This has to be one of the most interesting talks of the last few years and covers a lot of ground. Agree with him or not, there's a lot to learn here in a very dense dose of ideas.

I just got another email from Obama. It's interesting that people aren't following his moves using online communication tools more closely (short of some articles about his campaign). The fact that he's smoothly converted the campaign's online prowess to that of the US's is remarkable, but oh so quiet. I bet I'm just not looking hard enough, but I think there's a need to take notice that this is the first time the government has really gone online with web 2.0 and social. Hell, even email blasts which are oh so old-skool in internet time are a staple of both parties and very effective communications. How about a read only, opt-in listserv to the whole country from the white house, congress, and senate? Cspan should run it. The current use of technology - and all other attempts at it by gov - is all very militaryesque. In a project management class I took the example of how not to run a project was an article about the catastrophic failure of an FBI software design and rollout plan. Never has government and technology=smooth, but it's getting better. The DMV 'pay your fine' web page, city water bill web page, etc. seem to be the painfully extruded result of months of government board meetings, extended deadlines, and failed planning. But then again, the good 'ol US of A did give us the Internet. Lets see what Obama CAN DO to bring the social front end to it!!

Data Analysis for Business Intelligence

http://www.businessintelligence.com/ From Data Strategy - Chapter 3 - very boring, but useful to some. Data = Intelligence to organizations

Everybody wants better quality of data. Some organizations hope to improve data quality by moving data from legacy systems to enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) packages. Other organizations use data profiling or data cleansing tools to unearth dirty data, and then cleanse it with an extract/transform/load (ETL) tool for data warehouse (DW) applications. All of these technology-oriented data quality improvement efforts are commendable—and definitely a step in the right direction. However, technology solutions alone cannot eradicate the root causes of poor quality data because poor quality data is not as much an IT problem as it is a business problem.

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Artificial Intelligence

Brain vs. Mind as Conveyed by the Creator of the PalmPilot

"A landmark book. On Intelligence is the first clear exposition of what could be the long-awaited 'great general theory' of human brain function. Loaded with intelligence, insight and wisdom, it's a wonderfully readable account of the fundamental principles of the brain by a great American original."

• Mike Merzenich, professor of neuroscience, University of California, San Francisco

This is an awesome service because it aggregates all of your social media activity into a one-stop shop for your updates across the sphere. I wonder how hard it would be to build an open source ROR xml aggregator. i wonder what kind of special anything this is doing besides RSS aggregation.