Twitter has launched an election page, an outpost where users can share their thoughts on the various twists and turns of this wacky season. It's a neat example of what Twitter should be doing more of going forward. Twitter has great unrealized potential -- imagine a series of watercoolers where users can interact over shared interests (as opposed to just publicly IM'ing friends). It would be a very powerful thing indeed. The users are already there. It'll be exciting to see where Twitter takes them.

This doesn't look like it feels too good: people getting punched in the face in ultra-slow motion. Yeowch. I guess in slow motion that would be yyyeeeeooowwwwwwwwcccchhhhhhh!

Stuart Ramson/HTC-AP

... this phone was not primarily designed to solve a problem that you, the consumer, are having. Rather it was designed to solve a problem that Google has—namely, the need to keep feeding more and more people into the maw of Google's online advertising machine ...

In other words, the phone is a Trojan horse. You get a cool phone for not much money—$179 with a contract from T-Mobile—but then you're caught in Google's Web. Another way to see this is that a quasi-monopolist (Google rules the online advertising business) is attempting to protect and extend its quasi-monopoly by giving away at no cost something for which others charge money. Sound familiar? It's what Microsoft did to Netscape in the 1990s, giving away a free browser to undermine Netscape Navigator.

Oh, snap! I haven't played with the device yet, but it does look fairly nifty (for an elaborate advertising platform, especially). Indeed, elsewhere on the Internets BoingBoing guest contributor Douglas Rushkoff seems to be enjoying his new toy:

I played with Android yesterday. I don't gush over products. At least not in years. But this one makes me feel a bit like I did when I got my Kaypro. It's a solid device that hints at the beginning of a "golden age" of solid and reliable smart phone technology ...

I've played with a lot of phones, but this is the first true "smart phone" that is as easy to use as an iPhone, Sidekick, or Helio Ocean. Unlike the iPhone, it has a real keyboard that slips out from the bottom (and a bit more effortlessly than the one on my Ocean). Real keys, too, that feel good and click. Oh, did I forget to mention it? Copy and paste.

Of course, Rushkoff flicks at the advertising concern, but in the end is just pleased as punch with his relatively open source toy. Here's a video demo of Android that's been making the rounds for, oh, a year (we're nothing if not timely).




In conclusion: I wish Newsweek's top editors would make big announcements wearing Rollerblades.

When Woody Guthrie was singing hillbilly songs on a little Los Angeles radio station in the late 1930s, he used to mail out a small mimeographed songbook to listeners who wanted the words to his songs, On the bottom of one page appeared the following:

"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."

We use private rights to create public goods: creative works set free for certain uses. Like the free software and open-source movements, our ends are cooperative and community-minded, but our means are voluntary and libertarian. We work to offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them — to declare “some rights reserved.”

Today the good people at TED posted a video of Philip Zimbardo's talk--brimming with humanity and good will--from the conference earlier this year. Zimbardo is, of course, the psychologist who designed the Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971. More recently, he was called upon to be an expert witness at Abu Ghraib trials, an experience that led him to write "The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil."

You can buy his book, or better yet, watch the video. (And then buy his book.)

Zimbardo's central theory won't be too surprising to anyone even remotely familiar with his work: Many people who do horrible things are not necessarily born "evil." Determining why good people turn evil, or do evil things, has been his life's work. A lot of it, it turns out, has to do with circumstance. Evil, as Zimbardo sees it, is when power is abused in such a way that it hurts people physically, psychically or emotionally. And "if you give people power without oversight, it's a prescription for abuse," he says.

To illustrate his point he uses the Abu Ghraib prison scandal to examine how ordinary soldiers--who would be called "bad apples" by the government that asked them to oversee prisoners with inadequate training and oversight--did things that were extraordinary for their brutality. (In a somewhat related note, this week the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a 2006 ruling by Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein ordering the release of the Abu Ghraib pictures to the ACLU.)

With the caveat that "understanding is not excusing" evil, Zimbardo ends on a positive note: sure, the power to commit evil resides dormant in us all. But so does the potential for great heroism.

Context is key. Just ask Wesley Autrey, the New York City subway hero.

The funny, fast and informative Calculated Risk blog (read and commented upon by both Average Joes and economists, like Paul Krugman)

For news on failing banks, there's the Implode-o-Meter.

CNBC has a speedy market ticker--to keep track of late-breaking ups and downs (and further downs).

Thejuciest Wall-Street gossip can be had at Dealbreaker.

And, may you never need it, Bloomberg's debt-consolidation calculator.

(The Troll and his liberal arts degree would like to thank Newsweek.com photo editor and finance wizard Kathy Jones for this post)

I, for one, hope never to be chained to a bunkbed with a veciloraptor. Because it has been brought to my attention that if, by some fluke, I were chained to a bunkbed with a velciloraptor, I would only last one minute and six seconds chained to said bunkbed. At which point I would, presumably, perish, courtesy of the pointy bits of the veciloraptor. Which had also been chained to the bunkbed. (What I want to know is how long I would survive chained to a bunkbed with Mickey Rourke.)

That's right. Gravel. It's my new name. I think it suits me.

You know, Gravel. As in Gravel Palin. Or more specifically, Gravel Blood Palin. 

Are you jealous that I have a Palin name and you don't? Well, do not let envy eat you up from within ... that's, like, way unpatriotic. Instead, do what I did and check out the Sarah Palin Baby Name Generator to get your very one Palin moniker. Although I guarantee you that you won't get as awesome a Palin name as Gravel Blood. (A friend of mine was dubbed Hen Waffle Palin, which, to be sure, is rad. But there just isn't something right about having the name "Waffle" in an election season. It's worse than Hussein! Also, isn't Hen just a little, I don't know ... sexist? Maybe I'm reading too much into this?)

What's your Palin name?

Mark Zuckerberg, listen up! Ad Age's Bob Garfield (co-host of NPR's On the Media--whom I've interviewed and whose bitingly dry wit I lurve) is the latest and perhaps greatest to offer up a business model. Monetizing Facebook, what a novel concept. He begins his piece, "Your Data With Destiny," with a little context for you, young padwan:

The quid pro quo between the marketer and the audience, for several centuries, has been free or subsidized media in exchange for inundation with ad messages. Madge didn't say "You're soaking in it" for nothing. In the Brave New World, and already in the last remnants of the cowardly old one, the value proposition will be similar but the barter items very different. A marketer needn't pay for episodes of "Gunsmoke" or "Married With Children" or "24"; it need only provide value -- whether in entertainment, information, discount or utility. In exchange, the consumer surrenders data.

Nothing too surprising there. Gradually he winds his way through his argument, taking you in the process to MIT, Silicon Valley, even Israel. Here's a little nugget of wisdom he picks up in Dulles:

"'Now we have the ability to automate serendipity,' says Dave Morgan, founder of Tacoda, the behavioral-marketing firm sold to AOL in 2007 for a reported $275 million. 'Consumers may know things they think they want, but they don't know for sure what they might want. They're not spending all their time hunting for those things.'"

"Automating serendipity" is a concise and almost lovely way of putting it -- if you find sophisticated Orwellian marketing schemes to be lovely. But hey, if you play online, you probably know that you're leaving behind breadcrumbs for advertisers. You may have noticed those ads on Google or eBay or even, yes, Facebook pages that already seem eerily tailored to your interests. You have only yourself (and your web surfing habits) to blame/thank. Don't like it? Log off. After about eleventy thousand words, Garfield gets to his advice to Zuckerberg. People who have even passively paid attention to developments in online advertising aren't going to find any of this particularly earth-shattering or revolutionary. But the fact that Zuckerberg hasn't adopted a common sense approach like Garfield's (yet, anyway) is nonetheless surprising:

Dude, blessed as you are with the megaphenomenon called Facebook, why are you just another popular utility in search of a business model? Could it be that you're fixated on the notion that your revenue must come from typical advertising? Haven't we agreed that advertising is problematic, because users are suspicious of it, resent it and employ every means to avoid it? Yes, we have. Yet the same people 1) love goods and services; 2) crave information; and 3) are so fabulously self-involved that they display every last detail about themselves, their tastes, their preferences, their favorites, their hobbies, their embarrassing drunken photos, their damn near everything right on your site.

So why in the world do you not have a big honking box on the bottom of every Facebook page titled "What You'll Like" or "YouStuff" or "The Mirror" with a category-by-category selection of books, music, films, videos, news articles, websites, tennis gear, shoes, power tools, specialty foods, flea and tick protection, you name it?

So what do you think? How would you monetize Facebook?