John Cassidy has two (and likely more to follow) posts on this deal. First there’s this one: Facebook-Goldman: Where Is the S.E.C.?
and this one Facebook-Goldman: The Plot Thickens.

Both are worth reading.

As the WSJ says, you Decide: Goldman’s Facebook Pitch or Nigerian Email ‘Opportunity’?

From the article:

As a first step to drum up investor interest in Facebook stock, Goldman Sachs shot missives to clients with the opaque subject line, “Private Investment,” according to an email reviewed by Deal Journal. We couldn’t help compare it to another solicitation for money, from an anonymous Nigerian who assures you of a giant payout if you help him get back to his home country.

Of course, unlike Nigerian email scams, the solicitation came from a Goldman money manager rather than a random stranger. … But we couldn’t help note some similar language used by Goldman and purported Nigerian princes. Read and compare!

Exactly! Go to the WSJ blog post and compare the spam with the Goldman letter. The WSJ is not exaggerating when it says they are similar.

I think this latest play by Goldman is a good idea for them and a bad idea for everyone else. I also think they are testing the waters with the SEC. If the SEC gives them a pass on this, they will likely set up many private/unregulated IPOs like this, the next bubble will occur, and eventually we will have any financial meltdown similar like we just had.

BlogTO has a great set of photo essays showing some of the visual history of Toronto. I liked this one of Toronto of the 1890s. I was amazed by this photo:

University Avenue, now lined with large buildings and hospitals, is lined with trees back then.

Here’s the view from the other end of the Avenue:

Amazing.

Go to BlogTO and at the bottom of that post you can get the photo essays by decade.

Why? Because you will get alot more out of the Internet if you do, as Seth Godin very well explains in his post: In defense of RSS. If you are looking for a feed to test it out on, may I recommend my own? It’s http://smartPeopleIKnow.wordpress.com/feed And while you are at it, add Seth’s too. You will be glad you did.

Indeed, for any blog on WordPress.com, you can get the feed for it by tacking on “/feed” to the end of the blog’s URL. Relatedly, most online news sources have lots of RSS feeds you can use. Once you start looking, you will see them everywhere.

And if you have a Gmail account, you can use http://reader.google.com as your RSS feed reader, though in truth, there are many such tools out there. Ask your friends and co-workers what they use and go with what you think will work best for you.

It’s a good New Year’s resolution, but the next question is: how? Well, check out this blog: The Daily Post at WordPress.com | Post something every day. WordPress.com put it together to help inspire to blog more. It’s already off to a flying start. If you want to keep up with it, you can also follow WordPress Daily Post (postaday) on Twitter. Or if you want, you can put it in your feed reader, too. Lots of choices. Good luck!

(From the flickr photostream of poka0059, Paul Oka, who has some great photos of typewriters. See the link for rights.)

Anyone who doesn’t cook or feels their cooking is poor owes it to themselves to read this article: Sustainable Food – Three Recipes by Mark Bittman – NYTimes.com. It’s more a manifesto than an article, but it is very practical and something even good cooks should read.

Bittman does two things in this article: 1) demolishes the notion you should eat junk beause you don’t have time or you can’t cook or you can’t afford to cook good meals for yourself. 2) Presents three recipes which are more like three lessons on how to cook dozens of meals cheaply, easily, and simply.

It doesn’t matter if you are an omnivore, vegetarian or vegan: these recipes will work and provide you with lots of variety. Plus they are  “nutritionally sound and environmentally friendly”. Just as important: these meals are low cost. Rice, beans, lentils, cabbage, carrots, and onions can be some of the cheapest ingredients in a grocery store. If you are really tight on cash (e.g. a college student), look for vegetables being sold off in your green grocer or supermarket. You might find peppers, zucchini, greens, or squash being sold off, and while they might go off in a few days, if you prepare them that day, you can have a good and tasty and cheap meal.

If you only need to cook for one or two servings, the recipes are easy to cut back from the 4-6 servings listed. Cook one serving for yourself tonight, and put a second serving in your fridge for lunch the next day. Better yet, why not invite a friend or neighbor over for dinner?

(Great photo of lentils from photobunny’s photostream on Flickr. Creative Commons license: see photo for details)

You might think that is mad, but as this article show, The $100 New York City Weekend – Frugal Traveler – NYTimes.com, you can do it and have a wonderful time. The trick is all in the planning. But if you plan well, then you can see some amazing sites, eat in some cool places, and generally have a fabulous trip. Indeed, even if you did not want to go to NYC, I think you could use this article as a template for how you could visit other big cities cheaply, be that city Toronto, Chicago, San Francisco. If you do that, please let us know what you did and how you did it!

Don’t forget to read this acompanying article: My $100 Weekend in New York: Where the Money Went – NYTimes.com. The comments are also very good. s

This will be old hat to the pros who do this for a living, but for the rest of us,this post: Before & After(s): 1 Bedroom, 5 Different IKEA Makeovers | Apartment Therapy Chicago, really shows how changing a few things in a room can make a big difference. Here’s just two of the five:

and

You can make it a game: spot the differences from one room to the next. As you do, you can see how changing bed covers, pillows, curtains, to name a few, can make a dramatic change. (Of course painting the walls could make a huge change as well.)

Sometimes one of the best way to change for the better is to change your environment for the better.

I was always a fan of the Flash. Not sure why he hasn’t gotten a movie deal yet. 🙂

Found at ArtBest of 2010: April – July | Apartment Therapy Ohdeedoh

Can be seen in this superb article, India’s New Generation of Caste Busters – NYTimes.com. It reads more like the digest of a sweeping novel and less like a magazine article. Indeed, as the NYTimes states, the author, “Anand Giridharadas is an online columnist for The Times and the author of “India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking,” out this week, from which this article is adapted.” It is a very personal story set against and embedding the changes occurring in India. A must read.

My former colleague and all around smart guy, Adam Schwabe, has written a great iPhone app for riders of the TTC in Toronto. It’s called Rocket Radar, and you can find out more about it in this blogTO interview with Adam, here: Rocket Radar is the new must-have TTC iPhone app.

Great idea, and a great use of open data from the city of Toronto. Smart stuff indeed.

If you are looking for resolutions beyond the usual one, why not try that one. You can get lots of gifts for $20 at
20×200, including this great print called Vogue May 2010:pg 70 (List of Contributors), by Lauren DiCioccio. It would be perfect for the fashion (or magazine) lover. The 10″ X 8″ version is only $20! You can pick up a frame for a few bucks more (think IKEA or even a dollar store if money is tight) and you have a beautiful gift.

For crafts, there’s Etsy, of course (“Your place to buy and sell all things handmade, vintage, and supplies“) and in Canada, why not try  Art Interiors?

What makes this camera exceptional? Many things to a trained photographer, I have no doubt. But to me, what makes it exceptional is this, the “Yashica D had a long production run of 16 years with no changes”.

That is amazing to me. Is there anything these days that is a consumer product that hasn’t been redesigned in 16 years? 10 years, even.

There are some specialized sites on the web I just love. One are interior decor site (yes, there are many, including alot featuring bookshelves) and the other is food sites. There are lots of great ones out there. I like in particular this one, gourmande in the kitchen, which is just getting started. I hope it continues. It’s well designed, has good content, and really good photographs, like this one:

It looks better on that site. Go visit and feast your eyes.

Then check out this tumblr site and follow the instructions here: Never said about restaurant websites – How to make a less horrible restaurant website. The site itself has mockingly compliments restaurants sites, very likely born out of suffering through existing sites.

It boils down to keeping it simple.

Thanks to @adamschwabe on twitter for pointing this site out.

Reading this, Inaction and Delays by New York as Storm Bore Down – NYTimes.com, the one thing that no one brings up is that of the cost of having workers work at that time of year. Cities have a “snow” budget that they want to stretch over the entire winter, and if possible, you want to not spend it all at once. I wonder if that didn’t enter into the calculations of the city. That, and not wanting to call people in at Christmas are two reasons why New York failed to deal with things as well as they should have.

To monitor the situation there and to help move the cameras off of him and on to the people of Sudan in an attempt to prevent more atrocities from occurring. For more information, turn to George Clooney in Sudan – Photo Essays – TIME – StumbleUpon, and other sources.

Can be found in this good article: Behind-the-scene of Inception: Movie Locations – Associated Content from Yahoo! – associatedcontent.com

No doubt making it an expensive film to film!

Bruce Sterling was asked his thoughts on Wikileaks and he wrote a very strong piece on it, published here: The Blast Shack. While it is very intelligent and well written, it is also very neat. Too neat, I thought; almost fictional in how it is written. Gabriella Coleman has written a very good response to it here: Hacker Culture: A Response to Bruce Sterling on WikiLeaks – Gabriella Coleman – Technology – The Atlantic. If you read Sterling, I strongly recommend you read Coleman to give you a better perspective.

Made from a few basic electronic parts:

An abstract christmas tree made out of LEDs on Flickr. And here’s the schematic:

From the Flickr photostream of Omer Kilic

is this: Home Alone With Zombies

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for the tip, but I think I will stick with The Nightmare Before Christmas

There was a good article in the New York Times about the decline in web based email, but this chart from the blog  Contrarian sums it up well:

It’s quite astounding to me. I can recall the affects and the switch to email in the mid 90s when more people started getting email at work and from services provided by ISPs. Then web based email came along from sites like Yahoo! Gmail itself only came out in 2004. During that time mail carriers suffered in adjusting to the loss of personal mail. I would have thought that email would have lasted at least another decade. But looking at this chart, I’d be surprised if it too was around in 5 years.

Most of the time, stores still trot out the usual suspects when it comes to gifts for men. These gifts from the blog A CUP OF JO are so much better. Here are two:

Perfect for Dad (and uncles).

Here’s a great one for any man with a desk:

Check out the blog post for more.

If you are North American, you might think, “Oprah”. Well she is on the list, as is J K Rowling, but most of the list is made up of Chinese billionaires, as you can see:

From: Richest women: The great wealth of China | The Economist

The Economist has a great article on how for many people, the age of 46 is a big turning point in terms of well being:

As this graph and the accompanying article illustrate (Age and happiness: The U-bend of life | The Economist) people, regardless of where they live, have a greater sense of well being once they get through the middle of being middle aged. Not only that, but it continues to increase as they get older. There are many theories for that, but the data is strong.

I think everyone should read this article, not just the middle aged, for it can also help younger people and give them a sense of perspective.  Obviously you can find individuals that this doesn’t apply to, but as I get older, it feels right to me. Well worth a read.

For London defied the ban on Christmas during the time of Cromwell (according to this and The National Archives (UK)), for in this note, from

 Oliver Cromwell from the State Papers refers to a report that people in the City of London and in Westminster have been flouting his ban on celebrating Christmas.

When Cromwell and his Puritan forces took over England, they banned Christmas in an effort to rid the country of decadence. Soldiers were ordered to go round the streets and take food being cooked for a Christmas celebration, by force if necessary. Traditional Christmas decorations like holly were also banned. This move was unpopular with the people of England, many of whom resisted it.

Here’s to them. And here’s to you. Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it!

This photo essay/art/baking project has to be seen: Let It Dough! – NYTimes.com

In this blog post, Chinese Confusions – NYTimes.com, Paul Krugman sums up the bind the Chinese are in economically and politically.

But political considerations seem to be ruling out all the reasonable responses. They won’t revalue, because that would hurt politically influential exporters. They’re reluctant to raise interest rates, because that would hurt politically influential real estate developers. They’re trying to impose quantitative limits on credit, but are finding that borrowers have enough influence to circumvent the limits. And now they’re trying price controls — which will inevitably come apart at the seams unless they do something about the underlying pressures.

They can’t revalue, raise interest rates, limit credit, or do price controls. Something will have to give, and when it does, it will set off a series of events that will result in big changes there. China is always interesting to watch; 2011 will be no exception.

Not sure what this is from, but it is superb. Billie Holiday & Louis Armstrong do The Blues Are Brewin’

YouTube – Billie Holiday & Louis Armstrong – The Blues Are Brewin

I love this project from Yahoo! How Good Grows: Ripples of Kindness. I hope it is successful:  I like not only what it is promoting, but how it goes about doing it. Does that sounds mysterious? Good! Because I think you should go see it for yourself. Being good is smart.

If the answer to this is “yes”, Is Yahoo Shutting Down Del.icio.us? then if you are familiar with CURL, here’s how you can backup your bookmarks (from one of the comments in the post linked to above):

You can do a CURL on the command line: https://{your username}:{your password}@api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all > bookmarks.xml to get the bookmarks as bookmarks.xml – then you can put them in a spreadsheet.

is here: Gwynne Dyer: The accusations against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange (Straight.com). Great analysis: just what I have come to expect from Dyer.  (Thanks to Doug Saunders for tweeting about this.)

According to this BBC News story,

A man has admitted being involved in a £500,000 fraud in which he used stolen credit card details to buy his own songs on iTunes and Amazon. … They allegedly downloaded the songs 6,000 times in 2008 and 2009. Johnson admitted being responsible for about 2,000… (he) used “compromised credit card details” in order to gain royalties from the sales of the songs he posted on the websites.

It’s a novel form of theft: repeatedly buy something you own the rights to. It’s easier to do in this digital age, and one, I suspect, we will see more of.

Over at the NYTimes.com is a good editorial by David Brooks on the meaning of the work of Hans Rosling and Gapminder. For Brooks, the meaning is that the world is becoming more middle class. Given that Brooks is a small “c” conservative by American standards, this conclusion is not surprising. I also don’t think it is wrong.

What I think would be wrong, however, would be to just read one meaning in the work. I think there are many conclusions one can draw from it. To me, the main one is that the Gaps between rich and poor people in the world is diminishing and overall people are benefiting from human progress.

Don’t believe me? Start with this video

And then go search for Gapminder videos on YouTube or TED.com and draw your own conclusions. I’d be very interested to hear what you think.

The world has still a great many inequalities and too much suffering. But the gaps are closing, and progress is increasing. Be hopeful.

Anyone who is not really computer savvy could use a peak at some of the videos on this site: Teach Parents Tech

I am going to flog this one, because I can’t repeat it enough. Need something to do over the Holidays? Change your $%&* passwords! And Happy Holidays! 😀

YouTube – How to create a strong password

Thanks to Google for this. Well done.

Yes, it is TED commandments, not TEN. But there are ten, and they are for presenters that speak at the famous TED conferences. Now you may not get to speak at TED, but regardless of where you are and whom you are speaking to, try following these rules. I think if you do, your talk will be that much better.

(Found here: swissmiss | The TED Commandments)