiny amounts of money thru paypal. There are quite a number of Facebook applications which allow you to spend a bit of money and tie it to your communications.  It’s interesting that there is money to be made in this.  Campaigns managers could use more services like the ones that helped the campaign to save the TV show Jericho, services to do the fufillment.  Online petition sites could hold money in escrow until the issue is resolved.

Of course this is what those racks of gift cards are about in stores; and why some junk mail includes a gift or even a dollar bill.

I’d love more examples or exsiting services you can use to address this example and ideas for new services.