Marc Andreessen continues to fill up notebooks with ideas and sketched-out business plans for new companies. Among the gossipy cognoscenti, it's a poorly kept secret that in recent months he has been occupied starting a new Internet company.

Improbable as it may seem, given the breadth and depth of the dot-com collapse, not to mention the emergence of hivelike high-tech centers in places like China and India now available for off-shoring and outsourcing, Silicon Valley is starting to feel like 1995 -- the year Netscape went public -- all over again.

The miracle of Silicon Valley is that it is a system finely calibrated to spit out new companies -- some of which have come to be worth hundreds of millions, if not billions, within a few years' time.

"I think the mistake now is holding back when you've got a good idea." Particularly with the rich scent of investment money once again in the air.

They form the core of a revived entrepreneurial network drunk on the idea of creating the next big thing. None have to work another day in their lives, yet they still routinely work 60 to 70 hours a week -- except those who sheepishly confess to working 80.

"You can't underestimate the good feeling you get when people in your wider social circle think you created something really, really cool."

"It's like the word 'opportunity' is there in front of you in red flashing lights and you feel you have no choice. I'm having the time of my life."

"I know one venture capitalist who's basically reviewing scores of ideas from 1999 [2], figuring there's all these babies thrown out with the bath water. I think he's right."

"We are not ready to stop changing the world."

Wanted: "Silicon Valley ate my balls" webpage.

If I had my choice of locations to base Industrial Memetics and the MemeStreams empire out of, I'd probably pick New York for the Business and Media HQ, and San Francisco for Engineering and Research & Development. All the code tinkering and thinking would run out of the Bay Area in an effort to pool and poll its talent pool. All the (non-vendor) business relationships and production of PodCasts and vCasts would be run out of Manhattan, most likely mid-town, although that Freedom Tower is going to be pretty alluring whenever they actually build the damn thing. We could nickname the company intranet "The I-80".

Someone get me about $40-60 million, please. I'll start doing the diamond thing with my hands, and I'll take meetings and make decisions all day. I might even cut my hair, although I wouldn't expect Decius to cut his. Everyone could start calling me a self-righteous-militant-asshole behind my back, and maybe we'd be able to get something done this time around, without Silicon Valley eating our balls.

If You Can Make It in Silicon Valley, You Can Make It . . . in Silicon Valley Again

It is known, somewhat deceptively, as a cooperative advertising agreement. In plain terms, it means that many of the books on display at the front of a store or placed face out at the end of an aisle are there because the publisher paid for them to be there, not necessarily because anyone at the bookstore thought the book was noteworthy or interesting.

Pay-for-display programs are nothing new in the retail world, but the practice seems less savory in bookselling, where bookstore owners and managers were once assumed to serve as an editorial presence, recommending and featuring books they liked.

Co-op advertising has acquired a reputation as a kind of dirty secret of the publishing business.

In many Barnes & Noble superstores, about 70 percent of the books on front-of-store tables are there because co-op money secures their spot.

While publishers disagree about the merits of paying for display, one thing about the arrangements is clear: they further concentrate money and attention on the books that need it least.

The phenomenon has been called the reverse Robin Hood effect.

The bookselling business has fallen prey to the blockbuster, too.

Cash Up Front

"The wave of the future is getting inside these groups, developing intelligence, and taking them down."

Today's cybercrooks are becoming ever more tightly organized. Like the Mafia, hacker groups have virtual godfathers to map strategy, capos to issue orders, and soldiers to do the dirty work. Their omertà, or vow of silence, is made easier by the anonymity of the Web. And like legit businesses, they're going global. The ShadowCrew allegedly had 4,000 members operating worldwide -- including Americans, Brazilians, Britons, Russians, and Spaniards. "Organized crime has realized what it can do on the street, it can do in cyberspace," says Peter G. Allor, a former Green Beret who heads the intelligence team at Internet Security Systems Inc. in Atlanta.

The bust yielded of ShadowCrew a treasure trove of evidence. "We will be arresting people for months and months and months," says the Secret Service.

Hacker Hunters

noteworthy wrote:
There's a new NetNewsWire. It's been "streamlined", includes a tabbed browser, automatically downloads podcasts, supports "smart lists" like iTunes, and more.

Best of all, upgrades are free.

I've been using NNW 2.0 for awhile now. Even most of the betas were pretty reliable. The biggest win, aside from the new features, is the speed increase. Zooming around browsing articles is significantly faster. The memory usage could be a little bit better, but that's the tradeoff.

I have not used it myself, but there is also now support for syncing subscriptions between multiple machines using both .Mac and a standard FTP server.

RE: What’s New in NetNewsWire 2.0

Yes, this is for real. No, I am not kidding. Yes, these are your tax dollars at work. Yes, this is the State Department's idea of public diplomacy. No, you cannot go and heckle the speaker.

Dear Journalists:

The Washington Foreign Press Center is pleased to announce a special workshop on "Figuring Out Blogs: The Best Blogs FOR and BY Journalists and How You Can Join the Blogging Revolution as a Reader and/or Creator of Blogs," to take place on Tuesday, June 7, 2005, 4:00 - 5:30 p.m. The workshop is the second in a series of programs the Foreign Press Center is planning on "Information Technology and Journalism."

The workshop will be taught by Sreenath "Sree" Sreenivasa, Professor of New Media Journalism at Columbia University and a tech reporter for WABC-TV. His work explaining technology to lay readers has appeared in the "New York Times," "Business Week," "Rolling Stone," and "Popular Science." Professor Sreenivasa taught the first workshop offered by the FPC on "Smarter Surfing: Better Use of Your Web Time."

Why attend the workshop:
There is much confusion about blogs, bloggers and blogging. Is this the end of journalism as we know it? Or is it just another small step in the evolution of media? Are any worth following? You will get answers to these and other questions at this workshop.
You will learn about:
- Blog basics
- What's to love and what's to hate about blogs
- The best blogs FOR journalists
- The best blogs BY journalists
- Blogs that are changing America and the world
- Blogs that are over-hyped and a waste of time
- How to read blogs without drowning in too much info
- How to create a blog and raise your Google rankings
- Why journalists should be blogging
- Why journalists should NOT be blogging

Confused About Blogs? The State Department Is Here To Help

French voters are trying to preserve a 35-hour work week in a world where Indian engineers are ready to work a 35-hour day. Good luck.

Indians are not racing us to the bottom. They are racing us to the top.

Tom also notes that Paul Krugman is on vacation. I am unsure if he means from the New York Times or economic reality.

Get ready, Tom Friedman columns will shortly be the new warez.

A Race to the Top, Or, An Obit For Old Europe

The statement, which follows a visit to Caracas by Iranian President Mohammed Khatami in March, was intended to be noticed — and it was. The question is why he would have said it.

Confused? Don't worry. George Friedman explains it all.

Venezuelan Red Flag

Centrist liberal Milblogger (yeah, there are some) Alexander the Average has done a lot of good stuff. His 2-part set of posts exploring the aftermath of nuclear terrorism is highly recommended.

Some MemeStreamers will find this up their alley. I'm memeing a blog posting of this series because its two parts and they've provided one convenient permalink for it.

Winds of Change.NET: Exploring the Impact of Nuclear Terrorism

Why is the Department of Homeland Security involved in copyright issues?

Schneier on Security: DHS Enforces Copyright

My 1Ghz G4 Powerbook's performance has really taken a dive since installing Tiger. I'm wondering if anyone else is having similar problems... Should I assume for one reason or another my machine has developed cruft and I should do a fresh reinstall? I was hoping cruft was a "windows thing".

I have one gig of ram, yet regularly my system is having to pull applications out of swap in situations where I'm not pushing it hard and never had a problem in the past.

Dashboard flat out sucks. If I have not used it recently, it takes forever to come up and refresh apps. Currently I'm only using it with four widgets due to both memory and CPU reasons. I found it highly dismaying that even the translator app took a whopping 39M of ram to sit there infrequently used. The clock eats roughly 9% of my CPU. THE CLOCK!

Ok, I like Spotlight... But I suspect its at the heart of my performance issues. Quicksilver is way less mature in numerous ways, but its faster and it never caused my system to be leveled.

Safari seems to eat more ram with every update. I'm used to unloading it and re-loading it every so often to alleviate its fat, but that has not been necessary recently because it seems to be crashing more.

Mail has been crashing regularly as well.

Expose does not seem to be as fluid as it was previously. Also, sometimes it takes a very long time to activate and it never used to in the past.

The list goes on...