I rang in the new year with some mental floss. I found David Stone’s The Echelon Vendetta on one of our bookshelves in Keystone as I was looking around for a palate cleanser after my run of serious books last week. Last night I got about 80% of the way through it. At around 11:20, long after Amy had gone to bed, I actually got scared reading it. I hadn’t figured out the end game yet, so my brain was whirring around a lot. The book was taking place mostly in the Rocky Mountain West (Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado) and I suddenly had an image of the bad guy stalking me from the giant open space behind the two story picture window I was lying in front of. 

As 2008 winds down, Amy and I are having a traditional New Year’s Eve filled with debauchery. She’s eating a bowl of tomato soup with cheddar cheese and crackers in it; I filled up on appetizers at our friends’ house down the block where we hung out until the late hour of 8pm so we could make it home in time for bed by 10:05pm (yes – we consider that midnight here in Colorado.)

In response to my post The Dynamics of Full Disclosure, Jeffrey Kalmikoff – one of the co-founders of Skinnycorp (the dudes who do Threadless) wrote an add-on titled On trust, transparency and disclosure*.* Jeffrey came up to Keystone and spent Jewish Christmas with me and Micah Baldwin – we talked about a bunch of fun stuff, ate chinese food, and played a lot of Rock Band. Good stuff Jeffrey.

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.