If it’s good enough for demented mice, then surely…: Via AP: “(A study using mice has revealed that) a mutant protein named tau is poisoning brain cells, and that blocking its production may allow some of those sick neurons to recover. It worked in demented mice who, to the scientists’ surprise, fairly rapidly regained memory.”

Using blogs (and fake websites) to sell books: From the WSJ (a free feature) “To promote a new biography of the Scottish indie-rock group Belle and Sebastian, Germany’s Holtzbrinck Publishers is offering free copies to music bloggers who have written about the group. “In the old days, you placed an ad in the back of Spin magazine, and it cost a couple of thousand dollars, and you hoped that someone who liked this band saw it,” says Jeff Gomez, director of electronic content and business development at Holtzbrinck, which owns such imprints as St. Martin’s Press and Farrar, Straus & Giroux. It’s too soon to tell whether the blogging effort will pay off — the initiative is only a few weeks old — but Mr. Gomez says it is a cost-effective way to reach a targeted audience.”

Using RSS feeds to peer into the future: My friend, Patrick Ruffini, has an experiment running called the 2008 Presidential Wire that he told the Washington Post (third item, “the early line”) is a “buzz tracker.”

While Patrick is very partisan (he was the Bush Campaign’s webmaster), the 2008 Presidential Wire is unfiltered and unbiased. It merely tracks (utilizing the RSS feeds of political blogs and mainstream media) those articles and posts that include mentions of names of potential candidates for president.

In addition to this “aggregation” function, check out the different types of statistical analysis of the RSS data that are displayed in the right-hand column. Who’s being mentioned the most, who’s trending up, down. In other words, Patrick’s experiment is one in analyzing information flooding forth from RSS feeds to discover trends being revealed in the blogosphere and traditional media.

I’m the first to say it’s way too early to be pondering anything related to the 2008 election, however, when I look at Patrick’s experiment, I’m awed by the trendspotting power of it. This is truly an amazing display of how tapping into the magic of RSS and the conversations it tracks, can give one a jump of hours, days, weeks or even months on what the media will get around to one day determining is “conventional wisdom.” For example, if such a tool had been around in 2003, it would have revealed the extent of the buzz taking place about Howard Dean way before the mainstream media recognized it.

And since I just spent an hour this evening telling Patrick personally how impressed I am with what he’s doing, I thought I should say so publicly, as well.

Life’s Little Instruction book by Mr. Roboto: “Little kids should be singing Jesus Loves Me, not horny music.”

Raise you tray table and call your congressman: Earlier today, I was on a Southwest flight from Nashville to Baltimore. Near the end of the flight, after the pilot gave us some closing announcements about our location and arrival time, he launched into a 2-minute speech encouraging the passengers to help Southwest in its efforts to get Congress to repeal the Wright amendment, which restricts most flights into and out of Dallas Love Field (Southwest’s home). The pilot then told all us passengers to visit the website, “Set Love Free Dot Com” and encouraged us to tell all our friends about it.

I must say. Those Southwest folks know the power of having a captive audience.

For their part, The Dallas-Fortworth Airport folks have their own website, “Keep DFW Strong dot com” and they are begging Southwest to stop the whole “repeal campaign” and start flying in and out of DFW. Yeah, wright.

What Joe Mansueto said: (To Folio:’s Dylan Stableford) “I just wanted to make a bold statement saying that we were going to invest in the magazines, that there’s a stable owner, a stable backing, and just to reaffirm the missions.”

Ideal blog search: BusinessWeek blogspotting blogger Steve Baker asked Bloglines’ Mark Fletcher what he thinks blog search should be.

Quote:

1) It would be integrated with other Web search. (People don’t want to have to search twice)
2) No moving knobs to toggle between new posts and important Web pages. (The “advanced search” options on the engines today get minimal use.)
3) Posts from certain blogs, either highly trafficked or ranked by the individual user, would jump toward the top of the search results.