Antony Funnell interviews Douglas Rushkoff about the importance of technical literacy. Air date: February 24, 2011.

Ed Felten says the main reason for the popularity of “cloud computing” is that it reduces technology management costs and that this squarely trumps resource efficiency—i.e. “the cloud” may be less efficient, and consume more resources. I think he’s exactly right. And I believe the economists call this phenomenon making some of the costs of running the business into “externalities.”

Tim O’Reilly gives a list of reasons why he likes Obama’s new Chief Technology Officer, Aneesh Chopra.

Chris Kohler reviews Racing the Beam (2009) by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost, a new book about the significant technical challenges faced by developers who were making games for the Atari 2600.

It's a good question since it keeps coming up: should you run your e-mail services in-house or adopt free or cheap third-party hosted solutions. Many people commenting in this thread seem to see the former as more work than it's worth, and have liked the experience of moving to the latter.

Bruce Schneier on data as risk, and the pollution of the Information Age. He talks about the need for discussion, planning and policy to deal with the impact of data persistence on privacy as a significant moment of societal change.

Roger Johansson reporting on screen reader usage data from a recent survey, including the interesting fact that 76% of users update their screen reader within 12 months of a new release. Cool.