Harry Potter, the NHS, e-voting and Amazon
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I spent much of this afternoon in a mandatory (for poll workers) four hour training class on the Hart InterCivic eSlate voting system, soon to be in use in elections in my home county. (Hart InterCivic is a privately held firm out of Houston, specializing in election equipment and in software products for county records offices). Contrary to my previous impression, the machines are not touch screen machines, although they share some similarities.  I went into the class skeptical; I have been a critic of what I percieve as an unseemly rush to adopt insecure electronic voting systems. I emerged guardedly optimistic; the systems appear, from what I can tell, to be reasonably secure against vote manipulation by people who are not part of the election staff, and they appear to provide approximately the same level of security against election office malfeasance that paper ballots do. At the end of the day, if the election staff wants to tamper, they can; but that was true with paper ballots as well. That risk can be mitigated by election office procedures intended to mitigate it; in San Mateo County's case, those procedures have in some important regards not yet been established, as I will discuss below.
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By Chris Tomlinson  You may have noticed that the web is obsessed with lists. This is either something to do with ordering content logically or the autistic genius of its early creators.
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By Garry Bushell  A BIG thank-you to Virgin for closing my email account without warning. All the nice reviews I'd written of Jo Brand and Louis Walsh were lost forever. Any company able to supply a better internet service, please feel free to get in touch.
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Amazon.com Inc. said on Friday first-day advance orders for "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," the seventh and last installment of J.K. Rowling's successful book series, were 547 percent higher than for its predecessor.
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Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince has topped Amazon&#39;s book chart less than 24 hours after its release date - 16 July - was announced.
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Found in the search marketing forums: Measuring Cup; Is Google Weighting Clicks on SERP Entries More Highly in its Algorithms?; Link Building Campaign Imminent; and more.
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Those little devils who keep the gears turning inside the Twitter machine added a toy that's got the community sending public love missives whizzing around. You can figure it out yourself, or you can cheat and read this howto. @lovelyperson   Substitute the name of your lover in place of "lovelyperson" and you've just broadcast your love to all of TwitterLand.  While we're on the subject of Twitter, a couple of other items. 1. A must-read piece in today's NY Times, gives a clue why kids don't go for Twitter if their parents use it. No kid wants to be observed by his or her parents. Would they go for it if their parents weren't there? No one knows.  2. Conventional wisdom says you can't build a scalable distributed Twitter out of RSS. At first I accepted this, as a puzzle, then I remembered that's why we put the cloud element in there. I felt that for some applications polling would be too much. Since the cloud element has been largely ignored, most of the the apps of RSS couldn't scale to do what Twitter does. But if RSS desktop apps like NetNewsWire or FeedDemon were adapted to understand the cloud element, and if a proxy system was worked out to get through firewalls and NAT, it might just work.  3. Or you could use XMPP.
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Amazon.com Inc, the Web retailer known for selling books, said it had paid about $4 million to buy a handwritten, illustrated book of wizardry by "Harry Potter" author J.K. Rowling.
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There is an interesting post on OnLamp.com that mentions the search for a good wiki system. Read the post to find out why the author thinks that the wiki world "needs the kind of vision that will make the product more accessible, more polished, less prone to abandonment or neglect...", and the several comments that follow.
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Lance Knobel: "I'd install FlickrFan in every middle school and high school social studies class. I guarantee it would provoke endless discussion and ensure engagement in the issues of the day." I totally agree. It would be great to see it at checkout lines in supermarkets and on kiosks in BART stations too.
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Arts & entertainment: Â· Attack on Bloomsbury for 'profiteering' withdrawnÂ· Stores will sell book as loss leader in price war
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A website goes the extra mile to make sure voters aren & rsquo;t confused this Tuesday.  Also: West Virginia organizes the first public supercomputer & hellip;.  FDA keeps its eye on a new pain relief drug & hellip;. and more.
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The next Harry Potter book has just been announced, and it&#39;s rocketed--or broomsticked--to No. 1 on Amazon.com&#39;s best-seller list.
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Data workers of the world unite Yes, I know this sounds a bit like the eighth Harry Potter book. In fact, what I want to discuss are some implications of data governance that I don't think everyone has thought through yet.â¦
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Spamocracy Parliament may soon be debating whether to legalise incest, reclassify insomnia as a mental illness, microchip all children at birth ... or give pantomime actor Richard Griffiths a Knighthood.â¦
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Call it Pandora's inbox. Late last year, Prime Minister Tony Blair invited the public to post petitions directly on his official Web site, hoping a dose of cyber-savvy would attract disenchanted voters. Did it ever.