Co-render.com

BoingBoing posted an article titled “BIL is to TED as BarCamp is to Foo Camp.” The latter of which appear to be a network of user-generated conferences, and an annual hacker event respectively.  If you’re playing along at home, BIL is the “self-organizing, emergent, and anarchic” forum for sharing ideas, the “bottom-up” counterpart [...]

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Apparently, consumers wont really need that tax refund after all. Who needs an incentive to shop when businesses are giving away goods and services for free…at least online. For a comprehensive overview, check out this lengthy article in Wired, or this exhaustive catalog of ‘free stuff’ from trendwatching.com.
We’re not quite ready to pass [...]

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With all the gloom and doom discussion on Wall Street about a recession, it’s easy to overlook what could be a bright spot for consumers. While traditional ‘inflationary logic’ would dictate a rise in prices on par with the rising cost of commodities, many familiar food brands are protecting their margins by listening to [...]

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Google News is making news, along with the United Nations, and small fry media outlet Inner City Press. It’s quite a scandalous affair really, with Inner City Press playing the role of “pint-sized Internet” whistleblower, exposing corruption and causing controversy within the bloated U.N. organization.

As it turns out, Inner [...]

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In simpler times gone by, a recording artist would most certainly balk at the idea of allowing their work to be sampled freely and liberally by other artists.  Then Napster, DRM, iTunes, and American Idol all happened.
There’s plenty of giddy commentary on how the music industry business model has to change or die, and we’ve [...]

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After yesterday’s post on Style Icons, we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to comment on this story about Oprah from the Chicago Sun-Times;
“What would it be like to walk into Oprah Winfrey’s consciousness?
You can get close by walking into the new Oprah Store, a mishmash of the star’s sayings, passions, gurus and even her closet, [...]

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Manifestations of the current cultural fascination with everything celebrity are not limited to lists of the “X” most beautiful people.   Even celebrated (current and formerly) tech companies are the subject of retrospective photo spreads, revisiting the evolution of logo design over the years.
Silicon Valley might be more superficial than Rodeo Drive, but honestly, would [...]

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What is it with kids these days? Facebook is (yawn) making mainstream news again as a social event planner for the socially minded. It’s hard not to be smug in this particular instance, given that the group presently incurring the wrath of users is a Colombian socialist guerilla army composed primarily of the [...]

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In April we posted about a unique microfinance institution called Kiva.org.  Back then, we referred to the site as “a peer-to-peer banking system which helps entrepreneurs in developing countries receive loans from socially conscious, social media savvy capitalists with at least $25.”
Some months later, the New York Times Magazine reports;
“Kiva is a philanthropic organization facing [...]

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