Jeff Jarvis' "Buzz Machine" takes on a topic dear to my own heart, specifically, how much of a scumbag is Mark Cuban really? My opinion varies by day. Presently, Cuban reminds me of Ununpentium. Both are entirely synthetic, highly dense elements that shouldn't really exist in the natural world, created almost by accident and only recently via the fusion of a series of other dense elements (isotopes of Calcium and Americium for Ununpentium, the shareholders and management at AOL and Yahoo for Cuban) through the judicious use of spin (a cyclotron, for instance- or perhaps a bloodless public relations firm and a penchant for controversy), require large amounts of expensive equipment to feed and maintain and that still have no use whatsoever other than for basic scientific research (chemistry or forensic psychology, depending which side of the metaphor you want to use) and to keep various wing-nuts chattering. So far no one has created a particularly stable isotope of Ununpentium (or Mark Cuban). The half-life of its most stable known isotope is 87 milliseconds or so, and without a massive research budget, it tends to degrade into less sophisticated (but more stable and less prone to decay) elements like Ununtrium (similar to Guy Kawasaki).
As for "ShareSleuth," I don't quite know what to say other than anyone with a high enough mass to volume ratio to believe that "altruism" or "helping the poor schmuck" should be found on the same page as "shorting capital markets for profit" deserves to have Mark Cuban as a recurring dinner guest.
