Last week, the commentariat pounced on Obama's light-weight summer reading list, but what would they make of his doodles?  Yes, doodles, those absent-minded sketches found in the margins of the White House stationary.  A reading list, after all, is a highly calculated, self-conscious act of political semiotics, but a doodle ... truly, what better window could there be into the unguarded presidential id?

Despite their bad reputation, it’s hard to imagine an internet without cookies. The small, suspicious looking files sitting in the bowels of your browser are what allow you to have a shopping cart when visiting Amazon, save your passwords on frequently visited websites and receive the kind of targeted advertising that helps underwrite much of the internet’s free content. Handled responsibly, cookies can be useful tools that respect your anonymity while offering you great services. And if you really don’t like them, well, that’s what your browser’s privacy settings are for.

It would appear that The Wall Street Journal isn’t the only news organization that's struggling with how to revise web content after getting its facts wrong.  Reuters recently suffered an embarrassment when, after publicly acknowledging a serious error in a column by David Johnston, they deleted the original URL altogether.

This May, we weighed the merits of Apple's curated app store against the Android's big tent model, and what each meant for the future of free speech, but David-Michel Davies, Executive Director of the Webby Awards, suspects that this dichotomy might be a moot point.  Instead, he offers a third option that has been hiding in plain sight.

In The Future of Gaming, which aired on our show last week, Jesse Schell envisioned a world in which governments and corporations would reward you with points for performing certain tasks. In game design circles, this kind of point system is an example of what’s called a game dynamic.  Game dynamics can come in many different forms, but basically it’s just a fancy name for any mechanism that makes sure people keep playing the game.  (If you’re a video game company, you may even maintain a secret playbook which lists all of the game dynamics you use to keep people clicking.)

But game designer Seth Priebatsch points out that we don’t need to wait for some hypothetical future to see game dynamics put to use in the real world.  They’re actually all around us.  We just don’t realize they’re there, and, as a result, we aren’t using them very well.  What you call happy hour, he calls the appointment dynamic, because you’re rewarded for showing up at a certain time and place.  At a TEDx conference last year in Boston, he talked about some other game dynamics that we’ve been taking for granted, and suggested how they might be used for something other than cheap beer.