Private Equity Hub

Private Equity Hub — or peHUB to the cool kids — is aimed at VCs, entrepreneurs, and assorted hangers-on. Dan Primack and his merry band of well-connected contributors do a bang-up job of chronicling the ups and downs of the private equity business. Scoops abound.

Highlights

— Panorama (Finally) Closes Fund: "Debacle or blessing in disguise? That's what I'm trying to figure out about Panorama Capital's decision to end its fundraising drive with just $240 million in committed capital. Leaning toward the latter, but remain open to persuasion."

Information aesthetics

Form follows data, indeed — where else can you find a collection of graphs, video clips, and Web apps that celebrate the universal fascination with data visualisation? Author and university lecturer Andrew Vande Moere's collection contains a heavy dose of fringe artistic experiments, such as the recent 3D "data sculpture" of the Minneapolis/St. Paul public transit system.

Highlights

— visual search engines: "searchme uses an interactive interface resembling Mac's Coverflow in iTunes & Finder, RedZee adopts a similar, but more rudimentary visual metaphor of showing screenshot thumbnails that can be navigated in a seemingly fluid way, while brynsbrain prefers a pseudo-3D interface that known from the 3D tilt viewer."

Ian Bogost

This videogame theorist and assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology waxes between scholarly navel-gazing and witty media references. Ian really knows his stuff — how many people in your social circle have written books on the Atari 2600 and elementary Greek, are able to design Transformer-themed pie vents, and can spot Hall and Oates lookalikes in the ranks of the Kotaku editorial staff?

Highlights

— Chumby and the Rhetoric of Openness: "In addition to an always-connected wireless network, Chumby also sports a touchscreen and an accelerometer. Thanks to the touch/shake sensitivity as well as its small size it could become an interesting platform for experimental software and games."

Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media

Microsoft researcher Matthew Hurst has a pulse on the future of the news business and social media, from "algorithmic editors" to GIS visualizations. In other words, this is the blog you go to if you want thoughtful analysis of memetrackers and 3D maps.

Highlights

— The TechMeme Bikini: " ... The assumptions above are a little rough and there is absolutely no accounting for how network effects really get things done in the blogosphere. The point is, there is a 2 orders of magnitude difference in these numbers between what an individual can expect and what the groups (A-listers/others) can expect."