Paul Graham has another thought provoking essay out: How To Be Silicon Valley. Boulder makes the probable list, along with Portland.

Here is a new blog on information technology and public policy blog that I’ve started reading. It’s an interesting concept–each student is required to write once a week, guests are welcome to chime in (you can even follow along with the reading list, should you choose to do so), and the posts seem to be well thought out. I found the post titledFile-sharing, Market Impact and Consumer Welfare to be particularly interesting.

This is a graduate course at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, graduates of which include Samual Alito, Bill Frist, Eliot Sptizer and others. So the folks writing these opinions have, at the least, an opportunity to become a mover and shaker.

Via Freedom to Tinker.

Wow. I hope Prosper.com takes off. I think it will depend on the ability of the groups to enforce repayment and keep delinquencies down.

For more on microcredit, which is essentially what Prosper.com is, check out Wikipedia and this article by The Economist on Microcredit and Disasters.

I wonder what banks think of this? Via mnot.

No, this entry isn’t about blogs. If you want to hear how blogs are transforming PR, I suggest you visit Micro Persuasion.

Via Dave Taylor, I just found out about PRLeads, a service that lets you field requests for information from journalists. When you see a request about a topic on which you consider yourself an ‘expert’, you can correspond with the journalist. You provide information and context to the journalist and if things work out, you get publicity and gain authority by being quoted in a story.

I asked a friend who has worked in PR for a long time and this service is rather revolutionary. Ten years ago, the journalist would have looked to friends or in-shop files for an expert, but now they have access to everyone who knows about the service and is willing to pay the fee ($99/month–hardly backbreaking).

This is good for everyone. Journalists get access to experts who they might not find otherwise as well as the chance to write a more correct story (due to the fact that they’ll be exposed to more viewpoints). Experts get a chance to shape public opinion as well as publicity. And the public is exposed to a wider range of views than they’d otherwise see. Win-win-win.

PRLeads is a perfect example of an internet company, by the way. It has network effects–journalists will go where the most experts are, and experts will go where the most journalists are. It’s a service that just couldn’t be efficiently run without the internet. And the main commodity is information.

Update: Here’s a blog entry about results from PRLeads.com.

The US government has just released a DVD about identity theft. This DVD, “Identity Theft: Outsmarting the Crooks”,

features experts from the government and the private sector talking about the scope of the identity theft problem and how a few simple steps can significantly increase protection. Experts also cover topics such as: online safety; access to credit reports; taxpayer vulnerabilities to identity theft; and dealing with debt collectors if you are a victim of identity theft.

For only $2, it might be worth checking out.

What is interesting to me is how the government is using new technologies to increase citizen access to information. The government has RSS feeds (here are some from the Treasury Department) and a host of podcasts.

I’ve been doing some recent coding with Google Maps (like many many other folks). Anyway, I ran across a IP to location mapper. Pretty cool stuff. Would be interesting to hook this up to access logs. Via Infectious Greed.

Here’s an interesting speech about complexity by author Michael Crichton. It’s hard to argue with his conclusions:

If we can’t even understand the basic aspects of our own systems [financial markets], what makes anybody think we can understand natural phenomena, that are thousands of times more complicated?

What do things like this article on data mining Amazon wishlists mean? It’s awe inspiring, and not a little frightening, to think about what this kind of activity means… If all this information is available via a shell script and wget and 30 hours of work, what kind of information is going on behind the firewall, with direct access to the data warehouses?

Via reddit

Well, Wikipedia has hit the big time, as far as I’m concerned. Check out article on Bayesian reasoning and the human mind. An interesting article, given that Bayesian filtering is used to fight spam. But what really blew me away was the figure entitled “Vital Statistics, which is drawn from Wikipedia. The fact that The Economist, a major publication, is using it as a source is even more compelling than The Onion mocking it.