"And a week or so later, when you try to remember what you said at this party, that really terrific thing, you rack your brain, but can’t quite come up with it. That’s Twitter.

The blog, on the other hand, is slow, reliably reference-able, and findable. It’s like a speech, prepared in advance, with the text distributed. Some will hear the speech on the day it’s delivered, but others will be able to reference its text across the years."

"Want to keep your users? Just make it easy for them to leave."

"So, why don’t you have your own policy? Why can’t you be as trustworthy on the Web as you are walking into any store off the street? The reason is that you have no status on the Web itself beyond the minima implied by the term “user.” Whatever status you experience is what’s granted by site owners. You are the client. Your position is submissive. The dominant party is in charge, and there are a billion-plus of those."

Creating a reliable and persistent data store is a major hurdle to cross for personalized education.

""If 2009 was about the data platform, Data.gov, I would argue that 2010 is about thinking through the participatory platforms," said Chopra."

Very cool story about Bob Graham's notebooks for tracking daily information.

"Social streams may eclipse RSS, but the blogosphere's roots run deeper."

Quick summary of the black market for data APIs.

"Some time ago, I circulated a document internally with a straightforward thesis: Twitter needs to decentralize or it will die. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not even in a decade, but it was (and, I think, remains) my belief that all communications media will inevitably be decentralized, and that all businesses who build walled gardens will eventually see them torn down."

Mark Cuban argues that the uproar over privacy and Facebook is misplaced.

"Now, it might not be likely that a loose confederation of software companies and engineers can turn Facebook’s core services into shared protocols, nor would it be easy for that loose coupling of various online services to compete with Facebook...But in the internet I’d like to live in, we’d have that option, instead of being left with the choice of letting Facebook use us, or being left out of the conversation altogether."

Interesting new protocol being released for an open and distributed link-sharing system. Already has the likes of Google, Instapaper, and Digg on board.

"What pisses me off the most are the numbers of people who feel trapped. Not because they don’t have another choice. (Technically, they do.) But because they feel like they don’t. They have invested time, energy, resources, into building Facebook what it is. They don’t trust the service, are concerned about it, and are just hoping the problems will go away."

Scrapbooking the 21st-century child's life, the digital way.

Great, short video about the potential and critiques of the semantic web.

Building up the "Facebook is not to be trusted" argument.

Notes from Danah Boyd's talk at WWW 2010. A great manifesto for cautiously dealing with Big Data.

"So in summary: I need to be able to isntall my own Twitter and move my presence to my own server, easily. And I need control over the look and feel of my site."

"Facebook, MySpace and several other social-networking sites have been sending data to advertising companies that could be used to find consumers' names and other personal details, despite promises they don't share such information without consent." – How long before someone sues the hell out of them?

"Google said on Friday that for more than three years it had inadvertently collected snippets of private information that people send over unencrypted wireless networks."

The Diaspora team gives their pitch for funding on Kickstarter. The idea for a decentralized, individually owned social network is great.