12,850 words since my last update, which sounds pretty good until you realize that the last update was back in May. It's been a long few months.

That gives me 73,020 for the year so far. My original goal of 300,000 is probably out of reach at this point. 1,000 words per day for the rest of the year would give me around 200,000, so let's shoot for that and see what happens.

Today, the Washington Post reviews its coverage of the Iraq war debate. Like the New York Times back in May, the Post now says it should have been more skeptical of administration claims.

Lots of people are trying to figure out how to convert web content into a sustainable business. TidBits, a Mac-oriented newsletter, seems to have found a model that works.

There's adventure travel... and then there's two and a half months in Antarctica.

The Atlantic has a long article based on material recovered from an Al Qaeda-owned computer in Afghanistan. Interesting reading. It reveals, among other things, a profound failure to understand the resilience of the American system. Bin Laden really did believe, or claimed to believe, that the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath would cause the permanent collapse of the US economy.

I've been using Furl for nearly three weeks now. It's already helping me keep track of all the stuff I read on the internet so that I can find it again later. With nearly three hundred items, my archive is starting to be a useful reference to topics I'm interested in, too.

Furl also generates the list of links at the top of this page. These are simply my most recently read items. No endorsement of the content is implied, although a burst of links on a particular subject does mean that I'm paying special attention to that subject.

Protecting intellectual property is important, but let's not get carried away. Ideas don't happen in isolation, they build on each other. As Robert I. Sutton observes, "If you never show your ideas to other people, or to only a very few like-minded people, then your ideas won't get any better and you won't get the information you need about which customers will -- and will not -- buy them."

"Revisions to copyright law should be made without regard to the vested interests of particular business and consumer groups," a group of congressional economists wrote. "Instead, they should be assessed with regard to their consequences for efficiency in markets for creative works and other products."

Oliver Byrne's edition of Euclid is a triumph of graphic design, using color and images instead of text labels and lengthy verbal explanations. I wish I'd known about it when I was studying geometry.

Registration data gives site owners the demographic data they need to attract advertisers. But what happens if the advertisers discover your demographic data is bogus?

From Industry Week, a list of management behavior to avoid.

If you're going to put all your customer information eggs in one basket, you'd better make sure the basket is secure. Big databases make big targets for identity thieves.

Apropos of which, I recently read a scary article about the risks of merging private and government databases in order to "improve" airline security. Put all of a person's data in one place and you create a single point of failure. (Atlantic Monthly article. Paid subscribers only.)

Intel has known about focused ion beam tools for years. Now the New York Times has discovered them.

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