With every year that passed, as Perl 6 produced more press releases than actual code, the attractiveness of Perl as a platform declined. Sure, it still had users. Sure, it still had people starting new projects. (The Modern Perl movement was a decent attempt to bring wider enthusiasm back into the ecosystem by dispelling some of the worst myths of the language. It modeled itself after JavaScript: The Good Parts without realizing that Perl lacked JavaScript's insurmountable advantage of ubiquity. Who could have predicted that Objective-C would be interesting again a year before the iPhone came out?)

What it didn't have was a clearly defined future, let alone an articulated one.

Then I got to thinking. Screw the dodgy world of heterodox economics. Let’s go full-on fantastical and look at sci-fi. There IS actually a model out there that deals fairly realistically with a post scarcity economy. Not only that, it actually takes into account the difficulties of migrating from a capitalist society to a post scarcity society incrementally. It’s not just a theory in a vaccum.

It’s called Star Trek.

Why has the “Made in Germany” brand thrived over the last 15 or so years, even as “Made in Japan” grinds toward irrelevance? All the more extraordinary, Germany has flourished in a savagely competitive global environment despite high labor costs, an overvalued euro and any number of regional financial crises. Its secret: adapting and innovating in ways Japan Inc. cannot even seem to contemplate.

The problem in a predominantly pre-paid phone connection market like India is that caller identities are often a mystery. So people end up taking a lot of unwanted calls and spam. That’s why an app like TrueCaller, developed in Sweden, is more popular in India than in the West.

Now there’s a new app called Holaa!, just launched today, which claims to help smartphone users manage their calls better. It’s a product of Nimbuzz, which shifted its base from the Netherlands to India in 2012 to serve a growing Indian user base for voice over IP (VoIP), messaging, and mobile advertising services.

To those of us who were accustomed to thinking of the internet as a glorious, distributed, anarchic, many-to-many communication network in which anyone could become a global publisher, corporate gatekeepers had lost their power and peer-to-peer sharing was becoming the liberating norm, Labovitz’s brusque summary comes as a rude shock. Why? Because what he was really saying is that the internet is well on its way to being captured by giant corporations – just as the Columbia law professor Tim Wu speculated it might be in The Master Switch, his magisterial history of 20th-century communications technologies.

Gmail represents a dying class of products that, like Google Reader, puts control in the hands of users, not signal-harvesting algorithms.

Production Manager/Brewer for MadTree, and friend of the blog, Matt Rowe recently started a Twitter hashtag #SoYouWannaBeABrewer. I’ve dug this since the first one and they’ve only gotten better with time. Matt is providing us with insight into the boring doldrums, disgusting grime, and exciting joy of being a craft brewer. I’ll shut up now and let Matt and his tweets take it from here.

I’m going to show you exactly how I ranked a site on the first page of Google in just a couple of months. My intention here is to be transparent, and to show you everything. It seems like there is a lot of information about SEO floating around the web. Sometimes it is conflicting. Sometimes it is just plain wrong. Too much information can be paralyzing. I hope through this case study you will get some ideas of what you can do to help your site rank better.

I relaunched again 3 months ago and within 48 hours, I had 1,000 targeted users on my email list. What I didn’t mention is that I had barely started developing it when I relaunched. All I had was a landing page with a one-paragraph benefit statement of how my app will help them, an email signup form, and a fancy teaser screenshot.

The positions of powerful interest groups are "not substantially correlated with the preferences of average citizens," but the politics of average Americans and affluent Americans sometimes does overlap. This is merely a coincidence, the report says, with the interests of the average American being served almost exclusively when it also serves those of the richest 10%.