“This group is for images you make where some part of a modern day scene is overlapped by an old photograph. For example, you hold up an old photo so that you can see its place in the modern context.”

“They inhabited their remote island for 1,100 years without so much as dabbling in leveraged buyouts, hostile takeovers, derivatives trading, or even small-scale financial fraud. When, in 2003, they sat down at the same table with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, they had only the roughest idea of what an investment banker did and how he behaved—most of it gleaned from young Icelanders’ experiences at various American business schools. And so what they did with money probably says as much about the American soul, circa 2003, as it does about Icelanders. They understood instantly, for instance, that finance had less to do with productive enterprise than trading bits of paper among themselves.”

“Cardin’s Newspaper Revitalization Act would allow newspapers to operate as nonprofits for educational purposes under the U.S. tax code, giving them a similar status to public broadcasting companies.”

“The whole exercise was stupid, akin to buying insurance from the captain of the Titanic, who put the premiums in the ship’s safe and collected a tidy bonus for his efforts.”

“This is trolling, albeit well-done trolling. The questions the pot-lobby have asked have been submitted in serious ways, and they aren’t about Area 51. Obama thus now faces a classic Internet dilemma: how to deal with the trolls? Will he cave and answer one of the pot questions? Or will he just ignore them?”

“Perhaps you’re considering using a dedicated key-value or document store instead of a traditional relational database. Reasons for this might include:

* You’re suffering from Cloud-computing Mania.

* You need an excuse to ‘get your Erlang on’

* You heard CouchDB was cool.

* You hate MySQL, and although PostgreSQL is much better, it still doesn’t have decent replication. There’s no chance you’re buying Oracle licenses.

* Your data is stored and retrieved mainly by primary key, without complex joins.

* You have a non-trivial amount of data, and the thought of managing lots of RDBMS shards and replication failure scenarios gives you the fear.

Whatever your reasons, there are a lot of options to chose from…”

“When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

“There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.”

“That’s why I’ve collected the following links. Together, they form a kind of flying seminar on the future of news, presented in real time. (They are all from the month of March 2009.) Read all twelve and you’ll be caught up on your newspaper big think. Here they are in the order I think you should read them. If you take the seminar, feel free to leave your impressions in the comments. The “flying” part is simple: go ahead, steal these links. Spread the seminar. Get your people up to speed.”