To be or not to be: that is the question.
Hamlet's famous utterance plays a trick on theater-goers, a mind game of the same type he inflicted constantly on his family and his court. While diverting his audience's attention with a seemingly simple choice between being and non-being, Hamlet of all people would know very well how these extremes bracket infinite gradations. Our fascination with Hamlet is precisely his instinct for presenting a different self to almost everyone he met. Social networking gives us an impetus to review how we appear online. When people ask who we are, questions multiply far beyond the capacity of a binary "to be" digit. Read more.

O'Reilly is launching the first-ever Global Ignite Week, to bring together as many local Ignites as possible. Read more.

In a blog post today, New York Times Columnist (and bestselling O'Reilly author) David Pogue responds to a reader question about DRM (he calls it "copy protection") in light of all the recent ereader buzz, and he's very honest and open about his (very natural) reaction to finding copies of his books out in the wild: "As an author myself, I, too, am terrified by the thought of piracy. I can't stand seeing my books, which are the primary source of my income, posted on all these piracy Web sites, available for anyone to download free." He then discusses sales for one of his books since we began offering it as a (DRM-free) ebook: "The thing was pirated to the skies. It's all over the Web now, ridiculously easy to download without paying... The crazy thing was, sales of the book did not fall." Read more.

'Twas a night during the holidays, when all through the house
Everyone was connecting and using their mouse.
The screens were alight and holding their stares,
While holiday music from iTunes loudly blared.

The children were chatting and texting their friends,
Searching for YouTube clips they just had to send;
And Daddy with his iPhone and I with my RIM
Were synching our calendars to meet at the gym.
Read more.

The Importance of What You Say — "People laugh when I tell them I'm a professional speaker. They assume at first that I'm some kind of self-help guru or infomercial star," writes Scott Berkun in a new O'Reilly Insights column on Forbes.com. In the column, the bestselling author of the newly released Confessions of a Public Speaker discusses how to choose what to say and which angle to take. Read more.

Holiday Gift Guide — Need a gift for the hard-core geek in your life? How about the DIYer or digital photographer? O'Reilly has something for every techie and crafter on your list, from hobbyist to pro. Check out our Gift Guide to see our new titles, and pick up some great gifts for the holidays. Give O'Reilly.

iPhone Piracy -- over 70% of submitted game scores for this game (Tap Fu) were from pirated copies. Having seen our data and the fact that not a single pirate bought Tap-Fu after playing it, these arguments all sound a bit delusional to me. It seems like an attempt at trying to be legitimate while hiding the real reason. They should just change their page to say "We pirate because we can". That seems to be a much more honest statement based on the data we've seen. (via timoreilly on Twitter) This and more in today's Four Short Links. Read more.

What people are says about our webcasts: "Content superb of course. But I also loved its "personality" - friendly, casual, expert, geeky: perfect!"
-- Heather Young

Our upcoming webcasts include:

• DRBD and MySQL - An HA Match Made In Heaven
• Cloud Security & Privacy
• Cloud Security Deep Dive
• Using ICT (Information & Communications Technology) to Create a Sustainable Business
• Tour the Top 10 Treats in Entity Framework 4
• The Science of Social Media Marketing

Check out our Webcast page for on-demand videos of past webcasts and more upcoming live events!

Just over three years ago, Bre Pettis and I threw a geek night in our home town. We called it Ignite Seattle. Since that first amazing night in 2006, Ignite has spread to over 60 cities, bringing together thousands of geeks and generating hundreds of videos of Ignite talks. This March, it gets much, much bigger. O'Reilly is launching the first-ever Global Ignite Week, to bring together as many local Ignites as possible. Read more.

In light of the company's past consumer-unfriendly initiatives, Facebook's recent 'privacy' settings change should serve as a wake up call to its 350M users that they are entrusting a Fox to guard the Hen House; a truth that is destined to erupt into a crisis for the company. Read more.

• How can I interact with government on the Web?
• How to record phone interviews on a Mac
• How to build your own baseball stats database
• Practical differences between Foswiki and TWiki
• Which virtual machine on a mobile platform is fastest?

Share knowledge, ask questions on O'Reilly Answers today.

Under no pressure from anyone, I’ve forced this obligatory “end of year predictions” post upon myself. People always ask me where I think Government 2.0 is going anyway, I may as well get some writing mileage out of it, right? So, here are some non-exhaustive, somewhat creative, and entirely debatable trends and ideas that I foresee taking shape in the next three years or so:

• Local governments as experiments
• The rise of Citizen 2.0
• Mobile devices as primary devices
• Ubiquitous crude video content
• Always on-the-record

Read more.