Link-O-Rama: Trends, Blends, and Friends
10 years of the Lycos 50…and Pamela Anderson comes out on top. The greatest invention of all time, and the best we can do with it is to look up celebrities with artificially enhanced mammaries and bad taste in men. To quote Bill Simmons, I will now light myself on fire.
From one role model to another…. Ivy League women want to be stay-at-home moms…and people act surprised. I’m not. As an Ivy League dad, I’d rather spend more time with my kids too. But I do object to a double standard which forces women too feel bad whatever choice they make–if you stay at home, you’re wasting your education. If you work, you’re abdicating your parental responsibility to nannies and daycare. Just what do people want us to do?
Of course, if you’re Britney Spears, you may not feel too guilty about fobbing your newborn off on the nanny so that you can catch some rays.
One of the reasons we have so many two income families is how expensive it is to buy a home–and as a Palo Alto resident, I should know. But it looks like the bubble is finally ending.
But if things are looking more reasonable in the real world, they’re just getting started online. Let the virtual land rush begin…Wells Fargo has bought an island in Linden Lab’s Second Life to help them market to MMOG players. Yet again, the real and virtual worlds are blending. Somewhere, there’s an arbitrageur figuring out how to short real world housing and go long virtual land.
Speaking of videogames, regular readers know that I often argue that games are an ideal teaching method for today’s world. Looks like I’m not the only one who thinks this. Tucked away in this article, below a profile of my friend Kristin’s new mobile gaming company for women, is a brief mention of Dave McCool’s Muzzy Lane, which has launched an RTS (real-time strategy) game to teach kids about World War II.
At some point, I’ll post a longer comment on Web 2.0. While it feels like a bubble to me, at least some of the companies are profitable. Even if they were started as a joke!
Finally, there’s just one last story out of the Katrina debacle. Coyote Blog reports that the Feds actually stopped a volunteer doc from resuscitating a dying patient because he hadn’t been able to get through the clogged phone lines to get a FEMA credential. Folks need to remember that laws are supposed to protect us; when a rule doesn’t make sense, people need to use their own best judgment, rather than hiding behind Eichmann’s famous defense, “I was just following orders.”