Technology
Why Republicans Aren’t Serious About Getting Rural Areas Online
Spectrum policy isn’t the most incendiary or outlandish of the planks in the now-public Republican platform. But for pure disingenuousness, it ranks pretty near the top. READ MORE >>
The Tweeps on the Bus
IT’S EASY TO FORGET that eight months ago BuzzFeed didn’t even have a politics section. The website was known primarily for posting goofy and/or heart-warming lists created expressly for readers to share on social-media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Among the most popular BuzzFeed articles of 2011 were “20 Alcoholic Beverages Inspired By The Harry Potter Series,” “Basset Hounds Running,” and “Scared Bros at a Haunted House.” READ MORE >>
The Red State-Blue State Divide, As Seen by Amazon Books
Amazon has a fascinating “election heat” map listing the 100 best-selling “red” (i.e., conservative) and “blue” (i.e., liberal) books, and also calculating, based on the number of sales in each state for the top 250 red and blue books, which states are majority-red and which are majority-blue. The map, which is updated hourly, delivers some bad news—or at least it did when I checked it at 12:45 p.m. READ MORE >>
The Naked and the TED
I. READ MORE >>
The Machine and the Ghost
Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality of Things By Peter-Paul Verbeek (University of Chicago Press, 183 pp., $25) READ MORE >>
Who Goes There?
Twitterish
The Metropolitan Nature of IPOs
Facebook’s IPO (Initial Public Offering) is projected to value the company at $104 billion. Reportedly, only Visa has had a larger IPO. Only time will tell if Facebook is really worth such an astronomical sum, but one thing about it is not all extraordinary: Its location in the Bay Area. From 1996 to 2006, 9 percent of all U.S. IPOs were headquartered in the San Francisco metropolitan areas--where Facebook is located--and another 10 percent came from the San Jose metro area. READ MORE >>
