Seth Godin offers his new book for free download. "It's a short take on how to use the new online marketing tools to make any website work more effectively."

Robert Cringely writes about an Internet show he is launching next week:

NerdTV, as I've written ad nauseum, is an interview show. From a technical perspective, it is primitive, but beneath the surface, it is incredibly ambitious because it defies the maxim of Internet service design that assumes audiences are shallow and maybe a bit stupid.

Once you reach a technical baseline, you see, good television is all about casting. So NerdTV is based on the simple idea of having a lengthy discussion with some incredibly smart person you always wanted to meet. We go on so long (a full hour, more or less) that some viewers may get bored and give up. But if we aimed NerdTV just at those people, we wouldn't be serving very well the rest of the audience we know is there after eight years of writing and reading in this space. We'd just be doing 30-second video clips like most other broadcasters and CNET.
...
Once people get comfortable with NerdTV, I'm hoping similar shows on other topics will begin to appear as the concept starts to make sense. All you need is a topic in which a relatively large audience is extremely interested, but that audience is too widely dispersed to be served by traditional broadcast or cable television. You could probably serve the same audience as a niche cable channel, only much, much deeper, but the best application of NerdTV-like programming is probably for audiences that are completely un-served -- and most likely misunderstood -- by traditional broadcasters.

The New York Times writes:

Across the continent, fewer than 10 percent of working people have health insurance, pension coverage or other forms of social security, according to the International Labor Organization, the United Nations' oldest specialized agency.

But that is slowly changing, and not just because some African governments are expanding their ailing social security systems, vestiges of the colonial days and geared mostly to the vast number of people on the government payroll.

The bigger push is coming from everyday Africans who are tired of waiting for politicians to address their needs and have begun spinning their own safety nets.

Plans in which neighbors come together and create their own makeshift health coverage are the rage in Africa, particularly in the continent's west. Here, the plans now have a significant presence in 11 countries and membership has grown beyond 200,000 people.