Wednesday, February 12, 2003

The New Post-Amazon Bookstore - Andrew Sullivan's Book Club. This link will take you to Andrew Sullivan's Book Club. I wonder if this is the new post Amazon bookstore? Here is why I think this. Andrew enables us book nuts to have a club to talk about the books we like. He therefore extends the powerful reader review part of the Amazon site and creates a deeper community. If you buy the book from him linked to Amazon, he gets 15% but you don't pay any more. So Andrew becomes a power store for Amazon. Good for Andrew good for Jeff Bezos and good for me the reader who wants to participate in an informed forum. Andrew and Amazon make the book purchase very easy thus he and the reader piggy back on Amazon's system and logistics. He is a book store that has all the power of Amazon behind it and they pay him! Remember how long it took to get that copy and how much it cost from you friendly local bookseller? Let's go a bit deeper. Andrew's site is also like a book club. General Book clubs are OK for their owners but specialty book clubs - Military, Cooking etc - are exceptionally attractive. Lower overall volume but much more per member. Military buffs buy all the good books. This takes George Dafermos's ideas of the power of collaborative filtering to the next level as well. Maybe if Amazon is then a general book club - we can all then set up our own or join specialty clubs. Andrews is maybe too general right now. Anyone going to open a military club? Maybe I should? [Robert Paterson's Radio Weblog] 8:06:09 PM     I'm always torn, patriot act as intrusive privacy piercing problem, or necessary to protect our country.  In fact I'm not that worried.  Sure they took down the twin towers, but most of us lived.  Reminds me of airport security - the amount of tax evasion, and international fraud is not that high vs the amount associated with evil guys raising laundered money for terrorist missions. Now this sight will hit the govt radar on key word searches...  Go away! Often...;-) ================ A Chilly Response to 'Patriot II'. Lawmakers and civil rights groups say a proposed follow-up to the USA Patriot Act goes too far in granting broad new surveillance powers to the Justice Department. By Ryan Singel. [Wired News] 7:05:38 PM     Considering that I've been looking at IBM life sciences consulting stuff, here is a cool idea - Virtual supercomputer.  Reminds me of Jim Henderson's download of the SETI software to his Mac a few years ago.  But here the application is more immediately useful (unless of course SETI finds the Vulcans), and the software development intelligence to create a virtual supercomputers. This concept is a cool social movement idea - people with similar interests who are dispersed, but linked via broadband can allow their computers to add their computing power to solve problems of interest to them.  Intersection of High data processing and high social value problem - eg cancer genomic research, or extra terrestrial searches... ============== IBM Grid Computing: Join with us to fight Smallpox. Through the smallpox Grid project, potentially more than two million personal computers will be linked to create a virtual supercomputer that could deliver processing power greater than the most powerful supercomputers in use today. Researchers will use this massive computing power to analyze the active proteins in smallpox and screen approximately 35 million molecules to find drugs that will target these harmful proteins, and effectively treat or prevent smallpox infections [Smart Mobs] 6:49:39 PM     Key concept is the self-assembling project team that resembles film production. =================== From Jon's Radio One of the threads woven through my latest O'Reilly Network column is the notion that the film industry's project-oriented, just-in-time assembly of resources and talent is a leading indicator. "Every business will be like show business," say the authors of a 1995 Inc. Magazine story I quote in the article. What led me to hunt down that article was a conversation with my friend Andy Singleton, a serial entrepeneur [Now he goes on to extend the idea into self learning software...] Then he points out Andy Singleton's Byte article about Genetic Algorithm Software   6:35:41 PM

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