A fellow named Fons Tuinstra posted a lament about the usefulness of his LinkedIn account in terms of developing his business relationships.

From the BBC:

Social network sites are moving to make it much easier for software developers to write add-ons for the hugely popular web destinations.

Bebo, Facebook, Meebo and Friendster have unveiled plans to help them become more than places to keep in touch.

The add-ons will allow users to add extras, such as video and music clips, to the personal profiles they maintain. ...

Significantly, Bebo's interface tools will work with Facebook's already announced development system. This will make it possible for the many developers who have written applications for Facebook to use their code almost unchanged for the Bebo network.

Despite the tie-up on tools, Bebo and Facebook will not become a unified network.

SOCIAL SITES: DAILY VISITORS MySpace - 29 million Facebook - 15 million Friendster - 5.9 million Orkut - 9.6 million Bebo - 4.8 million Source: ComScore July 2007

Bebo said it would also support Google's Open Social initiative which aims to create a unified system of tools that can be used on any and every social network site. The Open Social tools are due to appear in early 2008.

Social networking giant MySpace is backing Google's initiative

From CBC.ca:

Google Inc. is testing a new user tool that invites people to write authoritative articles on particular subjects, a move that could put the internet search giant in direct competition with the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

The user-generated knowledge project, dubbed Knol, was made available this week to a small group of users in a trial, said Google's vice-president engineering, Udi Manber, in a Thursday evening post on Google's official blog.

"We believe that many do not share that knowledge today simply because it is not easy enough to do that," wrote Manber. "Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it."

Google said it would provide tools for writing, editing and provide free hosting of the content. Authors would receive credit for their work and could choose to include Google ads on their pages, with authors getting a share of the revenue generated from those ads.

Multiple articles — called knols — on the same subject would be allowed. The articles would be ranked according to a reader voting mechanism.

He may appear like a rough, tough, bottom-line-obsessed businessman who shut down the escalators at the Chicago Sun-Times to save a few bucks, but those who cling to that, that ... caricature don't know the real David Radler.

Iran's top elected political leader not only blogs, he approves negative comments.

This arrived, with the subject '27':

27

For more details: http://www.bbcnews.com

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This e-mail is never sent unsolicited. You have received this BBC Breaking News Alert because you subscribed to it or, someone forwarded it to you.

To unsubscribe (or subscribe if this message was forwarded to you) go to: http://www.bbc.co.uk/email

Actually, a few more details would be entirely in order. :)

Let's say you're a pig farmer and you hire a sex trade worker.

While she's in your company, your dark side erupts and you kill her.

That is murder, as I understand the law, and would probably qualify as second-degree murder.

But then you go out and commit five more such murders. You get rid of the bodies by butchering your victims and feeding their remains to your pigs.

At what point does your pattern of behaviour start to become planning and deliberation, thus making you guilty of first-degree murder?

Conrad gets a 6½-year prison sentence, a US$125,000 fine and must pay $6.1 million in restitution.

His first day of imprisonment is scheduled for March 3, 2008. By coincidence, March 3, 1996 would be my first full day of "freedom" from the Leader-Post, after a Hollinger-orchestrated layoff that left 173 Saskatchewan newspaper workers on the street the day before.

All the best on the appeal front, Mr. Black.

Here's the CTV.ca and globeandmail.com stories. Here's some thoughts I had when he was found guilty back in July.

A quick comparison of Black's sentence compared to that of David Radler, another former top Hollinger executive who pleaded guilty in 2005, agreed to co-operate and received a 29-month sentence -- which he can serve in Canada.

Generally speaking, someone serving a Canadian federal prison term gets full parole after serving about 40 per cent of their sentence.

Radler could be out on parole in about a year; less for day parole.

Black will have to serve 85 per cent of his sentence -- or about 5½ years (Radler would have had to serve about two years in the U.S.) before getting full parole.

In Canada, to serve 5½ years before getting parole would be like getting a sentence of 13.75 years.

Hubris has its costs.

From the NYT's David Carr:

Last Friday, the city of Chicago agreed to pay out $20 million to settle lawsuits filed by four former death-row inmates who said they had been tortured by police officers and subsequently wrongly convicted. The four men were among dozens of black men who said they were tortured, beaten with phone books and suffocated with plastic typewriter covers while in police custody in the 1970s and 1980s, according to special prosecutors.

The stories of three of those four men, who were pardoned by former Gov. George Ryan in 2003, were first told by John Conroy, a veteran reporter for The Chicago Reader, an alternative weekly. On Friday, Mr. Conroy received a note from Jo Ann Patterson, whose son had been nearly suffocated in police custody in the process of obtaining a confession that proved to be false.

“My son, Aaron Patterson, tortured by the Chicago Police Department, would not be alive today, I believe, without your articles about police torture in the City of Chicago. You documented and wrote the realization of police torture, of which we will never forget. You help save my son’s life for which I thank you.”

Mr. Conroy was busy dealing with a flurry of e-mail messages that day because on Thursday, he had been laid off. The Chicago Reader, which had published his work for over 20 years, decided it could no longer afford to support his reporting. Citing declining revenue and a need to trim costs, Alison True, the editor of the paper, laid off four of its most experienced reporters, including Mr. Conroy. The Washington City Paper, another newsweekly owned by the same company, announced five newsroom layoffs as well.

... Having the trains run on time is important too, finds a BBC poll.

I went to Canadian Tire late this afternoon.

I spent $88.91 before taxes, $101.35 with all taxes in.

So how much Canadian Tire money did the agent of that most munificent corporation give me back as a reward for my purchase?

From the NYT:

The economies of many big oil-exporting countries are growing so fast that their need for energy within their borders is crimping how much they can sell abroad, adding new strains to the global oil market.

Experts say the sharp growth, if it continues, means several of the world’s most important suppliers may need to start importing oil within a decade to power all the new cars, houses and businesses they are buying and creating with their oil wealth.

Indonesia has already made this flip. By some projections, the same thing could happen within five years to Mexico, the No. 2 source of foreign oil for the United States, and soon after that to Iran, the world’s fourth-largest exporter. In some cases, the governments of these countries subsidize gasoline heavily for their citizens, selling it for as little as 7 cents a gallon, a practice that industry experts say fosters wasteful habits.

“It is a very serious threat that a lot of major exporters that we count on today for international oil supply are no longer going to be net exporters any more in 5 to 10 years,” said Amy Myers Jaffe, an oil analyst at Rice University.

Slate media critic Jack Shafer took at run at embargoes back on Nov. 21 (see this blog posting for details).

He was back earlier this week. Apparently the NYT accidentally violated a World Health Organization embargo recently and is now on the liste du merde. Here's Shafer on the international group's decision to suspend NYT reporters from its distribution list for two weeks:

It was well within WHO's discretion to shame the Times with a little jawboning for breaking its promise to keep the embargo. Instead, it gave the paper what Scientist Deputy Editor Ivan Oransky describes as a "public flogging." The organization's sense of justice tells you all you need to know about why embargoes exist in the first place: It's all about being on top, baby.

(H/T to GuyNick!)

It's the technology sensation that's ignited the online newspaper nation! Bill Richards looks at how this dedicated electronic reader could change the economics of online newspaper publishing.

From The Tyee:

The office of a Vancouver journalist has been broken into in an incident he believes is linked to the political scandal he is covering.

Bill Tieleman, a regular contributor to The Tyee who has been writing about the B.C. legislature raid case, discovered upon his return from the courthouse Monday that someone had broken into his office via the ceiling and a vacant adjacent office after attempts to force his door apparently failed.

Although nothing was missing, Tieleman said the intruders had moved a copy of a book about the raid and an accompanying press kit across his office and placed them on top of fallen ceiling tiles.

"Somebody was sending me a clear message about the B.C. legislature raid," he told The Tyee. "There's no question about it."

Karl's Butcher shop on Roncesvalles is shutting down after 46 years, and is blaming new food safety regulations.

Social media It Boy Mark Zuckerberg posted a mea culpa on Facebook about the Beacon program that would track your online purchases and tell your friends.

Some aren't yet mollified, according to this NYT story.

From the Dec. 3 NYT:

Former Gawker editor Choire Sicha on why he quit as managing editor:

“Most of my frustration with the job is of my own making,” Mr. Sicha said by telephone on Saturday. “I’ve completely lost my taste for management, and the thing I realized is that the talent has all the fun.”

From the NYT:

Richard F. Zannino, Dow Jones’s chief executive, will leave the company after staying for a time to help with the transition, Dow Jones announced yesterday.

People briefed on the matter said that both Mr. Zannino and L. Gordon Crovitz, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, would be succeeded by trusted lieutenants of Rupert Murdoch soon after the takeover was complete.

Executives at both companies say there will be a broader sweep of the upper echelon at Dow Jones in the next few weeks, both to eliminate duplication and to make way for Mr. Murdoch’s people.

Mr. Zannino will be succeeded by Les Hinton, the executive chairman of News International ...

And as has been widely anticipated, Robert J. Thomson, editor of The Times of London, will take the place of Mr. Crovitz, publisher of The Journal.

From the NYT:

Passengers may soon hear a new in-flight announcement: “You can now log on.”

Starting next week and over the next few months, several United States airlines will test Internet service on their planes.

On Tuesday, JetBlue Airways will begin offering a free e-mail and instant messaging service on one of its planes, while American Airlines, Virgin America and Alaska Airlines plan to offer broader Web access in coming months, probably at a cost around $10 a flight.

You may have noticed I haven't blogged for a while (by my prolific standards).

I moved on Saturday, and in terms of my Internet access moving with me, it turned into a Kafka-esque, Catch-22-ish, corporate bureaucratic nightmare. I just got access back this afternoon.

This has me thinking I should investigate a new ISP (the bell is tolling for my old one).

If anyone who trips over this message has any suggestions, I'd be very interested in hearing them.

Please either leave a comment or e-mail me: blog-dot-bill-at-gmail-dot-com.

Many thanks.

From CBC.ca:

A new paper by two American economists suggests people who lose their jobs may be at risk of premature death. 

Economists tracked the lives of more than 20,000 workers in Pennsylvania over a 30-year period, including 7,000 employees who lost their jobs in mass layoffs.

They looked at the number of deaths for these laid-off workers up until 20 years after job loss and compared their mortality to that of similar employees who did not lose their job.

"The bottom line is that large mass layoffs that lead to large earnings losses will increase mortality of the affected workers 10 to 20 per cent a year. That leads to a loss of life expectancy of one to two years," said Till von Wachter, a labour economist at Columbia University, which conducted the study with the U.S. Federal Reserve.