It’s been a challenging week for my good friends on the MyBlogLog team and those of us who work with them. I’ve stayed out of the fray externally, but I know that what went down can be chalked up entirely to good intentions, and I hope we can all appreciate the fact that true innovation only happens when some risks are taken.

As a crack mogul-skiing friend of mine once told me while helping me improve my downhill lines, “If you fall any other way than on your face, you’re not doing it right”.

Hear hear, and here’s to you guys — and to everyone in the MyBlogLog community helping us improve the service as we transition this early-stage startup to Yahoo-grade stuff.

Chad has a good wrap of what I hope are the closing arguments of this particular trial.

I had the pleasure of attending ToyFair once or twice as a kid, since my dad was in the toy advertising industry, and it can only be described as adolescent nirvana. But it’s also an important window into the lifecycle of consumer adoption and, in some cases, the mainstreaming of technology.

My prized trophy from my first visit was an original prototype Hacky Sack, which I was intially under-impressed with — as were my friends at school — but turned out to be much fun when it became a pop-culture phenomenon many months after my well-informed prognostications that it would do so. (So I guess in that respect ToyFair was also a good early lesson in the power of marketing.)

Ventureblogalist has a writeup of some interesting finds at this year’s - see NYC Toy Fair at Ventureblogalist - and it shows some really promising things going on with making web and 2.0 technologies consumer-friendly. Nice to see some true startups in there too.

I had nothing to do with it whatsoever, but I’ve been watching from the sidelines with near-amazement a new Yahoo! service called Pipes.

It’s a stunning visual editor for web data services - reducing the friction required to normalize multiple data inputs, apply operations and parameters to them, and extract standardized outputs.  The benefit, of course, is to enable unexpected data mashups and new kinds of visualizations, along the lines I’ve talked about before here.  Jeremy Z and Tim O’Reilly do it better justice than I do.  I’m delighted to see a few others are picking up on it - to the point, it appears, that the service is down at the moment.

Congratulations to Pasha (who seems to have taken the opportunity to launch a blog) and the rest of the team that made this happen.

This is a taste of the power of a seamless client/web app, and a great example of some of the things I was talking about here.  It is what the whole widget thing will become it grows up.

It is the future.

(And Chris Shipley should take a cue from Fred W. and provide embed code for her videos.)

This is pretty fantastic - Amazon has put Mechanical Turk to work in the hope of finding lost computer scientist Jim Gray. Reviewing a few of the images looking for a 2×6 pixel boat among the swirling waves and clouds makes you realize what a daunting task is at hand - and is a very real reminder of the power of distributed social production when harnessed for good.

I urge you to lend a hand.

More details at the ‘Crunch.

There was a throwaway line in my post about Farecast that I’ve been thinking about ever since I hit “publish”. “It” being FareGuard (the Farecast product that is the subject of the post), I said:

Frankly, I’m surprised it’s not illegal (since it effectively is similar to gambling or an unregulated derivative security).

Setting aside the fact that I probably shouldn’t say such things so flippantly about other people’s businesses - I assume they did their legal homework - something about it has been bothering me.

It got me thinking about all the different kinds “bets” you can take against the future in one form or other — and wondering why some of them are legal and others aren’t. Personally, I think it’s stupid that a country’s worth of adults with access to compulsory free education can’t gamble on anything they damn well please, but the state of the social contract is such that there’s a political consensus otherwise, and I’m interested in some of the contradictions.  My full ramble (and quiz) is after the jump.

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As a follow-up to my previous post on Farecast - which seems to have hit the jackpot in terms of attention on this blog, as its most popular post by a factor of several X in just a few days - I’m delighted to note they’ve raised more money. Plenty of chat elsewhere (and some interesting activity in the comments on my post).

I can’t wait to see what they do with it.