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http://www.pearlriver.com

www.history.navy.mil/

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My friend Eddie Tejeda, has been working on an awesome site called, “LittleSis” which is an “unvoluntary Facebook for powerful Americans.” The relationships of politicians, their donors, CEOs, lobbyists, non-profit directors are made transparent through a combination of crowdsourced labor and accessing public databases. The site is a project of Public Accountability Support from the Sunlight Foundation.

It’s sort of like playing “Six Degrees from Kevin Bacon,” except with American elite, like Madeline Albright who is connect with soon to be former FCC commissioner Kevin J Martin. Their connection? The Aspen Institute.

2008 has been a rocky ride. I could write about a year reflecting on the changes of the guard… industries failing, fortunes made and lost, seismic Presidential shifts, passing of torches at the Olympics. We’re entering 2009 with lots of uncertainty. But instead, I’m just going to quickly post about how this occasional blog, is going to become even more occasional. Instead of the overhanging pressure to “feed the monster” I’d rather use my time work on other stuff without the self-imposed guilt of “I should be blogging.” So, the change is more a mental re-defining for myself than anything else. Anyway… maybe the frequency won’t even change… because I’ll still use this site as a staging area for some of the other things I was meaning to work on in 2008. 2009 will be year of getting the half done project out the door, wish me luck.

Anyway, this photo is from a party a few months… it has nothing to do with the post, just your standard blurry flickr photo.

Enjoy.

I must say that I’m impressed that Amazon.com continues to innovate on the e-commerce services, which is perhaps why they are still the market leader. I’m don’t think sliders are the answer to everything or can be applied everywhere. When it comes to shopping for diamonds, there are several factors which control the cost of them, such as size, color, and flawlessness. the slider interface give the user control over what your needs are makes shopping much easier. (Thanks for the tip Jen.)

On November 6, I didn’t run out to buy a paper. I thought about it for a second. I decided that I have more than enough stuff and because newspapers aren’t archival. Because they are designed to be disposable, newsprint disintegrates over time. I asked myself, “why bother?” When the paper eventual would turned brown and brittle, would I ever want or try to read it? Or would I just log on to nytimes.com and look it up? Of course, then I thought, what nytimes.com look like in 20 years.

Not that it matters, because the newspapers sold out all across the country during all this thinking. And I more concerned about getting a train to Philadelphia.

In retrospect, it’s interesting to observe in a time when newspapers are shutting down and laying people off, on the day after a historic election for many reasons, people still wanted to sought out the newspaper as a physical token of the event.  A copy of the New York Times apparently sold for $400, not a bad return for a one dollar investment in less than a week.

Did anyone bother saving a screen shot of the New York Times website for November 6th?

I wonder if the selling out of print newspaper was a generational phenomenon. Did Millennials, the so-called redubbed, Generation O, view this edition as someone to save?

On Wednesday, November 12, I was lucky enough to pick up a copy of the New York Times Special Edition. The parody issue of the Times dated July 4, 2009, with articles full of a hopeful future. (I wonder, however, what the Yes Men and others had planned if Obama had lost.)

This elaborate campaign took months of planning and reportedly hundreds of volunteers.  It seems that they will someday be collector’s items, according to Alex S. Jones, who wrote a book on this paper titled, “The Times.” Score one for ironic outcomes.

We, as a culture, still value scarcity. My newsprint copy is worth than my screen from nytimes-se.com. The vessel is worth paying for, but the content is not. Now the two have been irreparably divorced. And we want and expect the content to be free.  However, there are times like the 6th and 12th of November 2008, that we found ourselves returning to treasuring the vessel.

For those two days, we were back to the 20th century, where people sought out the print newspaper.

What this its last hurrah?