People always have a way of wanting to create their own little clubs where they can be around their fellow travelers. Smoking clubs, supper clubs, country clubs and gentlemen's clubs. Clubs that are as much about exclusion as they are about ensuring lively conversation amongst the 'right sort of people'. The polite term for clubs like this on the 'net is virtual communities.

So Douglas Bowman's resignation from Google is making all the rounds, and attracting quite a bit of verbage, so I figure it's as good a time as any to contribute my 2 cents. Like all infamous resignations, Mr. Bowman took his employer to task for a variety of sins. In this instance, those sins would seem to reinforce a great many outsider's (read: my) suspicions about the Do-No-Evil Giant.

Jonathan Jarvis has made an excellent motion graphics explanation for the economic apocalypse we're all currently living through - The Crisis of Credit Visualized (http://Crisisofcredit.com) I worked in the financial services sector for almost 10 years whipping up marketing collateral for technology platforms that enabled trading in things like Credit Default Swaps and other highly dubious financial instruments. In all that time no one that I worked for was able to explain basic concepts like leverage and CDO's like Mr. Jarvis has done here.