Links: Free Content, Free Country

• The 26th Story: Tribes author Seth Godin discusses free content and the publishing industry
  The huge opportunity for book publishers is to get unstuck. You're not in the printing business. The life and death of trees is not your concern. You're in the business of leveraging the big ideas authors have. There are a hundred ways to do that, yet book publishers obsess about just one or two of them. Here's the news flash: that's not what authors care about. Authors don't care about units sold. They care about ideas spread.
  (tags: publishing books ebooks marketing media)
• gongblog – journal – Your Own Democracy
  This past week I decided to sit down and concretize some thoughts on how to make democracy more transparent, efficient and participatory. I spent 5 days around the clock developing the designs for a new online platform called YOUROWNDEMOCRACY.ORG, and submitted it to the Buckminster Fuller Challenge. It embodies many of the ideas that I have been working on in the capital markets space, and I seek to merge that domain with my passion for politics and economics, as well as my favorite pasttime of blogging and Facebook. ****Basically, I think democracy itself needs to be a really kick-ass app.****
  (tags: politics government community web2.0 friends)