Now, this is interesting.

Next week Cisco plans to announce one of its most unusual deals: it is buying the technology assets of Tribe.net, a mostly forgotten social networking site.

It is a curious pairing.

... Tribe.net ... has been trampled by newer social sites ...

But along with the recent purchase of a social network design firm, Five Across, the deal will give Cisco the technology to help large corporate clients create services resembling MySpace or YouTube to bring their customers together online. And that ambition highlights a significant shift in the way companies and entrepreneurs are thinking about social networks.

This is precisely the news I needed.

There's a great big beautiful tomorrow, shining at the end of every day /
There's a great big beautiful tomorrow, shining at the end of every day /
And tomorrow is just a dream away

Social Networking’s Next Phase

Amapedia is a community for sharing information about the products you like the most.

Amapedia introduces a new way of organizing products we call “collaborative structured tagging”. In a nutshell, it makes it easy for you to tag products with what they are and with their most important facts, and for others to search, discover, filter, and compare products by those tags.

Amapedia is the next generation of Amazon.com’s product wiki feature; all of your previous contributions were preserved and now live here.

Check out our new features, like advanced search and side-by-side comparisons, or jump to a random article.

Was this necessary?

amapedia

I hesitate, given the early date and the project’s modesty, to call “Into Great Silence” one of the best films of the year. I prefer to think of it as the antidote to all of the others.

Lives Lived at a Monk’s Pace, Allowing Time for the Spirit to Flourish

Why is this in the news? The company is more than a year old.

UPDATE:

After months of fine-tuning, Ning is finally ready to make its big push with a free toolkit designed to make it easy to launch a social network with a few mouse clicks. Ning's package includes all the social networking staples -- videos, photos, music, forums, personal profiles and blogs.

The site does have some desirable features:

Members can set different privacy settings for every photo, video, or blog post they contribute.

From Ning:

Ning is the only online service where you can create, customize, and share your own Social Network for free in seconds.

You can make it public or private and for anything - and anyone - you'd like.

Wire story:

Although both MySpace and Facebook have become smash hits by offering the same features, Andreessen is convinced people dislike the big social networks' one-size-fits-all approach. With Ning's products, even technology neophytes can customize social networks around narrowly shared interests, such as a sports team, church group, hobby or TV show.

"This is the next logical step (for social networks)," said Andreessen.

Andreessen has discovered MemeStreams Circles.

Apparently Andreessen is unfamiliar with Metcalfe's Law.

From the FAQ:

For other Ning sites you might have created, like bookmarks or a discussion board, you'll need to create a new social network from scratch. We don't have an easy way to migrate them over. Sorry about that!

Thank you for being an early adopter. Now start over. Do not pass go, do not collect $200.

Ning - Create your own Social Networks!

The White House still avoids the label, but by any reasonable historical standard, the Iraqi civil war has begun. The record of past such wars suggests that Washington cannot stop this one -- and that Iraqis will be able to reach a power-sharing deal only after much more fighting, if then. The United States can help bring about a settlement eventually by balancing Iraqi factions from afar, but there is little it can do to avert bloodshed now.

Foreign Affairs - Iraq's Civil War - James D. Fearon

Controversies over the war in Iraq and U.S. unilateralism have overshadowed a more pragmatic and multilateral component of the Bush administration's grand strategy: its attempt to reconfigure U.S. foreign policy and international institutions in order to account for shifts in the global distribution of power and the emergence of states such as China and India. This unheralded move is well intentioned and well advised, and Washington should redouble its efforts.

Foreign Affairs - The New New World Order - Daniel W. Drezner

No matter how much films may improve, their prospects are not likely to — which suggests that something has fundamentally changed in our relationship to the movies. The long, long romance may finally be losing its bloom, and that is why Hollywood should be concerned.

Movies were the barometers of the American psyche. More than any other form, they defined us, and to this day, the rest of the world knows us as much for our films as for any other export.

Today, movies just don't seem to matter in the same way — not to the general public and not to the high culture either, where a Pauline Kael review in the New Yorker could once ignite an intellectual firestorm. There aren't any firestorms now.

To the extent that the Internet is a niche machine, dividing its users into tiny, self-defined categories, it is providing a challenge to the movies that not even television did, because the Internet addresses a change in consciousness while television simply addressed a change in delivery of content.

The Internet ... plays to [a] powerful force in modern America and one that undermines the movies: narcissism.

In effect, we have become our own movies.

The movie magic is gone

"No one on earth knows what will happen next year," Erofeyev concludes, referring to the Russian presidential race. "Even Putin doesn't know. But there are possibilities for better, not only for worse."

... "It's like always in Russia," he says in halting English. "You are like a monarch. No changes."

... "Time will tell us what will happen," he advises. "My old mother used to say we need three generations, because we lost three generations."

Russian Literature in the Age of Putin

Indica was fixated on my friend Ari. I asked her what kind of phone she had.

“A Sidekick,” she said.

“Wow,” I said. “That’s the same kind Brianna has.”

“Strippers’ phone of choice,” she said.

Robert's Steak House Restaurant Review | NYT

This thesis provides a unique game design methodology to realize player-centric Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment (DDA) in video games, which creates optimized video game experiences for different types of players.

Rather than offering player a passive DDA experience by analyzing incomplete in-game data, this thesis uses Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow theory and provides players with subconscious choices to help them actively customize their optimal video game experiences. It treats active DDA as a new parameter for analyzing video games and seeks to address why certain video games had a wider appeal than others

See also here.

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