Interestingness from all over.

Banners - The Media-Creative Schism
"You have a million dollars of a client’s money to spend online. Whichis more profitable? Give it to a boutique studio that has a team of 15 expensive people on the project, with high overhead costs and a lot of freelancer bills, or to give it to Yahoo, and take 25% profit off the top, and assign one media guy to oversee it? The profit pressure is immense to just give it to Yahoo."

Making Online Retail Social
WujWuj launched a retail portal allowing friends to by items together at lower cost than a single item. Not sure if it can scale, but interesting product nonetheless.

Facebook Gets Older
Can Facebook avoid the MySpace death spiral through the masses? For that matter, can MySpace regain its cool? Or is this the opportunity for the next big social player to arise? Friendster, then MySpace, then Facebook, then what?

The neurological basis for Intuition
"According to a new study, our gut feelings can enhance the retrieval of explicitly encoded memories - those memories which we encode actively - and therefore lead to improved accuracy in simple decisions. The study, which is published online in Nature Neuroscience, also provides evidence that the retrieval of explicit and implicit memories involves distinct neural substrates and mechanisms."

Internet Speed: Measured in Remixes
"Just remember that these pieces of content spread because real live human beings thought that they were remarkable enough to tell someone else about. And all of these remixes happened because real live human beings were inspired to create them."

The Ecology of Finance
"Even free-marketeers like Greenspan now recognize that unregulated capitalism has serious, perhaps fatal, weaknesses, and is in need of a tune-up. The world could try to develop a new model from first principles, but Princeton's Simon Levin, the Scripps Institute's George Sugihara, and Oxford's Bob May have published work pointing out that there are many natural systems that mimic, in nontrivial ways, the functioning of financial markets. "I've come to understand," says Levin, "that they're the same kinds of systems." Both feature competition for limited resources; individuals trying to maximize their own return; and competition and exploitation as well as the need for cooperation."

Overcoming our empathy deficit
"I want to warm to a theme that we too suffer from a deficit of empathy in the way we relate to those we seek to influence. We may try to understand their lives but we never really try to see the world through their eyes. That’s partly because we are constantly trying to lump people together so that their incredibly disparate lives become more manageable for us. And when we aren’t doing that we are dividing them into horrifying segments and then, even worse, writing ghastly pen portraits about our imaginary lives."