Erin Griffith at PEHub has a dynamite link to a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon from 15 years ago that is a perfect description what’s going on today in the “subsidy economy.” I love Calvin and Hobbes – it’s a close second behind Bloom County for me.

Yummy – that’s a fun tongue twister. It doesn’t quite mean “synchronizing data”, but it’s in the same family. I don’t have a better phrase yet for “renormalizing denormalized data”, but there is probably a construct for it that someone reading this blog can tell me (or invent – here’s your choice to replace the TLA RDD with something else.) Two companies – Gnip and Brightkite – that I’m involved with (there – full disclosure!) made announcements today about data integrations.

A meme that regularly goes around the blogosphere is “full disclosure.” When someone blogs about something they have a financial interest in (e.g. an equity interest in a company) or something they benefit from financially (e.g. affiliate fees), should they include a “formal disclosure.” I received the following email today: “I appreciate all your book recommendations over the last several posts. It’s a great service. However, with full disclosure being the norm these days, you might want to mention that you benefit from book sales via your Amazon affiliate status. Pardon me if you have previously done this.”

I’m still roughly on my “book a day diet” through the end of the year. The last few were really good, with one exception. Here are my quick reviews in case you are looking for something to read soon. Things I’ve Learned from Women Who’ve Dumped Me: This was hilarious. I’ve only been dumped a few times (since I’ve only had a few girlfriends) so I mostly got to live vicariously through the people telling these stories. There are some good life lessons, some excellent rants, some brilliant writing, and some really nasty breakups. I’m glad I hadn’t read this book when I was in junior high school or else I probably would have become a monk.

Yup – that’s a Gandhi quote that came from Om Malik’s great post What I Learned This Year. I encourage you to read it slowly and ponder it. With it, I begin my suggested Daily Reading for you, as Om has kicked it off with a “what”. Holiday’s and Communication: Jud Valeski, Gnip’s CTO, gives us a framework for “why” people twitter and blog. What does the BoulderTwits graph mean: Pete Warden helps with a “who” as he does a neat visualization on Boulder Twitters based on data he’s putting together. Boulder is aggressively pulling Pete toward it – I predict he’ll be here full time soon.

Kevin Kelleher’s article on GigaOm this morning titled 2009: Year of the Hacker made me think back to the rise of open source after the Internet crash of 2001. In the aftermath of the crash, many experienced software developers were out of work for a period of time ranging from weeks to years. Some of them threw themselves into open source projects and, in some cases, created their next job with the expertise they developed around a particular open source project.

Fred Wilson has a magnificent post up this morning from Berlin titled Bits Of Destruction. In it, he nails a critical point about innovation. “This downturn will be marked in history as the time where many of the business models built in the industrial era finally collapsed as a result of being undermined by the information age. Its creative destruction at work. It’s painful and many jobs will be lost permanently. But let’s also remember that its inevitable and we can’t fight it. Technology and information forces are unstoppable and they will reshape the world as we know it regardless of whether or not we want them to.”

My father, Stan Feld, is a retired endocrinologist. He wrote a beautiful blog post yesterday titled The Therapeutic Magic Of The Physician Patient Relationship: Part 1. In it he tells the story of almost flunking out of first grade in the Bronx. The punch line: “There is no question in my mind that this approach to medical care and the therapeutic effect of the positive physician patient relationship saved my academic life.”

Today’s lunch time conversation was about valuing competence vs. loyalty. In some organizations, loyalty is the most important attribute while in others competence is valued over loyalty. I have a different take on the distinction – I view competence as the most important attribute while assuming loyalty. Loyalty is a binary factor for me that is a superset of trust. In the absence of “loyalty” (and trust) nothing else matters. But a “loyal incompetent” is also worthless to an organization.