[Graph] The music industry during the past 30 years

[TED] Brilliant talk - Luis von Ahn: Massive-scale online collaboration

After re-purposing CAPTCHA so each human-typed response helps digitize books, Luis von Ahn wondered how else to use small contributions by many on the Internet for greater good. At TEDxCMU, he shares how his ambitious new project, Duolingo, will help millions learn a new language while translating the Web quickly and accurately -- all for free.

[study] KPCB 2011 Presentation On Internet Trends

KPCB Internet Trends (2011)

Stuxnet: Anatomy of a Computer Virus

Stuxnet: Anatomy of a Computer Virus from Patrick Clair on Vimeo.

[TED] Ron Gutman: The hidden power of smiling

From: TEDtalksDirector | May 11, 2011 | 72,858 views

Ron Gutman reviews a raft of studies about smiling, and reveals some surprising results. Did you know your smile can be a predictor of how long you'll live -- and that a simple smile has a measurable effect on your overall well-being? Prepare to flex a few facial muscles as you learn more about this evolutionarily contagious behavior.

[web] Space Shuttle Twitpic Launches Woman to Tweeting Fame

1 day ago by Sarah Kessler

When Stefanie Gordon boarded her plane in New York City to visit her parents in Palm Beach, the captain noted there was a chance passengers would witness the space shuttle Endeavour’s last launch during the flight. But she never expected to play a role in documenting it.

As the plane descended toward Palm Beach and the Endeavour’s launch became visible, Gordon pulled out her iPhone and snapped a few photos and a short video. On the ground, she posted one of the photos to her then 1,800 Twitter followers.

In a few hours, she was fielding phone calls from ABC, the BBC and CNBC. She had accumulated about 1,000 new Twitter followers, and she had to turn the @mention push notifications off on her phone so they wouldn’t drain the battery.

more after the jump..

[movie] RiP : A REMIX MANIFESTO - TRAILER

Find the full thing here: http://www.youtube.com/user/RemixManifesto#p/u

[web] Scobelizer on Lift

[Seth's Blog] Are $300 headphones worth it?

Seth Godin's Blog

A friend wanted to buy Dr. Dre headphones. They list for about $300.

Any audiophile can tell you that they sound like $39 headphones. Instead, consider these. We can prove they sound better!

But of course, that's not the question. It's not what sounds better, it's what's worth it.

The Dre headphones come with admiring glances at no extra charge. They come with self-esteem built in. You can argue that this is a worthless feature in a device designed to reproduce sound accurately, but you'd be wrong. After all, the whole reason you're listening to music in the first place is to feel good. To be happy. If the Dre's make you happy, and your happiness is worth $300, then they're worth it, no?

For others (put me in that category) I get more happiness knowing that I didn't fall for a clever marketing ploy, and I buy the ones that I believe sound better. Of course, that's a clever marketing ploy too--persuading me that better sound is worth this much. But don't tell anyone. That would make me feel manipulated.

[TED] Julian Assange interviewed by Chris Anderson

This interview was conducted back in July 2010 - I wonder how TED feels about WikiLeaks now.

[TED] Rory Sutherland: Sweat the small stuff

http://www.ted.com Advertising adds value to a product by changing our perception, rather than the product itself. Rory Sutherland makes the daring assertion that a change in perceived value can be just as satisfying as what we consider real value -- and his conclusion has interesting consequences for how we look at life.

Comprehensive Wikileaks Timeline

from: Read Write Web

As mentioned before, "Wikileaks was not a story, but an ongoing continuum of stories . . . It's a story that is destined to keep on giving." In that short time since that post, it has indeed done just that.

Wikileaks -- its actions and the reactions to them, the implications of what has happened around the whistle-blowing site -- has given birth to an extremely complex and ever-changing situation. In lieu of summing up a situation that has not come to a tidy conclusion, we have put together a full timeline of Wikileaks news and analysis from our site. Read through from our earliest coverage (February, 2008) to our most recent (today) and you should have a reasonably complete sense of why Wikileaks is important.

WikiLeaks, Censorship and the Watchdog Web February 18, 2008

"A very interesting site for whistle blowers called WikiLeaks is facing government censorship as today a California judge reportedly ruled that the company in control of the site's domain name must shut down public access to the entire site."

Wikileaks Calls for Help in Taking Whistle Blower Site to the Next Level November 28, 2008.

"Wikileaks.org, a website that publishes classified, confidential, censored or otherwise secret documents for anyone to see, put out a call last night for help in advancing the site beyond its remarkable early success. Just a week after publishing one of its most high profile documents yet, the organization sent an email to subscribers last night asking them to "tell us your most radical ideas for our vision of justice and how they might be economically, politically, legally, technically and socially sustained."

 Read more

Matt Ridley: When ideas have sex

About this talk

At TEDGlobal 2010, author Matt Ridley shows how, throughout history, the engine of human progress has been the meeting and mating of ideas to make new ideas. It's not important how clever individuals are, he says; what really matters is how smart the collective brain is.

About Matt Ridley

British author Matt Ridley argues that, through history, the engine of human progress and prosperity has been, and is, "ideas having sex with each other." Full bio and more links

[article] Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson on Where Ideas Come From

By Wired  - September 27, 2010 - Wired Print October 2010

Say the word “inventor” and most people think of a solitary genius toiling in a basement. But two ambitious new books on the history of innovation—by Steven Johnson and Kevin Kelly, both longtime wired contributors—argue that great discoveries typically spring not from individual minds but from the hive mind. In Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, Johnson draws on seven centuries of scientific and technological progress, from Gutenberg to GPS, to show what sorts of environments nurture ingenuity. He finds that great creative milieus, whether MIT or Los Alamos, New York City or the World Wide Web, are like coral reefs—teeming, diverse colonies of creators who interact with and influence one another.

keep reading

Ze Frank's web playroom

On the web, a new "Friend" may be just a click away, but true connection is harder to find and express. Ze Frank presents a medley of zany Internet toys that require deep participation -- and reward it with something more nourishing.

Watch your clocks

10 past 10 on the 10 of october 2010 = 10:10 10/10/10

That can't happen often?

The non-optimized life

When you measure an activity, you can improve it. Computers make it easy to optimize just about every portion of your life.

Surely, you can optimize a website or a blog for traffic. You can optimize ads to make them yield more results. You can optimize your presentation style to close more sales or change more minds. You can optimize your workout to get faster and stronger. You can optimize your diet to lose weight and gain muscle. You can optimize your sleeping patterns to get more rest in less time. Cosmo even says you can optimize your sex life...

And then, at some point, you realize you're spending your best energy on optimization, not on creation.

This is a fine line to walk, because of course you can optimize your creation time as well! You can develop habits to amplify your best thoughts and make it likely you'll ship work that matters. I get that. But I also worry that a never-ending cycle of optimization can become a crutch, a place to hide when you really should be confronting the endless unknown, not the banal stair step of incremental optimization. While Yahoo was optimizing their home page in 2001, the guys at Google were inventing something totally new.

That's one reason I resist the temptation to optimize this blog for traffic and yield. I'd rather force myself to improve it by having the guts to write better posts instead.

Posted by Seth Godin on July 03, 2010 | Permalink

The surprising truth about what motivates us

Why does Flammable and Inflammable mean the same thing?

Dictionary.com 

GoogleTalk: Energy Secretary - Steven Chu

Steven Chu (born February 28, 1948),is a physicist and currently the 12th United States Secretary of Energy. As a scientist, Chu is known for his research in cooling and trapping of atoms with laser light, which won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997. At the time of his appointment as Energy Secretary, he was a professor of physics and molecular and cellular biology at the University of California, Berkeley and the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where his research was concerned primarily with the study of biological systems at the single molecule level. He is a vocal advocate for more research into alternative energy and nuclear power, arguing that a shift away from fossil fuels is essential to combat global warming