Technology & Innovation

The fall of the Tunisian president Ben Ali played out for all the world on Twitter, some dubbing it a “Twitter Revolution” like the election protests in Iran and Moldovia.

Internet debate can be coarse, but it is holding journalists and politicians to account, writes Boris Johnson. What are we going to do about the lawyers, he asks.

Forget that old tagline about the Internet being an information “superhighway”. The online world is an information battlefield with pranksters and pragmatists struggling to be heard.

The shortage of web addresses is “not a crisis but getting more urgent”, say analysts. The web is running out of addresses and IPv6 is the answer.

Millenniums of bare subsistence have given way to two centuries of luxury. Crass middle-class values are what made the modern world, and we ignore them at our peril.

Mainstream economists are preaching a decade of pain and historically high joblessness as if no alternative policy existed. Dean Baker thinks pessimism has run rampant.

Wikipedia turned 10 years old this week, and perhaps no entry better captures its chaotic ascendency than that of Jesus Christ.

“There are some ridiculously ugly blogs out there,” says Joshua Brown. The modern money manager tells you how to spruce up your blog to get more readers.

Ron Paul, Congressman and anti-Federal Reserve crusader, has been appointed to chair a monetary policy subcommittee—now might be a good time to ask why we need the Fed.

Matt Warman examines the new ‘Conversation Mode’ for Google Translate for Android, and asks what’s next for the search giant.

Digital data is easily produced and copied. It doesn’t take up too much drive space, and, once uploaded, it can remain online in perpetuity.

The global financial crisis emptied the pockets of European governments. Although the Netherlands had it easy compared to some of its neighbors, the government still ran a deficit of 6% […]

The key role of emerging and developing countries—including India, China, and Brazil—in sustaining world economic growth will continue in 2011, says the I.M.F.

The PR people within the music industry are masters of spin. The music industry isn’t doing so badly as they claim. In fact, year after year more music is being sold.

“Effective signals in a marketplace have the characteristic that the people with a high quality product have lower costs of emitting the signal than people with a low quality product, […]

Budding public intellectual and critic of foreign aid, Dambisa Moyo says the promises of globalization have not been realized. The Independent interviews the economist.

Clay Shirky says that social media’s real potential lies in supporting civil society and the public sphere—which will produce change over years and decades, not weeks or months.

It seems inevitable that the number of books sold through bookstores will plummet, says Judge Posner. Traditional bookstores are doomed, concurs Nobel Laureate Becker.

The Arizona shooting suspect has been called ‘unstable,’ and no motive has been identified. But did the vitriol in the debates over immigration and health care trigger the attack?

An analysis by The Economist finds that over the ten years to 2010, no fewer than six of the world’s ten fastest-growing economies were in sub-Saharan Africa.

Treasury Secretary Geithner’s letter to Congress on the debt ceiling warns that if Washington doesn’t raise the government’s borrowing limit, the economy will face catastrophe.

Trader Anthony Grisanti claims that market consolidation and electronic trading have driven up the price of oil and taken the power out of the hands of the traditional pit trader.

Media and technology companies cozied up to each other at the Consumer Electronics Show this week, touting their collaborations on stage and flaunting their friendships.

The unreasoned and intemperate Web commentary on the shooting of Congresswoman Giffords is shameful and embarrassing, says the L.A. Times.

Negotiations that take place over computer have more chance of success when those negotiating think there is greater physical distance between each other.

Along with CD binders, bookshelves, and DVD collections, please add to the list of defunct media storage devices: Your hard drive.

People choose mates that are very similar to themselves in terms of education and income. They don’t tend to select partners who bring vastly different skill sets to the marriage.

In an extensive interview, the “Oracle of Omaha” discusses who might soon take his job and what he thinks the broader outlook is for the American economy.

A renewable energy startup is making deals that are attracting business. The company helps its clients to get photovoltaics on the roof without putting them on the books.

Today’s super-rich are different from yesterday’s: more hardworking and meritocratic, but less connected to the nations that granted them opportunity.