I only spend around 20-30% of my time working from home but can still sympathise with the sense of social alienation it would lead to if I did it much more. This article contains links to co-working initiatives for digital nomads who miss the social interactions of an office. I can see myself getting involved in such schemes if my working situation were to change and I was spending more time at home – my kitchen could serve as a comfortable office for three or four people, I reckon

Marissa Mayer of Google posts an insightful piece about where search might go in the next 10 years or more. Among the suggested directions are ideas coming from ubiquitous computing (the wearable device that continually runs searches for words it picks up in your conversations) as well as less far-fetched notions such as location-sensitive or rich media search. I get the feeling, however, that for a lot of these ideas, there's a pay-off between usefulness and privacy. For example, if Google knows where I am it can give me a much more useful answer to the query "sainsburys opening times". But do I want it to know where I am? Personally I anticipate that people will be less hung up on privacy than we might suspect – the recent past has shown that people are more than happy to surrender personal details as long as there's a tangible benefit for doing so…

Interesting in-depth case study involving Amazon's Mechanical Turk. "Feed the Animals" is an album comprising samples from over 250 tracks. Andy Baio wanted to carry out some analysis on them and so went to Mechanical Turk. What follows is a fairly complex exercise in data aggregation and visualisation of data such as what years were most frequently sampled and how far through tracks samples were introduced. It makes me tempted to investigate Mechanical Turk further (and perhaps carry out a similar analysis on a mix I helped produce called All Cylinders).