New Assignment.Net is a non-profit site that tries to spark innovation in journalism by showing that open collaboration over the Internet among reporters, editors and large groups of users can produce high-quality work that serves the public interest, holds up under scrutiny, and builds trust.

A second aim is to figure out how to fund this work through a combination of online donations, micro-payments, traditional fundraising, syndication rights, sponsorships, advertising and any other method that does not compromise the site’s independence or reputation.

At New Assignment, pros and amateurs cooperate to produce work that neither could manage alone. The site uses open source methods to develop good assignments and help bring them to completion. It pays professional journalists to carry the project home and set high standards; they work closely with users who have something to contribute. The betting is that (some) people will donate to stories they can see are going to be great because the open methods allow for that glimpse ahead.

This site is getting a fair amount of play recently.

NewAssignment.Net

The New York Times, in newsprint form, with its daily 1.1 million circulation, and Sunday 1.7 million, makes between $1.5 and $1.7 billion a year (the company does not break out the exact figure). Times.com, with its 40 million unique online users a month, likely makes less than $200 million a year. Cruelly, an online user is worth much less -- because his or her value can be so easily measured -- than a traditional reader.

To replace its $1.5 to $1.7 billion traditional business with its online business ... it could look to MySpace: while the Times's 40 million monthly users generated, in May, 489 million page views -- this is the number that interests advertisers -- MySpace's 50 million monthly users, deeply entertained by its user-created content, generated 29 billion page views.

That's a whopping 580 monthly page views per user for MySpace, versus a measly twelve for NYT. Judging by the statistics for 2005, MemeStreams is more in the range of NYT than of MySpace.

Why isn't MemeStreams stickier? What will it take to get every registered user to visit the site daily and generate 20 page views? There ought to be a plan!

Panic on 43rd Street | Vanity Fair

In my remarks today I will briefly review some past episodes of global economic integration, identify some common themes, and then put forward some ways in which I see the current episode as similar to and different from the past. In doing so, I hope to provide some background and context for the important discussions that we will be having over the next few days.

NYT coverage here.

"Even if these favorable trends continue, there are massive budget problems that most of the developed world is going to face as its populations age," Mr. Rogoff cautioned.

Check out Gladwell's latest for more on that.

Global Economic Integration: What's New and What's Not? | FRB: Bernanke

In An Engine, Not a Camera, Donald MacKenzie argues that the emergence of modern economic theories of finance affected financial markets in fundamental ways. These new, Nobel Prize-winning theories, based on elegant mathematical models of markets, were not simply external analyses but intrinsic parts of economic processes.

Paraphrasing Milton Friedman, MacKenzie says that economic models are an engine of inquiry rather than a camera to reproduce empirical facts. More than that, the emergence of an authoritative theory of financial markets altered those markets fundamentally. For example, in 1970, there was almost no trading in financial derivatives such as "futures." By June of 2004, derivatives contracts totaling $273 trillion were outstanding worldwide. MacKenzie suggests that this growth could never have happened without the development of theories that gave derivatives legitimacy and explained their complexities.

MacKenzie examines the role played by finance theory in the two most serious crises to hit the world’s financial markets in recent years: the stock market crash of 1987 and the market turmoil that engulfed the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management in 1998. He also looks at finance theory that is somewhat beyond the mainstream--chaos theorist Benoit Mandelbrot’s model of “wild” randomness. MacKenzie’s pioneering work in the social studies of finance will interest anyone who wants to understand how America’s financial markets have grown into their current form.

An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets

"People tend to attribute a promotion, or a great move to another company, to luck, or to being 'in the right place at the right time.' But far more often, it's the result of networking," Anderson adds.

"The more people know who you are and what you're good at, the 'luckier' you're likely to be.

Five months of networking, still no new job

Search is evolving. Ask.com has features others lack. Don't let habit prevent you from trying something new.

... next to that entry a little icon of binoculars. If you move your cursor over it, a miniature version of the EPA page pops up. Most of the other links on the results page also offer binocular screens.

"We're not building a rocket ship. We're building a better car. It's not what people will want in five years. It's what they want now."

... grew out of Pentagon-funded work at Rutgers University ... It clusters sites according to topic communities, using unique technology which Ask now calls ExpertRank.

Google's Up-and-Coming Rival

From Publishers Weekly
A book about the history of the shipping container? At first, one has to wonder why. (An eventuality not lost on the author, who muses "What is it about the container that is so important? Surely not the thing itself...the standard container has all the romance of a tin can.") The catch, though, is that Levinson, an economist, "treats containerization not as shipping news, but as a development that has sweeping consequences for workers and consumers all around the globe." That latter statement drives this book, which is about the economic ramifications of the shipping container-from the closing of traditional (and antiquated) ports to the rise of Asia as the world's preeminent provider of inexpensive consumer goods (distributed, naturally, using mammoth shipping containers). Levinson maintains his focus on the economics of shipping vast quantities of merchandise, organizing the book into snappy, thematic chapters on different facets of shipping ("The Trucker," and "Union Disunion," for instance), an approach that lends itself well to spot-reading. Throughout, the writing is clean-more informal than rigidly academic (union boss Teddy Gleason is "a voluble Irishman born hard by the New York docks")-making the book suitable for casual readers as well as students looking for a different take on the evolution of 20th-century world economics.

The Box : How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger

The book's style resembles the early years of Wired magazine.

He has now turned that presentation into a book and a documentary film, both called "An Inconvenient Truth."

As for the book, its roots as a slide show are very much in evidence.

'An Inconvenient Truth,' by Al Gore | Book Review

You know you've hit the big time when ...

The biggest porn stars in the world are using NewsCorp's MySpace.com to promote themselves, sometimes to teenagers, sometimes on pages replete with ad support from corporations like T Mobile and Weight Watchers.

As a result, Weight Watchers has pulled its advertising from the site. "Our rep has issued an immediate order to pull our ads from MySpace," says company spokesperson Grace Ann Arnold. "We'll be reevaluating that buy." T Mobile is "working with MySpace to rectify" the situation, according to the company's Tom Harlin.

What's the big deal?

McAfee SiteAdivsor says:

myspace.com: We tested this site and didn't find any significant problems.

Advertising on MySpace

The love affair with little women appears to be over.

"It appears that we have frustrated some customers. We are trying to figure out how many we have frustrated."

Where's the Petite Department? Going the Way of the Petticoat