Rick Bruner reports: “Steadily, we are furnishing our entire apartment with things our neighbors have thrown away. Not broken-down junk covered in coffee grounds and rotten cabbage. Stuff you’d actually want inside your home. Or we would, anyway.” Click to read what Rick and Adi have salvaged, including their huge recent coup.

(Blogging resembles scavenging: finding pieces of treasure in the stuff that other people discard or ignore?)

Wow, the volume of home equity loans has tripled since 1999.

WSJ: “…International Business Machines Corp. has told its managers to plan on moving the work of as many as 4,730 programmers to India, China and elsewhere. The unannounced plan, outlined in company documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal, would replace thousands of workers at IBM facilities in Southbury, Conn., Poughkeepsie, N.Y., Raleigh, N.C., Dallas, Boulder, Colo., and elsewhere in the U.S.” And: “A former IBM executive in India, Pawan Kumar, now chairman of closely held vMoksha Technologies PLC, an outsourcing firm there, says IBM has 9,000 people in India and plans to increase that to 20,000 by the end of 2005. Mr. Kumar says the cost advantages of hiring Indian programmers aren’t as large as the salary differentials imply, because building in India requires more investment in infrastructure and more spending on supervision to smooth communications between U.S. customers and workers in India. He says the true costs amount to about $100,000 in the U.S. and $50,000 in India for people to do the same work.”

Fun links: Farm belt. Southern Lowlands. Upper coasts. The datasharing revolution.

Dave Winer obliquely suggests McGovern would have won in 1972 with blogs.

What other alternate histories could be explored? Would the Nazis have been stronger or weaker in a blogging Germany? Would a blogging Alfred Wallace have outshown Charles Darwin? Would the blogging Buddha have swamped Jesus? Could KingGeorgeIII.blogspot.com have hung on to the colonies?

(Image borrowed from Scripting.com.)

The uptake of adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs) has doubled in the last year, now accounting for one home mortgage in three, reports CNN. When rates head higher, which is inevitable with $600 billion yearly government debt sales looming, these folks are going to get squeezed out of their homes. The bankers who push ARMs on people should be ashamed.

Jeff Jarvis writes about Zeyad, an Iraqi blogger:

Thanks to the Internet and weblogs — and a little help from the community there — it is possible for one man in a country just coming out from under dictatorship and war to speak to the world, to exercise free speech, to help spread that free speech, to report news, to make news, to build relationships, to create understanding. That is the moral of the story of the blogosphere: All that is now possible. Anyone can do this. Any of us can support it. All it takes is one person.

Jeff helped Zeyad get started back in October and is rightly proud. Here is Zeyad’s site and here’s his post about yesterday’s anti-terrorism demonstrations.

— warning —

Ok, stop here if you don’t want to see me rant again about corporate media versus real blogging.

–end warning–

(For context, folks in places like Davos wonder can “Mainstream Media Co-opt Blogs?” More optimistically, some bloggers like Jarvis think corporate media can incorporate blogging. I disagree: the New York Times can’t blog.)

Zeyad’s blog offers a prime example of things corporate media can not do. It can’t pursue absurd dreams. It can’t get other people excited and linking in. It rarely strays from the rest of the corporate pack. It can’t speak with sustained passion. It can’t converse and it can’t pay people to converse.

Corporate media ain’t human. It is a machine, a legalism. It’s an it.

Blogging is not a technology — blogging is the brainstorming human spirit, unadulterated by corporate filters and armor, linking to kindred spirits. Corporate media can’t do that.

Steve Outing points to David Carlson’s interesting timeline of online news.

Science writer Steven Johnson writes on his blog‘s first birthday: “I suspect the most rewarding part of all of this will arrive ten or twenty years from now, reading through the archives in chronological order, making all the long-forgotten connections (‘That’s right — we were just moving into the Brooklyn house when I came up with the idea for that book,’ etc.)”

I sometimes find it uncanny rereading old posts. I can still remember the color of the sunset reflected off the apartments opposite our house in Mareil Marly when I wrote my first blog post. These things are textual snapshots imprinted with the scent and texture of the moment.

Glenn Reynolds says Cameron Barrett’s [url=]blogging for Clark[/url], covered yesterday by AP, is one of the few things going well the candidate.