CNN is counting down the top 25 most influential business leaders of the past 25 years.

I see several names missing from the list. Hewlett Packard are two. Their influence on Silicon Valley, and hence the world of technology, is still felt.

John Doerr and other venture capitalists have certainly had more influence on business than Shawn Fanning, founder of Napster. Shawn's a great guy, but please. What impact has he really had on business?

There's only one spot left (it'll be announced Sunday night). But I can name at least three people at Microsoft who've had more impact on business than many of those on the list. Certainly Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates should both be on the list.

And why aren't there any Japanese names? Toyota, for instance, is one of the world's top companies. Toyota has had a far bigger impact on the world of business than Napster has.

And someone from China certainly deserves to be on the list. Am I wrong when I question this list? Who would you put on this list?

But then, CNN has become more and more irrelevant since Ted Turner left. I can not even stand watching them now. they are like a national version of the local news broadcast. No perspective, no depth, all happy talk and agitation.  4:58:50 PM    

Quickly focussed on why radio as it currently exists is dead. The main one is reason 7

Music is polarizing. This is why MTV doesn't play music anymore--there is no lowest-common-denominator playlist that enough people agree on to slow the tide of channel switching. The same is true for radio: Top 100, Top 40, Top 10--there is no magic list that can strike the right balance between broad popularity and grinding repetition to keep enough listeners. MTV went to reality TV and other "sticky" programming; radio went to cheap talk radio on the AM dial, where callers provide most of the content for free.

With this sort of polarizing, free models based solely on advertising seem doomed, at least ones that play music. The 'stations' will aggregate from the bottom, by social networks that self-organize or by subscription models. Monolithic businesses will have a hard time adapting, making it more likely they will try to prevent this from happening by regulation, ignoring their customer's needs and further alienating the customer. Quite a death spiral. The same will happen in TV. Creative, adaptive types will figure out what to do. Unfortunately for some of these companies, those sorts of people do not exist.  4:56:36 PM    

Rendezvous: flirting by iTunes.

In They Stopped Calling It Rendezvous, Alex Payne describes flirting by iTunes library.

I saw her when I got my coffee. Took note, lovely. Her. Her?

There is no music on my PowerBook. I offloaded my library to a drive that is to remain perpetually hooked up to my new Mac mini, serving away at home. Nonetheless, I shared my empty library out under the name maria i sweat your music collection <3.

I waited. I listened to selections from her library: Low, Manual. And then the sound skipped. I flipped to iTunes. Her library title had changed: try_the_new_dalek.

[Smart Mobs]

Something that could only happen between Mac geeks. And it is such a cute story. I imagine a younger, more punk/goth version of Tom Hanks/ Meg Ryan.  4:49:15 PM    

Correlation between early downloads and later citations.

Tim Brody and Stevan Harnad, Earlier Web Usage Statistics as Predictors of Later Citation Impact, a preprint. Abstract: 'The use of citation counts to assess the impact of research articles is well established. However, the citation impact of an article can only be measured several years after it has been published. As research articles are increasingly accessed through the Web, the number of

By noemail@noemail.org (Peter Suber). [Open Access News]

Trying to measure the impact of a paper has always been difficult. One way, measuring how often the paper is cited in other publication has long been used, although it has its problems. This paper uses online archives to determine whether there is a correlation between citation impact and frequency of downloading the paper. There does appear to be such a correlation. Instead of years, you can get an anwer much quicker. However, this would only work until people realized that you could write a simple program to download the paper many times, artificially pumping up your download numbers. They try to get around this by only counting document requests from a single IP once a day but it seems to me that enough ambitious people would find a way to game this system. But it is an interesting idea.  2:37:57 PM    

'Galactica' commentaries. Thanks to modern technology, you no longer need to wait for a TV show to come out on DVD to watch it with running commentary by the creators. Fans of Sci-Fi Network's "Battlestar Galactica" remake can now listen to MP3... [seattlepi.com Buzzworthy]

Now this does seem like a nifty use of podcasting and a little more interestig than some of the surrent uses.  2:21:31 PM    

Fired for a phone. Well, here's one way that bringing a cameraphone to work can get you fired: SAN ANTONIO -- A substitute teacher at a local high school was fired last month after students were shown photographs of the woman having sex, school... [seattlepi.com Buzzworthy]

Another in the growing list of things not to do with a phone when you are not making a call.  1:24:11 PM    

Inspirational ... kind of. Ultra-cynical John Constantine as the spokesman for good sportsmanship? That's just one of several hilariously discordant satirical "motivational" posters featuring comic-book antiheroes and villains created by Jeff Patterson. He explains that he was motivated to create them by the news... [seattlepi.com Buzzworthy]

These deserve to be made into real posters. I particularly like 'Imagine.'  1:22:06 PM    

Teddy sees, knows all. Clearly, I'm not the only person who finds the child-monitoring robot teddy bear demoed at Microsoft's TechFest somewhat absurd and rather creepy: Mitch Wagner: "Because your kids don't pick up enough viruses in daycare." Shiny Shiny: "How to give your... [seattlepi.com Buzzworthy]

Very funny comments. the last one only works if you have had experience with Microsoft's paper clip 'help' feature, which I have, and made me laugh out loud.  1:18:44 PM    

Darth Tater returns. Frank Catalano sent in this photo chronicling his close encounter with a larger-than-life Darth Tater at the recent Toy Fair in New York: The photo was taken in the lobby of the International Toy Center in Manhattan. Believe it... [seattlepi.com Buzzworthy]

Okay, I am freaked out. Darth tater is scary.  1:16:26 PM    

Of critics and rice cookers. A recent New York Times Magazine interview with film critic Roger Ebert revealed a number of amusing quirks about his lifestyle, including the fact that he files his video collection into two categories: ''Really Good Movies'' and ''Other Movies.'' Ebert... [seattlepi.com Buzzworthy]

I love what blogging does. We have an article that starts off with Roger Ebert and movies then moves onto rice cookers with fuzzy logic. I did not even know there were rice cooker nerds.  1:15:19 PM