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"My favorite metaphor for the current world transition, first pointed out to me by Norie Huddle (Butterfly, 1990), is that of a butterfly in metamorphosis. It goes like this: A caterpillar crunches its way through its ecosystem, cutting a swath of destruction by eating as much as hundreds of times its weight in a day, until it is too bloated to continue and hangs itself up, its skin then hardening into a chrysalis. Inside this chrysalis, deep in the caterpillar's body, tiny things biologists call 'imaginal disks' begin to form. Not recognizing the newcomers, the caterpillar's immune system snuffs them as they arise. But they keep coming faster and faster, then linking up with each other. Eventually the caterpillar's immune system fails from the stress and the disks become imaginal cells that build the butterfly by feeding on the soupy meltdown of the caterpillar's body. It took a long time for biologists to understand the reason for the immune system attack on the incipient butterfly cells, but eventually they discovered that the butterfly has its own unique genome, carried by the caterpillar, inherited from long ago in evolution, yet not part of it as such (Margulis & Sagan, Acquiring Genomes 2002). If we see ourselves as imaginal discs working to build the butterfly of a better world, we will understand that we are launching a new 'genome' of values and practices to replace that of the current unsustainable system. We will also see how important it is to link with each other in the effort, to recognize how many different kinds of imaginal cells it will take to build a butterfly with all its capabilities and colors."

"A lovely website" needs to show brains and brawn, too, otherwise, you lose prospective customers. Perhaps, it's time to hire a web content writer to help you.

While most kids are out in the park playing with their dogs, 10 year old Zoe Pemberton put her 61 year old grandmother, Marian Goldall up for sale. I guess her grandmother's incessant nagging was too much to take, and with a laptop right in front of her, she came up with an ingenious idea of selling her granny on eBay.

are you truly convinced that social media can actually help small businesses? No? I thought so too. To help you see how it can work no matter how big or small your business is, I've found some great case studies of small businesses that get it, and are seeing results!

"Stripes is a presentation framework for building web applications using the latest Java technologies. The main driver behind Stripes is that web application development in Java is just too much work! It seems like every existing framework requires gobs of configuration. Struts is pretty feature-light and has some serious architectural issues (see Stripes vs. Struts for details). Others, like WebWork 2 and Spring-MVC are much better, but still require a lot of configuration, and seem to require you to learn a whole new language just to get started."

Text messages and instant messenger programs have spawned a variety of abbreviations and shortcuts that are sneaking into everyday English. In his new book, Txtng: The Gr8 Db8, David Crystal takes on the h8ers who want to know why kids these days are too lazy to use vowels. Crystal says the concern over texting lingo has been greatly exaggerated; he says that on average, less than 10 percent of words in text messages are abbreviated.

Web 2.0 too. Play math and spelling games. Teachers can even creat accounts for their students.

Really interesting, since it's not too different from my recent "history"; I was quite addicted to delicious, then I discovered in a blog the daily summary from Diigo (a service that I didn't know at all), then I investigated, I learned how is working and... wow, I may become a bigger fan of Diigo, too! ;)

I have been facing the problem of which online bookmarking service to use for quite some time now. This is due to the fact that I have the StumbleUpon and Google toolbars installed on Firefox, and also have accounts on deli.cio.us, blinklist and digg (and possibly some others which I can't remember right now :-). Too diversified for my own good you say. Well my thoughts exactly. So, if you have any suggestions or comments be my guest.

Everyday consumers are doing cloud computing, too, maybe without even realizing it. When you use an Internet-based backup service, or Google's online word processor or spreadsheet, or a Gmail or Yahoo mail account, you're working with data on a secure Internet server somewhere - not on your hard drive. Apple is the latest company to find a silver lining in the cloud. Its new MobileMe service ($100 a year) is an overhaul of a suite of Internet features that used to be called .Mac.

tool for you to share your feelings and care for others. Track your own feelings too by simply saving it and making it as your own personal online journal. See the average feeling of the community

Online customer service has been fast emerging as an important aspect for all consumers. Among other shopping for other stuffs, people are owadays shopping for computer support services too.

Any tax scheme should reflect a nation's goal to increase productivity and to improve the lives of people of all income and social levels. As it is now, the U.S. tax system has too many inequities.

Techcrunch details features of the new Friendfeed interface rollout. In beta so check it and comment.

Google and other members of the IT industry recently joined at Google Data Centre Efficiency Submit at Calif, Mountain View, to discuss best practices for building and measuring data center efficiency. The idea behind this submit is tosave resources such as electricity and water is not just good for the environment, it makes good business sense too. Being "green" reduces operating costs and can keep our industry competitive; it is this economic advantage that makes efficiency truly sustainable.

New design brings updated look and feel, open web video, and a brand new icon.If you've happened across the GetFirebug.com web site recently, you'll notice everything has a rather pleasant freshly painted smell. After a much-too-long delay, we've finally updated the design and layout for the official Firebug web site, and introduced a lovely new icon by our resident Iconmaster General Sean Martell.

Students who fear that spending too much time on social media sites will affect their academic performance can breathe easy, according to a new study.

"WebClip lets you clip videos, photos, text and links that most interests you. Rather than bookmarking the web page (of course you can do that too), you save parts of pages that you like. Having all the clips in one location, able to play, view, read and share them with your friends via social networking channels, are some of the advantages of webclip. "

Interesting idea: giving up Twitter and Facebook to concentrate on blogging -- though with some inconsistency, given that buttons for those are still on the website. worth readingbthe comments too. So what do YOU think?