Morning Reading, selected articles of interest from various publications.

Does Hunch Have All The Answers? Flickr Founder’s New Startup
The site revolves around helping users make decisions spanning a wide array of topics. To help users make their decisions, Hunch presents them with a brief series of questions that have been submitted by other members, using their responses to help them make their ultimate decision. It’s a great idea that combines the crowd-sourced nature of Wikipedia with services like Yahoo Answers. But does it work? We’ve managed to get our hands on an invite to the service, and have put it to the test.
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The rise and rise of Twitter –
Could Twitter really become ‘the consciousness of the planet’, or is it merely ‘this year’s Facebook’?
So is the Daily Mail’s Twitter feed the equivalent of your dad dancing in public to your favourite nu-acid-crunk band? Does a government decision to “teach Twitter” represent the site’s ultimate shark-jump into banal unfashionability?
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How Google Shot Microsoft After It Took A Knife To A Gunfight, by Danny Sullivan
That brings us to how Google just hammered Microsoft for suggesting that it was weak. My The Google Wonder Wheel & Other Search Refinement Features Get Live Test article covers how Google’s running an experiment that lets anyone narrow content to particular topics or get more search suggestions than the Kumo screen shots show. Convenient how this test just happened to go live this week, eh?
Still think they can’t experiment, Ballmer? Almost as if to go overboard, Google tossed out the “Wonder Wheel” graphical refinement tool that few searchers would likely use, if it was released to everyone. But it looks supercool, and Microsoft doesn’t have one (yet).
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The real reason I had to join The Spectator, by John Cleese
John Cleese says the magazine has been so consistently horrible to him over the years that the only way to ensure favourable reviews is to join its writing team. […]
A digression. Interesting ideas often emerge from the world of management. One useful concept is that of the ‘articulate incompetent’. This is a person who speaks clearly and cogently and persuasively about something, without actually understanding anything about the reality that their words are intending to describe. Such a person is dangerous to an organisation because they can sound very persuasive, despite the fact that they have absolutely no clue what they are talking bout.
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How Chef Nobu built his sushi empire
Celebrity chef Nobu Matsuhisa survived fire and bankruptcy on the route to culinary independence. […]
I was a 49% stakeholder in the restaurant, but I had to do everything. Just as I had done during my apprentice days in Japan, I opened and cleaned the restaurant, put together the menus and made basic sauces. Back then you couldn’t jog down to the corner store to buy fish paste or other specialized Japanese ingredients, so I created everything from scratch, through trial and error. A lot of what I experimented with in Peru became part of my repertoire later on.
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United By Problems At The Nanoscale
Symposium draws researchers in disparate areas with common need to overcome challenges at the nanoscale.
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