Hilarious!

Quoted: Already got a dozen Obama headbands? Worn out your " Hot for Hillary" T-shirt? It's time for a new campaign accessory: Slate's political ring tones. Get one of these clips, and you'll hear John McCain say, "My friends," every time you get a call.

A great Slate piece on why you don't find technology (computers, cell phones, etc.) in children's books.

Quoted: Technology, as we well know, has become a ubiquitous part of American children's lives. And yet there is one place—a whole world, actually—where children are safely walled off from wired and wireless devices. That is the world of picture books.

Might be bad for Yahoo, but I'm not sorry the deal fell through...

Quoted: It is axiomatic in the online world that no one knows what anything is truly worth. Yet for practically all of its corporate life, Yahoo has been comfortable with the answer: It's worth more.

Interesting Slate piece on how the E. coli breakouts of 2006 illustrate how hard it actually is to engineer a biological weapon.

Quoted: An outbreak of E. coli isn't usually the stuff of feel-good stories. But a close look at recent outbreaks of E. coli—and a closer look at the bacteria themselves—may help us to put aside our fears for the moment. Engineering plagues is harder than it looks.

I hope China doesn't try to ban cell phones with recording devices after this. It's a fuzzy boundary between the economic opportunism that China champions, and the freedom of speech that it's trying to subdue. This is really one of the most powerful forms of revolt that these people have right now.

Quoted: Cell-phone photographs and videos from Tibet, blurry and amateur, are circulating on the Internet. Some show clouds of tear gas; others burning buildings and shops; still others purple-robed monks, riot police, and confusion.

Fascinating stuff...

Quoted: The individual user has been king on the Internet, but the pendulum seems to be swinging back toward edited information vetted by professionals.

SO corrupt.

Quoted: Even though White House computer technicians hunted high and low, an entire week's worth of e-mail from Cheney's office was missing. The week was Sept. 30, 2003, to Oct. 6, 2003, the opening days of the probe into whether anyone at the White House leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame.

Really fascinating article from Slate that questions the idea of Web democracy through user-generated content sites like Wikipedia and Digg. The author raises some great points. Tal, this reminds me of the book you edited!

Quoted: Social-media sites like Wikipedia and Digg are celebrated as shining examples of Web democracy, places built by millions of Web users who all act as writers, editors, and voters. In reality, a small number of people are running the show. According to researchers in Palo Alto, 1 percent of Wikipedia users are responsible for about half of the site's edits.

Interesting article from Slate on how Facebook is like Ikea because they get their customers to do the work (and enjoy doing it).

Quoted: Roughly five years after Internet users caught on, the bookshops are suddenly full of books about the user-generated content that "Web 2.0" makes possible: blogs, Wikipedia, Facebook, and the rest.