"Pinterest has 10 million users. Let's say that the average across all of them is that they buy items valued at $10 in a month through affiliate links on Pinterest. That's $100,000,000 of sales for which Pinterest would get credit. That's $3.75 million in monthly revenue, or $45 million of annual revenue.
"If the site had 800 million users like Facebook? That revenue would go to $3.6 billion, just $100 million less than Facebook's 2011 haul."

"Apple® today announced it has sold three million of its incredible new iPad®, since its launch on Friday, March 16." What's remarkable about this isn't just the numbers (it took 28 days to sell the first million iPads, and estimates are that the iPad 2 sold a million in its first week), but that Apple have been able to supply the demand. (Anecdata: most people in SF who pre-ordered found their delivery chain started in Ontario, California rather than abroad.)

"I contacted a friend of a friend, a smart and lovely editor at a high-profile women’s magazine that from time to time runs articles about strong women doing worthwhile work. Her reply was quick, honest, and upsetting: The magazine couldn’t tackle the palm oil issue head on, because half its advertisers were beauty companies guilty of destroying the very same forests."

"What we saw is something unique in the history of American social movements: a mass conversion to free-market theory as a response to hard times. Before this recession, people who had been cheated by bankers almost never took that occasion to demand that bankers be freed from "red tape" and the scrutiny of the law." An extract from Pity The Billionaire by Thomas Frank.

Matthew Engel: "This is the sixth in my irregular series on British Institutions. After I finished the fifth, I noticed that the themes were becoming familiar: [...] the glory days were over; it was a fight to maintain popularity and relevance; and money was getting ever tighter." "But London Underground is different. It is more expansive and confident now than at any time in memory. How on earth has this happened?" Nice photographs too.

"what Delicious is doing doesn't quite mirror what we want out of it - which is a piece of plumbing where we can store our bookmarks and then extract a subset daily. Plumbing is dull. Plumbing is also essential. That's why you pay money when you get it done. Pinboard, it turns out, isn't into "social news", but it is in to taking our money."

"In an interview in Germany’s Der Spiegel, Dominik Schwarzinger and Matthias Kramer, who are researching the entrepreneurial personality, say that borderline personality disorders can actually be crucial elements behind startup success."

"Focusing on boys saved the toymaker in 2005. Now the company is launching Lego Friends for “the other 50 percent of the world’s children.” Will girls buy in?" This seems to be causing a minor kerfuffle on Twitter, but I can see what Lego are trying to do, and why. The 1980s style of relatively gender-neutral Town stuff has gone, and nowadays the line is, well, stereotypically male. Also: "The Lego Friends team is aware of the paradox at the heart of its work: To break down old stereotypes about how girls play, it risks reinforcing others. “If it takes color-coding or ponies and hairdressers to get girls playing with Lego, I’ll put up with it, at least for now, because it’s just so good for little girls’ brains,” says Lise Eliot", a neuroscientist and author.

I've heard bits of this from people inside the tech-does-music industry, but it's good to see someone come over the parapet and properly talk about the craziness of licencing.

Aditya Chakrabortty: "Both the evidence and the voters are against investment bankers. So why do the politicians cling on to them? Part of the answer is financial. ... the City now provides half of all Tory party funds. That is up from just 25% only five years ago." "Running this government are two sons of bankers. Cameron's father was a stockbroker, Clegg's is still chairman of United Trust Bank."

(Side note: the picture is of Canary Wharf, part of the City-as-finance but not City-as-geography or City-as-government. It's arguably more photogenic, though.)

"Like the passing of distinguished individuals, the passing of great corporations should prompt us to ponder the transience of earthly glory. So let's pay our respects to Eastman Kodak, which at this writing appears to be a shutter-click from extinction."

"In the past 30 years, the UK's manufacturing sector has shrunk by two-thirds, the greatest de-industrialisation of any major nation. It was done in the name of economic modernisation – but what has replaced it?"

George Monbiot on scathing form. "Our common treasury in the last 30 years has been captured by industrial psychopaths. That's why we're nearly bankrupt." "Reading their work, it seems to me that if you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a poor family, you're likely to go to prison. If you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a rich family, you're likely to go to business school."

Somewhere between eight and four years ago, Matt Webb took the single-minded focus of the geek and applied it to learning how to run a business. This is the result (except 'result' is the wrong word, because as this post makes clear, it's still a process). It's fascinating, and slightly daunting, but well worth reading.

"After marveling at the idea of an endless corridor of offices, and speculating on Twitter about which firm could handle all that curved glass, I realized Apple's ring reminded me of something else. And it wasn't the future. It was 1957." A very good critique of the conceptual framework behind Apple's proposed new Cupertino campus.

A must-read article comparing the Dutch (and German) and British postal industries in the time of the internet.

"BAA said it had handled 7.2 million passengers at its six UK airports in December, down 10.9% from a year ago." Also, Virgin Atlantic is witholding fees because of the "slow reaction" to snow. Fun times.

"it's up to the entrepreneurs who are building applications in the valleys between those hills to make the tough choice: do you live off the largesse of the feudal lord on top of the hill, and enjoy the short term benefits [... or] do you go your own way, and attempt to amass enough strength to take the hill yourself?"

Fascinating stuff. "‘Figures are down,’ we say again, but more wearily now, as we pile yet more packages into our panniers, before setting off on our rounds." "They aren’t rival mail companies in a free market, as the propaganda would have you believe. None of them delivers any mail. All they do is ride on the back of the system created and developed by the Royal Mail." "Whether the Royal Mail remains in public hands or is partly or fully privatised in the future, the pension deficit will always remain the tax-payer’s obligation." "There is a tension between the Royal Mail as a profit-making business and the Royal Mail as a public service."

Fascinating stuff, about the emigre from Iraq and the way the Norwegians decided to deal with the discovery of oil reserves.

On the birth and death of the British TV manufacturing industry, with interesting digressions on the fact that we still make programmes and the future of the screen as a focal point for living rooms.

"Journalists pooh-poohed the brevity of the stories, media buyers thought it too cheap, rival executives thought it was a licence to lose money. Nobody seemed to like it, except the readers, a fact Metro quickly alerted media buyers to" Have a go at the internet for dumbing down news if you like, but Metro was doing it on paper at the same time.

The Hoxton wanker take on thrift. "Everyone seems to be taking a lot of (perverse) pleasure in faux-austerity and mock phlegmatic belt-tightening."

On a proposed (infinite?) TV archive via a cable provider. "The Supreme Court should rule that copyright holders (the studios, in this case) retain the right to profit from the distribution of their work for a given period of time."

"For me though the huge loss is board games."

Lots of interesting stuff in here, both about the iPhone's UI metaphors, and also pricing responses on the App Store.

"Here’s an idea for newspaper website homepages — just a search box and a list of blogs." One reader's frustrations trying to get local news out of a world-focussed US newspaper site.

"here’s a whacky idea my Yahoo friends. Why not define yourself by your news services and the other stuff where you destroy the competition?" He's not the first person to say this, but concentrating on news not the Flickr/delicious axis is new.

This isn't actually that much about the environmental aspects, not as I read it, but it's a fascinating look at Asustek's factories in Suzhou, amongst other things. (Don't read the comments.)

Speaking of Yahoo, it's hard to see how they're going to be able to refuse a 62% premium, even if the cash part of the offer doesn't quite cover the current valuation.

If record labels are "prepared to keep copy restrictions on his label’s songs on iTunes for six months to a year while Amazon establishes itself", then where does that leave Europe? DRMed, evidently.

I wonder how they'll find the (Perl, I think) infrastructure there? Also, does this point to a consolidation in mapping, and what happens to Streetmap?

"Innovation only happens at Apple's pace. The marketplace of ideas is much smaller, and the devices are much poorer because of it. (Example: Why can't I stream music from my iPhone or iPod touch to my Airport Express?)" Why indeed?

I liked Gruber's take ("couldn't they find a symbol that stood for 'shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic?'"), but it made me wonder if anyone's suggested Apple should buy Sun. After all, the inverse was a popular cry ten years ago...

Today's 4th of July link: the US uses more petrol than the next twenty countries combines. As ssp says though, per-capita petrol consumption would be interesting. (I'm guessing Canada and Australia would do really badly.)

Facebook apps are well-integrated, proxied, have access to a rich API, and are viral. "iLike announced that they have passed 3 million users on Facebook and are still growing -- at a rate of 300,000 users per day."

"Michael Dell, the founder, chairman and chief executive of Dell, is himself an Ubuntu user." Could be interesting; depends how well hidden the Linux option is.

"Apple has always wanted to operate a single, pan-European iTunes store [...] but we were advised by the music labels and publishers that there were certain legal limits to the rights they could grant us." Blame the artists, then?

"When I bought some of the finest American music around and then moved to Sweden, my music was no longer authorized and cannot be played" I knew there were limits at purchase time, but authorisation that varies by territory is awful.

I found this email from the Iowa anti-trust case, on the priorities for Office 97 development, fascinating. During Apple's darkest days there were people deep in MS who still really cared about shipping great products.

I like the way the name swaps between Omniphone and Omnifone throughout the article. Anyway, the iPhone isn't appealing because of music downloads, but because it's purty.

"Britain, as a colonial outpost, is only relevant for crude profits, not long-term social developments."; "Barwick, like Gordon Brown, is a bureaucrat speaking into a void."

Tagged to note variant URLs in Comment Is Free stories that also appear in the main paper (and the comment syncing).

Tagged mainly to note for Phil Gyford the fact that CiF articles also exist on the main Guardian sites, and the comments are syncronised between them. Why there's not a single URL I have no idea. Maybe Hammersley could explain.

Sadly, I suspect this might be right- Ajax is easier for most people, I doubt it's as easy to make money from a data API, and people follow Google.

Sad news as the model kit company goes into receivership.

Bit rambling, but this is interesting: "Three in particular were responsible for OpenDoc integration. Not surprisingly, the following week the three engineers were recruited by Microsoft. Result: no OpenDoc support in ClarisWorks 5.0."

Seesaws between insightful and infuriating. Worth a read though.

Macs don't have the same price premium over comparable PCs as people think (10% not 20%), but Apple also don't sell low-end machines. Hmm.

£28bn of overvaluing on the shares? Ouch ouch ouch.