Or perhaps reading this blog has created in you a powerful hunger for words that read good.

Either way, our OLD, OLD friend Yannick Murphy will be reading from her latest novel, SIGNED, MATA HARI, this coming Wednesday night. The particulars:

Wednesday, November 14th 8:15 pm
Columbia University
Rm 413 Dodge Hall

Of special interest is that she will be reading with Diane Williams.

Last time these two shared the stage a really cool cat fight ensued.

Fingers crossed.

Via the Pittsburgh Business Times:

Dick Corp. restructuring brings new name, new owner into fold [sic]

Dick Corp., the region’s largest construction company, is planning a restructuring that will bring a new name to the family-owned firm and give a nonfamily member an ownership stake.
Instead of carrying the last name of co-chairmen David and Douglas Dick, whose family has owned Dick Corp. for more than 80 years, the firm is expected to introduce a new name, DCK Worldwide LLC, within the next few weeks, according to Nadine Lee, Dick Corp.’s marketing manager.

DCK stands for “Diversified Construction Knowledge,” according to an e-mail sent by a Dick Corp. executive to members of the local construction community. The e-mail also included an attachment with a new company logo. [entire article]

Nice spin, but “It’s a shorter Dick” would have sufficed.

Twine.

As announced today at Web 2.0 in San Francisco and brought to you via Great Britain, the land o’ cheese and buggery:

Today, at the Web 2.0 Summit, Radar Networks is announcing an invitation-only beta test of its new “semantic web” application, Twine. The press release says:

Twine provides a smarter way for people to leverage and contribute to the combined brainpower of their relationships. “We call this ‘knowledge networking,'” said Radar Networks Founder and CEO Nova Spivack. “It’s the next evolution of collective intelligence on the Web. Unlike social networking and community tools, Twine is not just about who you know, it’s about what you know. Twine is the ultimate tool for gathering and sharing knowledge on the Web.”

It’s being touted as a The Start of Web 3.0 which is almost annoying enough to make me ignore it. However, Richard MacManus at Read/Write Web says “while the app isn’t ready yet for the public, I was impressed with what I saw in Nova’s demo.” He says:

The aim of Twine is to enable people to share knowledge and information. At first glance it is very much like Wikipedia, but there is a whole lot more smarts to the system. Spivack described it to me as “knowledge networking” — ie it aims to connect people with each “for a purpose”. It’s not based around socializing, but to share and organize information you’re interested in. Using Twine, you can add content via wiki functionality (there are many post types), you can email content into the system, and “collect” something (as an object, eg a book object).

[ More posts about Twine ]