Netizen

Conveyor Belt Blogging

Over the past few days I seem to have resorted to what can be called conveyor belt blogging.

I have a private webpage that has links to sites and news sources I visit often. And so I have a list of places I go to for technology news and commentaries.

This is the conveyor belt concept.

You open up a news source. You open up an article or blog post. Even before you have read it, based just on the headline and summary you create your own headline and jot down a few comments. You start work on a new blog post. You insert the headline and hyperlink to it. You grab key sentences and phrases to quote in your own blog post. By the time you are done reading you should have more comments. Those comments are the meat of the blog post.

Then you use Zemanta to add related articles, the image. Google's Blogger helps with labels and products to advertise (although noone has bought anything at my blog yet .... I am blaming it on the ongoing recession).

You can produce one blog post every 10 or 15 minutes. You can do it all day long if you enjoy reading as much I do. This is a great way to work out your mind. I can just feel it. I can feel my mind muscles building up.

Leave Biological Programming To Allah

And while we are at it, Happy Ramadan, everybody! Go visit a mosque while you can.

Biology's Master Programmers

For more than a decade, synthetic biologists have promised to revolutionize the way we produce fuels, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals. It turns out, however, that programming new life forms is not so easy. Now some of these same scientists are turning back to nature for inspiration.

Solar Makes Sense

solar-powered solar system 19/365 (Photo credit: Faisty.com)

It is like tapping into nuclear energy minus any of the radiation: the Sun is at a safe distance. But the trick has been to make business sense out of it.

The Dog Days of Solar

The solar industry has done a spectacular job lowering costs in the past three years, slashing per-watt costs in half.... The challenge isn't lack of innovation or financing ..... smaller players face the powerful headwinds of competing against giant incumbent providers with access to large amounts of cheap capital, all while needing to work out the kinks of a new production process at scale ..... Many upstart solar companies did the right thing by betting on new technologies to bring the cost of solar power closer to that of fossil fuels. In the end, though, market woes may trump their technical advances.