So it’s a ripe time to consider the status of the relationship. What’s new? What’s changed? The amount of financial data available publicly is astonishing. That doesn’t mean it’s all useful. There’s plenty of data out there, but it’s plenty confusing. You can’t extract alpha until you understand what you’re looking at. As Michael Simonsen, president and CEO of Altos Research, puts it, “free data on the internet is a mess.”

If anyone doubts that financial markets and technology markets are deeply intertwined, consider this: the same day that JPMorgan Chase revealed its “purchase” of Bear Stearns, a Gartner Group analyst released a report showing that “the financial services industry continued to lead all vertical markets in server revenue, as it accounted for 25.3 percent of worldwide server revenue in 2007.” As goes one set of markets, so goes the other.

In this issue of Release 2.0, we consider the Wall Street/Web 2.0 mashup from a number of angles. We talk to Paul Kedrosky, chair of our Money:Tech conference and an influential blogger on the topic (as well as others), about why some on Wall Street hate Web 2.0 — and what Web 2.0 can do to infiltrate Wall Street nonetheless. Entrepreneur Marc Hedlund, now chief product officer for OATV-funded personal finance startup Wesabe, examines what happens when hidden data gets surfaced. Cathleen Rittereiser talks to hedge fund managers to discover what they want from Web 2.0 — and what they’re actually getting. Longtime Radar contributor Nathan Torkington digs deep into prediction markets and spells out both how to manage them and what companies can gain from implementing them.

It’s a truism that alpha lasts longest when it’s hidden. That may have been true in the past, but the growing use of Web 2.0 tools means that less data will stay hidden, and what’s hidden will stay hidden for a shorter period of time. As James Altucher of Stockpickr said at Money:Tech, “When it comes to data nowadays, closed source is a myth.”

You can purchase the current issue of Release 2.0 or, even better, subscribe to the newsletter.

And now one of the biggest purveyors of virtual worlds for children, Nickelodeon (which owns Neopets), is going in deeper. It’s adding more virtual world features to Neopets and developing a virtual world around its SpongeBob SquarePants franchise. Companies not paying attention to virtual worlds are not paying attention to where the market is going.

What’s that? It’s the last print copy of the Times I’ll ever have delivered to my front door. Over the years, I’ve slowly weaned myself off subscriptions to physical newspapers, but it was hard to say no to the Times. The quality was high, the thump of the paper on the sidewalk was a pleasant sound to hear first thing in the morning, I liked the serendipity of walking through a print section, and I felt obligated to pay for the paper at a time when print subscribers were becoming an endangered species. But, after years of wavering, I’m done. The environmental argument alone should have been enough for me, but the simple fact is that I do more and more of my reading on a screen (the only holdouts: fiction and poetry). And plenty of that reading has been from the Times. What finally made me give in to the inevitable was realizing, one barely-dawn morning last week when I was reading the paper at our kitchen table, that I had already read much (most?) of it online. For all the pleasure of holding and print, the Times on paper is just too late. In 2008, today’s paper is yesterday’s news.

So now I’m a freeloader, although you could argue that my personal information, sent to the Times in return for a username and password, may have some value. I rarely, if ever, click on an ad on the Times‘s website. I would gladly pay for the pleasure and convenience of reading the paper online, just as I do for The Wall Street Journal, but I don’t have that option. In this era of advertising-is-the-only-business-model, management at the Times Company has decided that I’ve decided that the value of what it sends to me is zero. I disagree — and I’m not going to pay a premium for the proprietary and little-used Times Reader to make my point.

I’ll miss the paper on paper, and I bet I’ll buy it when I’m on vacation, as a treat, an indulgence. But if even people like me — who adore The New York Times — can no longer justify a print subscription, how can its print version survive, except as a high-priced, scarce product for an increasingly elite audience?

Yet, like everyone else in business and technology, I need to communicate. As so many studies — and common sense — show, we make decisions better (or, at least, faster) when there are pictures involved. I’ve written awkward stick figures and embarrassingly asymmetric circles on whiteboards and the backs of napkins and envelopes to make points. And now there’s a book to support those of us who have to communicate visually but shouldn’t be allowed to. Dan Roam’s The Back of the Napkin (Portfolio) is breezy in presentation but rigorous in approach. Essentially, it’s a framework for understanding why presenting problems in visual form makes it easier to solve them and presenting ideas in visual form makes it easier to develop them and convince others that they’re good ideas. Most important, it shows you how to show things, walking through some vivid examples and well-worn metaphors. Chances are you won’t pick the same visual metaphors — but you will think in terms of visual metaphors and that’s what will stick.

I hope I’ve made the case for this book, although I realize I would have done it more effectively if I had drawn something.

On Penguin’s latest e-Book move via the O’Reilly Radar blog:

What’s most galling, of course, is that Penguin isn’t attempting to increase interest in ebooks as a medium by making these classics, long past copyright, available in free, un-DRM-encumbered formats. In an old-meets-new mashup, publishers could use free distribution of still-in-demand classics to generate interest in a form, ebooks, that is still only in the earliest days of its potential public acceptance. Wouldn’t you be more likely to try something new if it was free?

I’m guessing that the etiquette primer will not be what makes ebooks mainstream. Although ebooks should have extras, those extras should take advantage of the interactive medium, not merely deliver more — and inferior — text. This reminds me of the early days of CDs, when all sorts of trivial extras (outtakes, alternate takes) were added to discs as selling points. More recently, it’s like the “deleted scenes” stuffed into DVDs. People, do you think those scenes were deleted because they were good?

What’s most galling, of course, is that Penguin isn’t attempting to increase interest in ebooks as a medium by making these classics, long past copyright, available in free, un-DRM-encumbered formats. In an old-meets-new mashup, publishers could use free distribution of still-in-demand classics to generate interest in a form, ebooks, that is still only in the earliest days of its potential public acceptance. Wouldn’t you be more likely to try something new if it was free?

Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard neuroanatomist, eavesdropped on her own stroke. As I wrote the day of her talk, she walked us through what she felt and thought while her brain was going wild, from the borderline-metaphysical (“I can’t define where I begin and where I end”) to the borderline-hilarious (“I’m a busy woman. I don’t have time for a stoke”). Her description of her time in that strange state, caught between two worlds, the rare researcher who has been able to chronicle a brain-changing event from the inside, was astonishing.

And now you can see and hear it, too:

The brain she’s holding there is a real one, by the way.

We’ll alert you to the other two classics when they’re published.

Order the report.

See all the O’Reilly Radar reports.

John McCarthy, father of LISP, a giant in artificial intelligence, gave a sit-down high-level talk about Elephant 2000, a proposed programming language intended for transaction processing and electronic data interchange. He described Elephant in terms of its ability to capture “speech acts,” which I’ll define roughly as words that lead to actions. (One of McCarthy’s examples: “I now pronounce you man and wife.”) McCarthy said these words “create obligations.” They’re promises, questions, requests, etc. As anyone who has read the code to programs I’ve written (many of which include the words “hello” and “world” in the title) will know that I’m no expert. If anyone in the ETech audience can do an ace job of explaining the most provocative line in McCarthy’s talk, “ascribing beliefs to thermostats is like adding 0 and 1 to the number system,” I’ll send you a free O’Reilly book of my choice.

Steve Cousins of Willow Garage proposed an open source platform for personal robots. Those personal robots would perform useful activities, and he showed some very enjoyable film clips of humanoid robots performing basic tasks such as picking up a living room. And Willow Garage is balancing its philosophical and business imperatives:The company is privately funded and “focused on impact before the return of capital…The goal is to produce 10 robots and make them available to researchers so we can all be on a common platform.”

Kathy Sierra, who ran an inspiring storyboarding tutorial on Monday, told us how to kick ass. Her talk was not merely a paean to mastery, but also a brisk walk through recent neuroscience to “show that the difference between world-class and average is not about natural talent.” The research, she said, reveals “that most common thread separating world-class and average is the ability to put in the time, to focus, concentrate, and practice.” Expertise, she noted, is not so much about what you know, but what you do. She showed how mirror neurons let us run similations of another persons bran inside our brain — but she emphasized that the quality of simulation depends on experience. There’s still only one way to get to Carnegie Hall.

(Then Tom Coates spoke about fire eagle. My post about that is here.)

Finally, Peter Semmelhack, CEO and founder of Bug Labs, talked about community electronics, a term intended to turn the tradition term “consumer electronics” on its head. He posited a long tail of gadgets. Today, there are relatively few devices, marketed to millions. In the future, he’s hoping for millions of devices targeted for the few. To develop these niche devices and custom gadgets, Bug is building a hardware innovation platform that goes from idea through functional spec, all the way to manufacturing. It’s not the only way, Semmelhack noted, but it’s the way Bug is trying to make it happen.

And now to the breakout sessions: Why are there always two I want to go to scheduled at the same time?

You can read Brady Forrest’s previous coverage of rire eagle on Radar and our resident geo wiz will post further thoughts on this shortly. He can’t now — as the program chair of ETech, Brady is onstage right now, too.