One slide in particular jumped out to me during the presentation. It showed a micro-view of IBM’s revenue breakdown comparing Linux-related activities and traditional IP royalties and licensing revenues. Yochai showed this graph as part of a pattern that he points to in which collaborative peer-based production is 1) happening, 2) measurable and 3) large scale in certain applications. I found what I believe to be a similar version of this slide in some random PDF that Google dug up for me (see slide 5).

Whirlycott - Philip Jacob » Yochai Benkler at HLS

Given the pervasive security that now surrounds the President of the United States and just about everything associated with him, it's a bit far-fetched to think that a couple of pranksters could sneak onto an Air Force base, tag Air Force One with spray paint (while the other person recorded the event with a videocamera), and escape unscathed — and even more astoundingly, not a word of the feat reached any news outlet.

Urban Legends Reference Pages: Photo Gallery (Tagging Air Force One)

Summary:
Eyetracking visualizations show that users often read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe.

F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

Matt Cutts confirmed today that the AdSense mediapartners bot (aka mediabot) is indexing pages for use in the Big Daddy Google index. Both Greg Boser and myself have found evidence of mediabot's crawls for AdSense ad targeting purposes have ended up being used in the natural Google search results.

It could definitely be used as a tool to detect when content is being cloaked for either the Google or AdSense bot, particularly since the mediapartners bot has been indexing pages since at least the beginning of February.

It will be interesting to see if other consequences arise for webmasters, such as excluding pages for googlebot via robots.txt that end up being indexed via the mediabot.

If you think about it... this isn't very cool. Googlebot is a well-known robot that people may have reason to block from certain content. It is easy and well-documented how to do this. It seems reasonable that Google should launch a second bot under a new name for a different index and different function. But it seems shady (although logical) for that bot to also feed into the Googlebot index, unless it were to respect robot.txt directives for Googlebot as well as mediabot in those cases. Which I doubt.

Matt Cutts confirms AdSense media bot in natural search index - JenSense.com

I found a new LaTeX package the other day, known as cancel, which allows me to either strike through or zero out a term in an equation.

\jeff{krimmel} � Cancelling Terms in LaTeX

But, some in the Northeast get even one more day. Taxpayers who live in Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Vermont or Washington DC have until Tuesday because Monday is Patriots Day — the annual commemoration of the battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775.

Time Is Up For Tax Procrastinators - CBS News

In what must have absolutely spooked out a ton of last minute tax filers, Intuit shut down its computer systems briefly this evening. While they claim that this was "preventative maintenance" in order to "prepare for the heavier volume of electronic tax filing expected later in the evening," that seems hard to believe.

Techdirt: Intuit Freaks Out Last Minute Tax Filers By Rebooting Machines

What if there were a database of commercial email senders which published a score (like a credit score) that was based on how well they complied with best practices?

Return Path launched just that last week and its called the Sender Score Reputation Monitor. It's a reputation service for commercial mailers. Return Path is collecting over 60 data points on over 50 million mailboxes. Data points include unsubscribe compliance, complaint rates, unkown user rates, security practices, and identity stability.

A VC: Sender Score

"They said, 'Oh, we're just calling it that to get people to watch the show, we're doing it for ratings, there's no meaning behind it,' " Wobrak said. "I was very gullible. My husband could see through things, but I saw it was a chance to be on TV. Red flags should have come up, but I thought, TLC, that's a good station, what could go wrong? They gave us a bunch of bull to get us on the show. It's not about helping the kids, it's helping TLC or whoever the producers of the show are."

The moral of the story? Agree to participate in a reality show at your own (and your children's) risk.

"Honey, We're Killing The Kids" had potential, but went way over the top. This is a nice followup of the local participants -- sounds like pretty poor treatment.

Tuned In: Families on TLC diet makeover show report bitter aftertaste

SolidDB is going open source. What’s interesting to me about this is that this is a company that has had strong success with their proprietary channel, having 3 million implementations of any product is pretty damn impressive.

Venture Chronicles