Here's a great Salon piece that shows how the difference between dating and appearing on "who wants to marry..." is a matter of degree. "Women's eroticization of traditional power relationships makes evaluating a boyfriend for his earning power seem acceptable, rather than mercenary, to most men and women."

Dave Winer has a worthwhile piece called Notes on Competing - One of the better pieces by Dave I've read, actually. This Amazon business seems to be stirring up quite a few people. Jakob Nielsen and quite a few others still point to Amazon, however.

Now this is truly ridiculous. Jeff Bezos needs a kick in the pants. absurd! "Amazon has demonstrated they are not afraid of seeking an injunction to stop other people in their tracks" I'd be more inclined to call it cowardice.

No. Scratch that. Amazon needs to learn what it means to feel the love. It's that simple

Here's how: Go the other way. Instead of cutting yourself off from the rest of the web with patents, open up your infrastructure for everyone. Let any web developer put their own value-added interface on your product database. Selling stuff online is all about providing good information about products, so let everyone use your shipping and handling, and let them skim a percentage off the top for selling through you. If Amazon has the best infrastructure, it will be ubiquitous, perhaps without the customers knowing it. You don't need to worry about one size fits all, because if it's compelling, hundreds of people that know will use their knowledge to sell products for you. Feel the love

No one else is feeling the love yet. Bummer.

I'm a face in the crowd of Brent Simmons' collection of Manila people today