Douglas Rushkoff, who’s only the coolest ever, not only has a new book coming out (via), but also has a book available as a PDF online — Open Source Democracy: How Online Communication Is Changing Offline Politics.

Lexicon is a game in which you and your fellow players create an encyclopedia for a world that doesn’t exist. For example. (Via.)

Cross-posted from the Beehive, ’cause I’m just that lame, sorry.

Tucked into The Fresno Bee‘s wire feed is this nugget — The Gap will be opening a new chain targeted to boomer women, called … wait for it … “Forth & Towne.”

From the press release:

“We created an address with the name ‘Forth & Towne,’

because we wanted it to evoke a sense of place — to signify a special

and unique shopping destination,” explained Gary Muto President, Forth & Towne. “‘Forth’ references our fourth brand, and ‘Towne’ conveys a sense of community that we want to create for our customers when they shop with us.”

Would it be snarky to point out that they misspelled both “fourth” and “town”? I’m sure they’ll correct that oversight by the store’s fall launch.

“Fitting rooms will be at the center of the store, with ‘neighborhoods’ of merchandise around them,” Gap CEO and President Paul Pressler told the AP.

Oh! Cu-ute! So the checkout counter will be sort of like ‘City Hall,’ and the sales racks will be the ‘crack slums,’ right? And instead of mopping the store, it’ll be like ‘neighborhood beautification’ or whatever. I can’t wait to shop there. Oh wait, I’m not a boomer woman. Totally forgot. Just over-enthusiastic.

In addition: Steve at the other snark blog points out that the F&T ampersand just dodges what would be a very unfortunate acronym, given the store’s target demographic.

Actually, Dijjer.org says,

You don’t need to install anything. Just put a file on your site as you normally do, but add “http://www.dijjer.org/get/” to the beginning of your links. …

When they click a Dijjer link, users will get some of the file from your website, but most of it will come from other people running Dijjer. That’s how you save bandwidth. And when someone clicks on the link who hasn’t used Dijjer before, they’ll get help installing it. After that, downloads happen seamlessly inside their web browser.

Via TRFJ.

One of my favorite Olde Worlde reporters, Anne Hull (c.f.), has been a Pulitzer finalist six times, but not yet a winner. Now, the Washington City Paper is calling on the Pulitzer board to give Anne one of their rare “Special Awards” for her continually outstanding work.

A group of gay people mad about Australia’s ban on same-sex marriage are petitioning the UN to let them establish a sovereign gay nation. Love it.

Images of the N.Y. that might have been. This was apparently on Boing Boing and Kottke a month ago, but I missed it coming and going. (Via Things.)

According to the JuicyStudio readability calculator, you need 5.65 years of schooling to understand the posts on Snarkmarket. Our “Gunning Fog Index” score is a respectable 8.99, which puts us right smack at the reading level of most popular novels.

NYTimes.com has a score of 6.7, while the WaPo’s holding steady at 7.81. Not even the previously linked Valve post and its comments reached the current Snarkmarket score, topping out at 8.71.

The other blog I write for has a GF Index of 7.44, slightly below Reader’s Digest. (Robin’s clearly wrecking the curve — it broke when I tried to feed it his other blog.) My senior college thesis has a GF Index of 15.47, at the lower range of the academic papers scale.

As Robin points out, Snarkmarket may have taken a slide toward the nerdy, given that our score for October 2004 (quite a prolific month for us) was 8.26. I imagine this post has not helped the trend.

Via Kevin Drum.

… Yahoo purchases TiVo? Could happen, sports fans.

I don’t like most Firefox themes. I find the default theme ugly and many of the user-generated ones cartoonish. But I’m always hunting for good ones. Today I found PimpZilla. Surprisingly clean and detailed, although it kind of clashes with the Windows XP colors.