Apparently the new trend at pubs in New York and Boston is to host nerd nites and invite people to show off their obscure powerpoint presentations. How long before we see a Seattle chapter?

An interesting piece on AppleMatters about the cultural trends towards full disclosure (a la twitter, personal blogs, and the like) being embraced by people who believe they'll be the next reality stars.

Quoted: I want to believe that this trend, like all trends, will eventually pass. I want to believe that one day people will wake up and realize that it is more important to live your life than to document it.

A full post on Amazon.com's social design.

Quoted: But even though big sites adding many social features at a time draws lots of attention, there is one site that is way ahead of everyone else, offering a myriad of social features that eclipses the field, hands down. That site is Amazon.com. Now, we’re not feature counters by any means, but we have seen the features on Amazon provide a tremendous amount of value to users during testing of the site. The product reviews, for example, are a huge advantage Amazon holds over other e-commerce sites…people really trust the reviews there compared to everywhere else. I wrote about this phenomenon in The Amazon Effect.

Bokardo, which is always a great blog, today maps out just how social Amazon's product detail pages are...

I really like this high-level piece in the NYT re: the "online disinhibition effect." When I used to moderate large communities of users who were mostly anonymous and invisible to each other, social interactions degraded to the point of childish absurdity. Once we instituted less anonymous community (users had to have a registered credit card and use their real name) much of this moderation was minimized. Wild.

Quoted: Social neuroscience offers clues into the neural mechanics behind sending messages that are taken as offensive, embarrassing or downright rude.

This looks like a great study resource for looking at, and annotating, historical documents.

Quoted: At Footnote.com you'll be able to view, save, and share original images of historical documents available for the first time on the Internet.

An interesting study on "hotness" with a new measure or attractiveness called the "beholder index."

The beholder index:

variance in private taste / (variance in private taste + variance in public taste)

Quoted: The value of this ratio can range from zero to one -- a value of 1 would indicate that all variation in attractiveness ratings are due to individual differences, while a value of 0 would indicate all variation is due to group differences.

Quoted: The Life & Times of a Digital Entrepreneur