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There is a growing consensus in Washington among policy and opinion makers (if not yet lawmakers) that taxes must rise in the next four years, and not just on the wealthy. According to a recent Quinnipiac poll, 60 percent of Americans favor rolling back the Bush tax cuts for families making more than $250,000. Apparently some very rich families agree and they’re petitioning the government to raise taxes, starting with their own.

This story brings to mind the occasional conservative argument that if rich people want to pay higher taxes so badly, why don’t they just donate their money to the government? It’s true that it is technically legal to write checks to the Treasury, but this is a weak argument. The animating motivation behind paying taxes is not the unalloyed joy of writing checks to the government but rather the knowledge that you are part of a collective system that is funding a government and its policies. One rich family’s check might cover two staffers. A higher marginal tax rate helps pay down an entire federal budget.

Or does it? According to WSJ economics editor David Wessel,
congressional estimators — correcting for people who will dodge higher rates — expect that for every percentage-point
increase in the marginal tax rate levied
above $372,950, the government would raise $73.5 billion over 10 years.
Raising the top two rates by one percentage point would raise $100
billion over 100 years. That’s serious money. But it’s about one
percent of the $9 trillion of debt we’re expected to add over the next
decade. When Obama campaigned on the promise of rolling back the Bush tax cuts — like the Democrats’ 2004 presidential nominee John Kerry — it was a keystone of his fiscal restraint platform. Today a realistic fiscal policy will require much more than raising the top marginal rate to its 2000 level.

The screaming over marginal rates is just a vocal warm-up for the tax showdown later this decade. A value-added tax, for comparison purposes, could raise hundreds of billions of dollars every year when fully enacted. A carbon tax could add a similar amount. US tax expenditures account for nearly $1 trillion of the US budget annually. There is quite of a lot of tax policy to reform. If we can’t tweak the Bush tax cuts quietly, it bodes poorly for the inevitable tax debates to come.

Deepak Chopra is a peddler of nonsense, woo, and alt-med garbage. I’m not a fan — duh — so I missed his tweet which is causing a minor stir on the intertoobz:

Had a powerful meditation just now – caused an earthquake in Southern California.

Reading his tweets is like trying to read a book whirling around in a blender, but it does appear that he thinks he caused the earthquake in Baja the other day.

However, in a later tweet he said:

Some people were upset at my remarks re earthquake. Sorry about that. I was actually meditating when it happenned [sic] and thougt [sic]” Whoaaa!”

So either he was joking, and haha if he was, or he was serious. So if it’s the latter, y’know what I’d love to see? A class action suit against him. That’s right, the people of Mexico and southern California should sue Chopra because he caused a major earthquake! If you win, he goes bankrupt and we’ll never hear his quantum enmangled word salad again. And if you lose, it’s because he’s a charlatan.

I don’t see a downside here, frankly.

Recentemente, o presidente da Ford, Alan Mulally, visitou a filial brasileira da Ford e concedeu uma intrevista para a imprensa nesta última terça-feira. O engraçado é que não foram dados muitos detalhes sobre o futuro da operação brasileira da empresa.

O CEO da Ford comentou outras coisas, como lembrar da importância do mercado brasileiro para eles, já que somos o “3º mais importante da empresa“, embora não tenha falado uma palavra a respeito dos planos para manter os seus clientes brasileiros, que são cada vez mais seduzidos por novas marcas concorrentes.

Durante a entrevista, Mullay disse muitas frases “clichês”, tais como: “Manteremos uma linha completa de veículos em todos os mercados em que atuamos“, e também “Estou entusiasmado com o mercado brasileiro“. O estratégia “One Ford”, adotada pela companhia, e que visa padronizar modelos para venda global, como a 3ª geração do novo Focus, também foi lembrada.

Via | Blogauto

It’s been 18 years since the first Dodge Viper rolled off the assembly line. It was big, red, rancorous and unlike anything the automotive world had ever seen, and with it’s 400hp V10 engine it was poised to take on the world. Back then the Viper was a true concept car for the street, hell, when first released it didn’t have door handles, windows or a roof. It was raw and as powerful as you could get, while at the same time being oh so quintessentially American.

Now in its fourth generation Dodge has finally decided to bid the big bad snake farewell, but not without sending it off in style. 50 “Final Edition” Vipers will be built. 20 Coupes, 18 Roadsters and 12 ACRs. The Viper captivates everything that we have come to love in an American super car. As a true performance machine the Viper is the stuff that little boys dream of. It’s a hooligan in every sense of the word and makes no bones about its persona.

It acted as a boost of pride when our auto industry was in the dumps and made it’s European rivals continually scratch their heads as they watched the Viper rack up victory after victory on racetracks around the world. I know that we hear at Ridelust.com will sorely miss this snake as it is definitely one of those rare machines that puts the “LUST” in Ridelust.

Source: Chrysler.com

If you are enough of a badass to wield this ice axe monopod in earnestness, you are enough of a badass to put a big boy’s camera on top. Right Ashton? [Instructables] More »

One of the best ways to find out who to follow on Twitter is to find someone you really find interesting, look at who they follow, and go from there. Taking that same idea, Twitter app store OneForty, which we dubbed one of the top ten startups of 2009, will start offering today Twitter application “toolkits”.

The toolkits are user created lists of their most used, favorite apps that either manipulate, add on, hover around or otherwise interact with Twitter in some fashion.

Sponsor

OneForty currently has 2623 different Twitter tools in 23 different categories – we’re talking anything from third-party software client TweetDeck to picture hosting site TwitPic to online coupon finder Cheap Tweets.

The site just launched last fall and has since doubled the number of applications listed. And already, the website offers a Yelp-like atmosphere for users to find the apps they need, offering peer reviews and lists of user favorites. This latest feature will take it one step further.

While the site already does something to point out the top apps in their categories, sometimes there’s nothing better than learning from those you admire – and thus, OneForty’s Twitter Toolkits. Today’s launch features tool kits by startup guru Guy Kawasaki, Drew Olanoff, the social media consultant whose cancer we can blame for everything, Steve Rubel, one of the leading public relations bloggers on the Web, and Beth Kanter, the leading nonprofit technology consultant in the country, and more.

The feature seems like a simple, if not obvious step for the Twitter app store to take, but it falls in line with what we’ve seen of Twitter already. Our own Marshall Kirkpatrick, for example, wrote last February how he subscribes to an RSS feed of certain people he follows to find out who else he should be following. In the Twittersphere, it really is all about who you know, and not what you know, and we imagine this would hold true when sifting through nearly 3,000 Twitter-based applications.

OneForty sent us the following list of featured toolkits available on the site today:

Toolkits to be Spotlighted at launch include:

* Twitter Indispensable Tools by Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki)
* Essential PR Tools by Edelman’s Steve Rubel (@Steverubel)
* Cancer Killing Chemo Toolkit by Drew Olanoff (@thatdrew)
* Brand New to Twitter? by Twitter for Dummies (@dummies)
* Starter Apps for Nonprofits on Twitter by Beth Kanter (@kanter)
* Must-Haves for Startups by Greenhorn Connect (@greenhornconnect)

Discuss

The competition for this year’s Worst Company in America contest is heating up, and so is the media coverage of our reader-driven bracket. We were on the early morning show on ABC on Monday and other outlets are taking notice of WCIA as well:

Reuters
Huffington Post
Marketplace, on American Public Media
TIME
BoingBoing
WIVB
KOMO

America/mdyiKHUh8EekSqNTaal0vA.cspx”>WCPO
KLAS
Walletpop

bracket-worst-company-in-america/?cxntfid=blogs_atlanta_bargain_hunter”>Atlanta Journal Constitution
San Diego Source
Delaware Liberal
Connecticut Watchdog
Charlotte Business Journal
Triangle Business Journal
TVNooz
The Big Picture
GearDiary
One Penny Sheet

Too legit to quit. What’s next? Obviously, a campaign to get WCIA recognized as an official Olympic sport.

This is a post in our Worst Company In America 2010 series. The companies competing for this honor were chosen by you, the readers. Keep track of all the goings on at consumerist.com/tag/worst-company-in-america. Print the bracket, here.

Spring is finally here, and in Chicago, it is now safe to leave your house without risking frost bite.  So please come out and join us at some upcoming events where you can learn more about Zillow and Internet marketing so you can get the Spring selling season kicked off right!

Thursday, April 15 – We’ve been holding “Zillow power-hour” educational events across the country that have been very well received, and I am excited to now host them in my hometown of Chicago.  On April 15, there will be two sessions: one at 9:30 am and the other at 12:30 pm, where we’ll thoroughly go through the Zillow site.  By the end of the presentation, you’ll have a good answer to the phrase “…but, Zillow says…” whenever a client brings up the Zestimate.

We will also discuss:

• How Zestimates are calculated, its strength of accuracy and what you can do about it
• How to best leverage Zillow’s 10M+ monthly users to market yourself and your listings
• How to use your expertise on Zillow to gain clients for free
• How to dominate your ZIP codes on Zillow

…. and much more!

We’ll even provide breakfast or lunch, depending on the session you attend. Events will be held near O’Hare Airport, convenient to public transportation, major interstates, and there is parking available.

Register here for the 9:30 am breakfast class

Register here for the 12:30 pm lunch class

Monday, April 19 – Zillow has teamed up with ActiveRain to bring you RainCamp Chicago!  ActiveRain has offered RainCamps across the county, and I have yet to hear an agent say anything less than the day-long Internet marketing event was fantastic.

RainCamps are designed to bring you the most valuable tips, tools, ideas, and social media education and information that will empower you to take your business to the next level.  You’ll have an opportunity to walk away with some of the best proven practices to enhance and grow your business.  Effective strategies that can be implemented easily and immediately!

Register here for Chicago Raincamp

It will definitely be worth your time!

I look forward to seeing you at both of these events!

Animal Factory: The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy, and Poultry Farms to Humans and the Environment by David Kirby is an eye-opening, informative account of how factory farming is negatively affecting our health and environment. I have not read this book cover to cover at the time of this review, but I am very impressed at its thoroughness and message.

Animal Factory is a thoroughly-researched piece of investigative journalism, in which Kirby sets out to approach factory farms differently from ‘Fast Food Nation’ or ‘Eating Animals’. As his powerful and provocative books shows, the supermarket price of milk, pork, steak and chicken do not reflect the actual costs of mass-producing meat and dairy, which are passed on the to surrounding communities, including:

• Airborne feces sprayed by farms, covering neighboring homes, fields, and towns
• Recalls of dangerous meats, fruits, and vegetables caused by farm pathogens
• Increasing public health crises, including asthma and MRSA infection, and possibly swine flu and leukemia and other cancers in communities adjacent to these farms
• High levels of feces and nitrates in public water supplies near these farms. The New York Times recently reported that “19.5 million Americans fall ill each year from drinking water contaminated with parasites, bacteria or viruses.” (9/15/09)
• Massive fish kills in local waters from pig and cow manure lagoon spills
• Immense costs to clean up hazardous farms, absorbed by taxpayers or individual farmers, rather than by the corporations that profit from such practices
• Dead zones spreading miles out to sea, where marine life is suffocated by algae growth stimulated in part by factory farm pollution

In Animal Factory, Kirby follows three American families in different regions of the US, whose lives have been utterly changed by Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs. Weaving complex science, politics, business, and the lives of everyday people, Kirby documents a crisis that has reached a critical juncture in the history of human health and our larger global environment.

I like how Kirby tracks factory farms affect on families, as it gives a human touch to a story that is truly overwhelming to contemplate.

As a vegetarian, my life is still affected by factory animal farms. No one is immune. We must support local, traditional farms as consumers to really bring about change, as well as make sure our politicians are aware of the consequences of factory farming. Anyone that has visited or driven by a large factory farm, like Harris Ranch on I-5 in California, knows, the situation is not good for animals or humans.

Disclosure: I was sent free samples of these products to review. No
prior assurances were given as to whether the review be positive or
negative.

How do you score some unofficial (and free) excitement for your phones? If you’re Verizon, you leak out an image like you see above. So something’s coming. Could be anything. Could be nothing. Could be the HTC Incredible. Or it might not be. Discuss. [BGR]

Update: Unidentified sources (don’tcha just love them?) at Android Forums and Android and Me are saying could could see the Incredible on or about April 25 … Or April 29. So just a few more weeks, folks. Maybe.

The Brits just aren’t that into watching Lindsay Lohan save the world: an abysmal 224,000 viewers tuned in to Lohan’s Indian Journey, a documentary highlighting the trafficking of women and children in Bihar. The feature aired on The UK’s BBC3 this week and was beaten out by an airing of Gene Kelly’s 1951 cinema classic, An American In Paris.

The “Mean Girls” star, who has hit headlines for her stints in rehab and drink-driving arrests, teamed up with The BBC Network for the charity work, but the venture may cause even more harm to Lohan’s already damaged rep. Lindsay is facing a ban from India after immigration officials cited the star for entering Bihar without securing the appropriate work visas.

Brooksley Born

At today’s Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission hearing, Brooksley Born, the former head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, declared Alan Greenspan’s tenure at the Federal Reserve an unmitigated failure – to his face. Greenspan accords a certain degree of respect on Capitol Hill, despite Born’s accurate take on his many failures, and so this outburst was highly unusual – and gratifying.

Born, who pushed to strictly regulate derivatives under the Clinton Administration, but lost the battle to, among other people, Alan Greenspan, told the former Federal Reserve chair that his agency “failed to prevent housing bubble, failed to prevent the predatory lending scandal, failed to prevent the activities that would bring the financial system to the verge of collapse.”

“You failed to prevent many of our banks from consolidating and growing to a size that are now too big or too interconnected to fail,” Born added. She added that Greenspan’s views on deregulation, which he took as an article of faith, contributed to the Federal Reserve’s failure in delivering on its mandate.

Looking as angry as he could at his advanced age, Greenspan replied, “The flaw in the system I acknowledged was an ability to fully understand the state of potential risks that were fully untested… That means we were under-capitalizing the banking system for 40 or 50 years.”

He then pivoted to a defense of his work, using an innocent bystander argument. “I don’t have the discretion to use my own ideology to affect my judgments on what Congress did. If somebody asked my view on a particular subject, I would give it to them. But I ran my office as required by law… I fundamenally disagree with your perspective.”

This is frankly ridiculous. Alan Greenspan was known during his days at the Fed as “The Oracle.” Every word of his moved the markets and moved politicians. His viewpoints absolutely contributed to the deregulation of the financial sector. He also had lots of broad discretion while at the Fed to deal with the housing bubble. Instead he hyped it.

If anyone was watching this but me and the WSJ, they would have seen a cornered rat. Born nailed Greenspan – although, given the relative lack of interest in the FCIC, the benefit to that will be merely psychic in nature.

As commercial real estate values are highly dependent on the income they generate (they aren’t too productive as empty shells), vacant complexes are shocking their owners right now with selling prices far below what people thought were worth not too long ago.

Thus it’s probably a great time to buy empty commercial real estate disasters… if you somehow can also bring in tenants as well, or be the tenant.

Case in point, the 100,000 square-foot ghost building just snatched up by the University of New Mexico:

REIS:

The University of New Mexico has a contract to buy the empty, 99,033-squarefoot building at 1650 University NE for $4.6 million, a steep 44 percent discount from the asking price of $8,250,000 just one-and-a-half years ago. The property had gone into foreclosure.

“We think it’s a pretty fair deal,” said Tom Neale, associate director of real estate at UNM. “We’re really focusing on the building and what it will take for us to renovate and upgrade the (building) systems.”

UNM’s purchase of the building is not a done deal. “We still need to go to the regents for approval of the transaction,” Neale said. “We’ll do that when we’re satisfied with our building assessment.”

Yet it’s not just the owner of the building above who’ll be disappointed by this transaction, other owners of other empty distressed properties will shocked as well given that transactions set benchmark prices for others in the market. Thus empty properties drag each other down, and what the guy next door got is a bad sign for what you’re going to get.

According to the Moody’s/REAL All Property Type Aggregate Index, commercial property prices are down 40.2% since their October 2007 peak, yet have rebounded moderately from their recent low point in October 2009. Yet it’s key to highlight that there’s reportedly a stark difference in performance between the tenant-haves and the tenant-have-nots. If you’ve kept your tenants, prices may have only dropped 10% on average.

For the vacant properties, transactions such as above suggest there are a lot of owners out there who haven’t fully come to terms with just how little their properties would go for, if sold today.

Now don’t miss: The Most Depressing Commercial Real Estate Disaster In America >

Join the conversation about this story »

Alan Bersin

The key administration officials recently installed by recess appointment can serve in their new jobs through the end of next year, but at least one of them says he plans to keep his job for much longer than that.

Alan Bersin, who last year became the Obama administration’s point man on border security issues, is now the commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, part of the Department of Homeland Security.

“I look forward to a good and candid and fruitful series of exchanges over the next number of years,” Bersin told a group of reporters on Wednesday, in his first face-to-face with the press since becoming commissioner.

Asked by Fox News whether that means he’s planning to be CBP commissioner beyond what the recess appointment allows, Bersin said: “Absolutely.”

Such a move would require Senate confirmation, but Bersin said he hopes to prove himself to skeptical members of Congress in the months ahead.

“[I] moved very proactively to not only build on Congressional relationships that I have had over many years but also to reach out across the aisle and across both houses to indicate my openness and eagerness to engage with Congress,” he told reporters. “Recess appointments have a history in all administrations, and I expect over time that people will come to see that it was a good choice, and I look forward to that. I look forward to earning that confidence with members of Congress.”

He is scheduled to testify before the House Appropriations Committee next week.

Bersin said he is “honored” to be CBP commissioner and to “work effectively every day with the men and women of CBP to enhance our service to the American people,” even if through a recess appointment.

“Not a single moment of hesitation on that,” he said.

In announcing the recess appointments of Bersin and 14 others on March 27, the White House accused Republicans of “obstructing” administration nominees, insisting that “partisan politics” was hindering “the basic functioning of government.”

“The United States Senate has the responsibility to approve or disapprove of my nominees,” President Barack Obama said in a statement. “But if, in the interest of scoring political points, Republicans in the Senate refuse to exercise that responsibility, I must act in the interest of the American people and exercise my authority to fill these positions on an interim basis.”

Some of President Obama’s recess appointments faced strong opposition from Senate Republicans. In the run-up to the appointments, all 41 Senate Republicans wrote a letter to the White House urging President Obama not to use a recess appointment for a top labor official.

Bersin faced no such opposition.

Before joining the Obama administration, he served in a wide array of positions, including a stint as a private lawyer in Los Angeles, nearly five years as U.S. Attorney in Southern California, and more than a year as California’s Secretary of Education under Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Nowadays, Bersin’s official photo is hanging in the lobby of CBP headquarters in Washington. However, it has yet to be added to the wall of the CBP conference room that hosted reporters on Wednesday.

Asked when he might join his two predecessors on the wall, Bersin didn’t have an exact answer.

“Well, we’ve got it down in the elevator lobby,” he said with a smile. “That’s a start.”

The board of St. Vincent’s Hospital in lower Manhattan threw in the financial towel last night, voting to close in-patient services that had been a medical mainstay in Greenwich Village for 160 years.

The decision wasn’t a surprise, having dragged on for six months as the 727-bed hospital tried to come up with a rescue plan to handle $700 million in debt. Still, the closure will deal a blow to medical services in the area as well as marking the end of an institution filled with history.

St. Vincent’s was founded by four Sisters of Charity in 1849 to treat victims of a cholera epidemic and is the last Catholic general hospital in New York City. It treated victims from the sinking of the Titanic to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and was one of the early institutions to respond to the AIDS epidemic.

New York state recently loaned St. Vincent’s $9 million and there was talk by politicians of trying to save a scaled-down version of some of the Greenwich Village facility. In the meantime, elective surgeries will end by April 14 while outpatient services and other facilities and services are slated to stay open in hopes of lining up partners or other operating plans.

Here’s more from the WSJ, New York Times and the Associated Press. St. Vincent’s has put out info starting here.

Photo: Associated Press

In this popular account from 1860 [1]) the observation that “electricity” traveled through a medium implied that “other” fundamental forces such as light and gravity must also travel through a medium (emphases mine) …

April 1860 -Scientific American – Electrical Theory

… The results of the experiments instituted by Sir William Grove are exceedingly curious, and must be regarded as all but proving the truth of the modern theory, which assumes that electricity is not, in any sense, a material substance but only an affection (state) or motion of the particles of ordinary matter.

If electricity is unable to pass over or through a vacuum, it is probable that all the other so-called imponderable forces—light, heat, magnetism, and possibly attraction—obey the same law, and as these agencies freely travel the interplanetary spaces, the supposition of Newton that such spaces may be filled with an ethereal form of matter receives an indirect but powerful support….

There is no ethereal form of matter in the 19th century sense however. Electricity has a relationship to fundamental electromagnetic forces, but it is not the same sort of thing. Once electricity was divided from “light” it was possible to find common models for light and magnetism.

In 2010 some people are trying to deal with the unquantifiability of gravity through a similar approach …

arXiv blog: Gravity Emerges from Quantum Information, Say Physicists..

One of the hottest new ideas in physics is that gravity is an emergent phenomena; that it somehow arises from the complex interaction of simpler things.

A few month’s ago, Erik Verlinde at the the University of Amsterdam put forward one such idea which has taken the world of physics by storm. Verlinde suggested that gravity is merely a manifestation of entropy in the Universe. His idea is based on the second law of thermodynamics, that entropy always increases over time. It suggests that differences in entropy between parts of the Universe generates a force that redistributes matter in a way that maximises entropy. This is the force we call gravity.

What’s exciting about the approach is that it dramatically simplifies the theoretical scaffolding that supports modern physics. And while it has its limitations–for example, it generates Newton’s laws of gravity rather than Einstein’s–it has some advantages too, such as the ability to account for the magnitude of dark energy which conventional theories of gravity struggle with.

But perhaps the most powerful idea to emerge from Verlinde’s approach is that gravity is essentially a phenomenon of information.

Today, this idea gets a useful boost from Jae-Weon Lee at Jungwon University in South Korea and a couple of buddies. They use the idea of quantum information to derive a theory of gravity and they do it taking a slightly different tack to Verlinde.

At the heart of their idea is the tricky question of what happens to information when it enters a black hole. Physicists have puzzled over this for decades with little consensus. But one thing they agree on is Landauer’s principle: that erasing a bit of quantum information always increases the entropy of the Universe by a certain small amount and requires a specific amount of energy.

Jae-Weon and co assume that this erasure process must occur at the black hole horizon. And if so, spacetime must organise itself in a way that maximises entropy at these horizons. In other words, it generates a gravity-like force.

That’s intriguing for several reasons. First, Jae-Weon and co assume the existence of spacetime and its geometry and simply ask what form it must take if information is being erased at horizons in this way.

It also relates gravity to quantum information for the first time. Over recent years many results in quantum mechanics have pointed to the increasingly important role that information appears to play in the Universe.

Some physicists are convinced that the properties of information do not come from the behaviour of information carriers such as photons and electrons but the other way round. They think that information itself is the ghostly bedrock on which our universe is built.

Gravity has always been a fly in this ointment. But the growing realisation that information plays a fundamental role here too, could open the way to the kind of unification between the quantum mechanics and relativity that physicists have dreamed of..

In short, one way to deal with the gravity problem is to make gravity go away. It’s merely a confusing epiphenomena.

[JURIST] Several visual artist organizations filed a class action suit Wednesday against Google alleging copyright infringement resulting from the company’s book scanning project. The plaintiffs include the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP), the Graphic Artists Guild, the Picture Archive Council of America, the North American Nature Photography Association, Professional Photographers of America, as well as individual photographers and illustrators. The visual artists’ class action is being brought in the US District for the Southern District of New York, the same court where an earlier class action was brought against Google by text authors. According to lawyers for the plaintiffs, ASMP and the other visual artists decided to bring a separate suit when they were prevented from joining the earlier action.
Last month, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) urged a federal court to reject the proposed class action settlement in the copyright suit between text authors and Google due to copyright and antitrust concerns. In February, a federal judge heard arguments on the proposed settlement but did not indicate when a ruling can be expected. The case originated when two lawsuits were brought against Google by the Authors Guild, a group seeking to preserve copyright protection for authors, and by other plaintiffs including the Association of American Publishers (AAP), McGraw-Hill, Penguin Group, and Simon & Schuster. Under the terms of the original settlement agreement, which was reached in October 2008, Google would pay $125 million to authors and publishers of copyrighted works. In return, Google would be allowed to display online up to 20 percent of the total pages of a copyrighted book, and would offer users an opportunity to purchase the remainder of any viewed book.

Crytek and EA pulled out the big guns for Crysis 2’s hype train, debuting the game’s first trailer right at Times Square in New York, but they’re far from done. They’re also teasing something for this Friday.

“Son, no one gives a sh*t about all the things your cell phone does. You didn’t invent it, you just bought it. Anybody can do that.”

Such is the wisdom that the Sh*t My Dad Says Twitter account has been bringing us since last August. The popular feed of quotations from creator Justin Halpern’s 74-year-old father just announced, however, that it will be moving its home base to StatusNet.

Sponsor

StatusNet, the open-source microblogging service that serves as the foundation for identi.ca, announced the launch of the Shit My Dad Says website yesterday afternoon. The site will run on the service’s SatusNet Cloud Service, which also powers a community-driven microblog for the Mozille Foundation.

According to StatusNet CEO Evan Prodromou, the main point to move a service like SMDS to StatusNet is that the site owner can take control of advertising revenue, while still being able to send out content to other services.

“Other value includes being able to put the site under your own domain, to control the namespace, to control the look and feel, and to associate the site more strongly with other Web properties,” said Prodromou this morning in an email. “With StatusNet, a publisher like Justin Halpern can push their updates into multiple channels — Twitter, Facebook, and any PubSubHubbub-enabled service — but the data has its ‘home’ at their own site. You may notice, for example, that the latest shitmydadsays posts now say, ‘via shitmydadsays.com’, with a link.”

For publishers who use the StatusNet Cloud Service, the single-user option like SMDS is a flat fee charge per month, while others are doing revenue share, Prodromou told us. At the sign-up page we also see an option for a “secure network for your company”, which our own Alex Williams detailed early last month.

Discuss