- Emily sent me this link: Kottke compares Facebook and AOL. It sums up a lot of why I'm an FB skeptic. Open, diffuse standards and services are good. Putting your eggs in one basket is bad.
- Slate has an article with a bunch of good links to other stories explaining why we should be dubious of carbon offset traders. I guess I'm probably behind on all of this, but I found it interesting and, as someone who's at least had offsets purchased on their behalf, personally relevant. The upshot seems to be that you can't just buy $1 worth of carbon non-release. Your money's actually pushing the margins of where it makes sense for companies to implement clean technologies — projects that they were considering doing for reasons unrelated to climate change. It's not clear whether traders are doing a good job of actually getting the money where it can best tip those scales, though, or whether it's just a case of a smattering of environmentally beneficial projects having their profit margins inflated at random. It's also unclear how much of the transaction the brokers are pocketing.
- Speaking of Slate, good lord but this is a bad article. Who could possibly think that a series of passive-aggressive letters from a landlord to her tenants would be funny or interesting to anyone except the embittered property owner? Even more astounding: there's a podcast version.
- Via TorrentFreak I see that Sprint is going to start spamming P2P users, embedding advertising in some dude named Plies' tracks, which they'll then blanket filesharing networks with. Details seem a bit scarce, but odds are that they'll just be throwing the Sprint logo into the ID3v2 metadata sections of the tracks (or whatever the equivalent is for AAC). It's an interesting idea, but I have a hard time imagining it's a strategy that would be worth pursuing if not for the one-time earned media that its inventiveness is garnering.
