Time Magazine compiled a list of the 25 Best Financial Blogs. It’s a good reading list.

Full List – The 25 Best Financial Blogs – TIME via kwout

In a  podcast published a few weeks ago, NPR Moneys interviewed Niall Ferguson (author of The Ascent of Money,).  I summarized below some of the key ideas highlighted in the discussion:

• Bank assets. Most of those assets are banks loans. It’s the money banks lent to their clients.  This means bank customers’ liabilities. Bank assets are their client debts
• Money is any token accepted in payment of goods and services
• The key thing is money system is trust. We believe banks have (all of) our money. But they don’t because of the fractional reserve system
• Money is a relationship between a lender and a borrower

I just came accross ScribeFire a Firefox extension that allows to blog when browsing a web Page. This is very convenient. For instance, now i’m browsing the Getting Starting Page while I’m writing this post.

ScribeFire: Fire up your blogging via kwout

Powered by ScribeFire.

Webware published a very good introduction to Facebook: Newbie’s guide to Facebook. This introduction gives you:

• A definition of what is FB
• The way to setup an account/Profile
• Advices on security/Privacy settings
• A definition of Poking and how to use it
• Advices on the way to share information with friends
• A short description of the FB platform
• A list of addons to enhance the FB experience

I would have loved to find this introduction on FB earlier when I was a newbie to FB.

Marc Andreessen highlights in this post regarding Microsoft investment in Facebook that in the software industry, it is possible to say something at the beginning of the month and to act at the end of the month in contradiction with the previous statement:

October 2: Steve Ballmer, the Microsoft chief executive, believes that the craze for individual social networks such as Facebook risks being exposed as a "fad"…

October 24: Microsoft Corp. agreed to invest $240 million for a 1.6% stake in Facebook Inc. that values the social-networking site at $15 billion

Another example of ubiquitous blog usage is shown by Marc Andreessen which uses his blog to post job posting.

Mashable published a handy list of tools for LinkedIn. Those tools are mainly plugins or widgets to grab your LinkedIn profile and display it on your blog or on Facebook.

snarkerati published a great list of 50 Dystopian Movies. Their definition of a dystopia is:

A dystopia is a fictional society that is the antithesis or complete opposite of a utopia, an ideal world with a perfect social, political and technological infrastructure. Therefore a dystopia is an imaginary place or state in which the condition of life is extremely bad, as from deprivation, oppression, or terror.

I didn’t see all the films in the list, but I really like some of them:

• 50. Equilibrium (2002)
• 44. Strange Days (1995)
• 42. I Robot (2004)
• 30. Dark City (1998)
• 29. Total Recall (1990)
• 25. Gattaca (1997)
• 16. Pleasantville (1998)
• 9. Minority Report (2002)
• 7. The Matrix (1999)
• 5. Blade Runner (1982)
• 3. Brazil (1985)

Today I installed the K2 version 0.91 WordPress Theme. It has a feature out of the box that I really like: Random header image. I’m still configuring it. I discovered that there are many mods also. 

Sign-up new writely account is open since yesterday (August 17th 2006). Then I sign-up for a new account and trying to publish to my WordPress blog using writely. The interface is simple yet full of features. There are 2 levels of menu at the top. The features that I found interesting are:

• The ability to edit the document as HTML
• Publish the document in a Blog
• Revision management: This might be very useful, as you may recover the amazing idea that you wrote 1h ago and deleted 15 minutes ago