Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has 31 million users, turned down a $1 billion offer from Yahoo! (looking for $10 billion or better) and faces a lawsuit that might make it all worthless.  Zuckerberg is accused of stealing the idea behind Facebook from founders of rival site ConnectU back at Harvard.  ConnectU asked for Zuckerberg’s programming help and claim he stalled his work so that he could launch essentially a site cloning their idea.

Now stealing the idea for a ten billion company isn’t like a college room mate borrowing a pair of vintage Air Jordans and not returning them.  The thing is that Facebook has a lot of money now.  Even if the plaintiff is telling the truth and can prove it, they may not have the money to hire the legal fire power to get the job done.  (The original suit was thrown out a few years back on a techniality.)

Plus, from Facebook’s perspective they don’t need the expense of a serious drawn out lawsuit.  That all spells a potential settlement.

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Here’s a simple alert that should ring true with your common sense.  Wearing headphones for your iPod during a lightning storm is a good way to blow your mind, literally.  A man wearing headphones attached to his iPod was struck by lightning.

Now that would typically flash over a person and a minor amount of damage would happen.  However, when the electricity hits something metallic, like headphones in the ears, or the wire attached to the iPod or that shiny metal backed iPod itself, that electricity is going to burn and penetrate. (Listening to MP3s in a storm could blow your mind - health)

So if a storm crops up, get out of harms way.  Leave the iPod home or in the car.  You might even want to pick up a water proof accessory to drop your iPod into if it starts to storm so that you’ll be protected from the burn.

But if you just have to listen to your music while you are outside in a lightning storm maybe you should pick up some car or truck accessories that let you crank up your music or audio book and blast it from your vehicle at a distance.

That or just take a day off from exercise.

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Since I started working primarily from a home office, I’ve been able to eliminate a number of things from my life as I simplify.

First, I got rid of my car (I kept a small motorcycle for short local trips.)

With the car I got rid of a number of things that go with the car.

I sold my radar detectors at a garage sale. I gave my CD holder to my son, dumped the extra local maps, hands free gadgets, ice scrapers, tire pressure checker thing(digital of course) and a bunch of other things including my car insurance plan and twenty pounds in Dunkin Donuts, donuts and croissants!

All those things cost me about $500 - $600 per month or about $6,000 - $7,200 per year. If the rest of the US could emulate that type of experience, the economy would simplify or contract by about $1.8 billion per year. . . . . .

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There is a new and promising Social Bookmarking concept on the net. Its called Thoof.com and they provide a social bookmarking version of personalized news. I think that is some sort of play on the concept of Proof Reading, but I’m not sure.

The concept is that you can read stories and not only show your interest, approval or lack of approval in those stories, but you can alter the description and the write up that go along with that story. Future or other readers will then vote up or down on whether your recommendation of changing the description, title or tags helps the story or not.

Once you submit the story your story gets a ThoofRank button like the one below that relates to an article I wrote titled “Funny Numbers Playing on iPhone Sales?“

The submission process is easy and not half as intimidating as that of a Digg or Slash, but not so simple that its worthless either like Delicious or BlinkList either.

I do like the concept of the group/social edit function and if you watch the video demo at their site you will get an interesting look at how they bring information to you, socially.  I suspect there is a little bit of potential for group think, but in general it seems to take a couple steps past some of the issues that plague Digg.com.

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The show will remain a default in the program until 100,000 unique downloads of the podcast have been accomplished.

ClickPress | Podcast Ready, Inc Announces ?100K Play? Contest; Winning Podcaster?s Podcast Receives Unheralded Ex

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