When I tweeted, “I feel trapped in the Social Graph”, @andybob from London tweeted me back: “you’re wandering around your social graph like people wander around Königsberg? (<-- geek joke/reference - google if ne ..." I googled it and found this (brilliant):

The river Pregel divides the town of Konigsberg into four separate land masses, A, B, C, and D. Seven bridges connect the various parts of town, and some of the town's curious citizens wondered if it were possible to take a journey across all seven bridges without having to cross any bridge more than once. All who tried ended up in failure, including the Swiss mathematician, Leonhard Euler (1707-1783)(pronounced "oiler"), a notable genius of the eighteenth-century.

This article kills me:

Given the decision to set up shop in high-rent districts in Manhattan, Boston, Chicago, and Jobs’s hometown of Palo Alto, Calif., the leases for Apple’s stores could cost $1.2 million a year each, says David A. Goldstein, president of researcher Channel Marketing Corp. Since PC retailing gross margins are normally 10% or less, Apple would have to sell $12 million a year per store to pay for the space. Gateway does about $8 million annually at each of its Country Stores. Then there’s the cost of construction, hiring experienced staff. “I give them two years before they’re turning out the lights on a very painful and expensive mistake,” says Goldstein.

We launched our branded network feature in November 2007 in partnership with over 50 leading organizations, including Amnesty International, CARE, The Humane Society, The American Lung Association, and Greenpeace. A partial listing of organizations is below. Click here to sign up for a branded social network.

Earlier in Apple Store strategy: “Position, permission, probe”, we briefly considered his training and job experience at an Apple Store. Today we ask Alex to expand specifically on his Apple Store insights in an exclusive interview:

the one thing I have been able to extract as the core and essential principle is the fact that people are the singlemost important elements in a company. When you think about it, “company” implies that one person is in the company of another. Or an “organization” is a system of people, and certainly not a bunch of computers or other inanimate objects. Human resources are the critical factor to winning a game of basketball (not the basketball itself), to taking a company public (lawyers are people too), to fixing a great bowl of chicken soup (the ingredients do help, but it takes a person to collect those ingredients), and so forth.

To help understand how many elements are in the hCard and keep the block-level and inline elements separate, I followed Andy Clarke’s 3D Zen Garden map model and made my own 3D map for the hCard microformat.

Very interesting demo of how Facebook Beacon works.

What has been the most uplifting, encouraging story you’ve heard about China these days? What, you mean you can’t think of one? We thought so. As I was explaining to someone yesterday (who also happens to be Chinese), China really gets a bad rap in the United States. This is nothing new…whether politically, socially, environmentally, or most recently, throughout the disastrous summer of lead poisoned toys, even on a parenting level, China seems like a more antiquated and distant country than ever.