The Aerocar

Following up on Carfree cities, here's an interesting article about flying cars (another approach to improve transportation).  There are a number of practical reasons why flying cars haven't "happened", but who cares about that; I want one!

L.T.Smash comments on the recent terror attacks in Riyadh and Casablanca: "These attacks show that the terrorists are on the ropes.  They're getting stupid and desperate."  Interesting point of view...  L.T. is not only authoritative because he's a reserve officer stationed in Kuwait, he's also thoughtful...

Is Pinch a Cinch?  Mickey Kaus in Slate discusses the success of welfare reform.  "If all the 1996 welfare reform did was take non-working single mothers on welfare and turn them into working single-mothers with exactly the same incomes, it would be a huge success."  Recommended reading...

Are you a Tivo fanatic like I am?  Then you need to read Tivo Hacks :)

The NYTimes reports that Napster, the brand bought out of bankruptcy by Roxio, is going to buy Pressplay, the online music service from Universal and Sony.  Pressplay has been a disaster so far, but no wonder; $10/month for streaming and downloading only (no burning, no MP3 player support), and $18/month adds 10 "portable" downloads per month.  And they only have music from Universal and Sony.  Well, maybe Roxio can do something good with it...  Apple has certainly shown the way.

[ Update: CNet has this story, too. ]

Remember the great "should Google index blogs" discussion?  Well, it continues...  Microdoc News notes What Google Leaves Out, an interesting analysis of which 30% of the [estimated] 10B web pages Google indexes.

Scoble suggests Google could improve its index by getting rid of bloggers who "aren't authoritative".  Yeah, so who decides?  Well, we do, by linking blogs we like and trust!  That's how the web works, and that's why Google's approach to indexing - 'you are what other people say you are' - is so powerful.  This follows his earlier observation that Google is getting pressure from advertisers to de-emphasize weblogs.

Dave writes It you want to be in Google, you gotta be on the Web.  Seems obvious, but this is why a lot of "authoritative" sources don't rate highly on Google.  Many newspapers' online archives are limited to a short period of time, like a week or a month.  How silly is that?  Meanwhile bloggers pretty much leave everything they ever wrote up "forever".

Ed Cone blogs some great suggestions for journalists with weblogs.  Actually they are good for any blogger...

Dan Gilmor writes about OhMyNews, a popular South Korean online news service which employs citizen-reporters.  "Over 15,000 have contributed articles."  Kind of like The Command Post on steroids.  It looks like a nice site - lots of pictures, nicely laid out - but unfortunately I can't read Korean.  [ via Boing Boing ]