Annals of Monadic Deadlock

Is social networking a product or a feature?

That is the $1,000,000,000 question. Maybe it should really reside at the OS level.

Recent developments in the Ergonosphere

that might interest you.

* Amazon mp3 store
* Radiohead pay your own price digital release

Radiohead "In Rainbow" analysis

What's their true agenda? Is this a positive or negative development in the egonosophere? If every artist handles distribution of their material, won't we end up with a million separate sites, all incompatible?

There's value in having a standardized interface for commerce--it reduces transaction costs (and in classical economics, reducing transactions costs is nearly always a good thing.) It would be like having every band run their own storefront, instead of just going to Tower Records and looking on the right shelf. (And being able to purchase albums by more than one band at a time!)