Tuesday, December 31, 2002

Transparent Accounting Pushing Accounting Rules to the Edge of the Envelope. Can accounting that follows the stated rules still be unreliable? In other words, is there a gap in GAAP? By Kurt Eichenwald. [New York Times: Business] Enough penance for corporations?. Public ire and lawmakers' fury in '02 led to broad reforms - and more are coming. [Christian Science Monitor | Top Stories] 12:46:44 PM

San Francisco Chronicle: Will the Internet succeed in eliminating the middle man?. Carol Lloyd writes about Craig Newmark's Craigslist. Started in 1995 as his personal hobbyhorse to list cool things and offer free resources to the Bay Area community, craigslist has grown into a micro empire, with 14 employees, a nonprofit foundation and community Web sites in 16 American cities as well as Vancouver. Over the years, it's become a standard-bearer for the virtues of online community: allowing people to buy and sell goods, advertise their businesses, discuss hot topics of the day and find a job or even true love -- all for free. (The only fee craigslist charges is for job listings on the San Francisco site.) If craigslist helps people buy and sell used cars or find a baby-sitter, so what? This has always been a decentralized market. But real estate is different. Historically an insider's game, real estate has generally operated behind closed doors, according to unspoken or bureaucratically incomprehensible rules that confound the ordinary buyer or seller. It's also the only realm in which ordinary people sell their used possessions for hundreds of thousands of dollars. And if people shop and sometimes buy homes after reading free Web sites, then such Web sites are encroaching on once-hallowed territory. [Scott Loftesness] 11:36:49 AM

It's just freaking cool. The most compelling effect in Minority Report, for me, was the visualization of active paper. Last night we watched it again, and later some friends dropped by. To put this in context, I live in smalltown New Hampshire, not Silicon Valley or Silicon Alley. There is lots of dialup Internet happening here, and DSL is growing, but Wi-Fi households are rare. When a topic came up in conversation, and I flipped open the TiBook to check it out, I had an epiphany. The future really is here, albeit not evenly distributed. I didn't mention, and I'm sure it didn't occur to my friends, that I was connecting wirelessly to the Internet. It seemed completely natural that "the Internet" would be "in" this little box, whether or not wires were running to it. The technology is disappearing into the woodwork, as it should. It is becoming a small-i internet. ... [Jon's Radio] 11:35:08 AM

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