The time it takes from when a book appears on the radar to the moment I “proceed to checkout” is quite often affected by recommendations. An excellent blog I discovered recently tipped me over the edge last week when I bought a book that I’ve been meaning to read for a long while: The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen.

I haven’t received it yet … so more on that later.

The book was recommended in a post about innovation at Google by Microsoft based blogger Dare Obasanjo.

Among other interesting posts by Dare are Improving Website Usability with A/B Testing which discusses an MS research paper that I highly recommended for any web based decision maker, and A-List Technology Bloggers: What Are They Good For? which outlines Dare’s take on Facebook and how those who don’t get it … don’t get it.

Finally, for those who like trivia, Dare is the son of Nigeria’s former president Olusegun Obasanjo.

Most countries have rules and regulations to protect consumers from misleading advertisements. The general tone is usually the same: Don’t mislead people.

What’s the only thing worse than a horrible distracting attention seeking ad? The fake user interface ad.

The image on the right is the non-blinking version of an ad that currently appears regularly on Facebook. Not only does it mislead the user with the ad’s text (”999.999th visitor”) but it also presents the less web savvy user with a trap: click on the “close” button in the top right corner and instead of “closing” anything, the user is taken straight to the advertised site.

This ad manages to be doubly misleading; both by its content and its interface.

Anyone unlucky enough to fall for the con is taken to Freelotto:

CONGRATULATIONS! YOU WON! YOU WON! YOU WON! … Claim your cash award now. Where do you want us to send your check?

In all fairness, Freelotto doesn’t hide the fact that they will send you “sponsored email” (spem, anyone?).

The advertisement does however try and trick you into visiting their site with their ad on Facebook, much to the detriment of Facebook’s friendly, cosy and intimate image.

When Bill Gross founded his famous Idealab incubator in 1996, taking an idea and turning it into a functioning business was a venture that would require funds of at least $1 million a pop.

Today, developing an application like Walletproof costs significantly less than a million dollars. This changes the game.

In Return of the startup factory, Business 2.0’s Michael V. Copeland writes about the contrast between the good old days of the bubble and the new high turnover incubators, such as Paul Graham’s Y-Combinator.

The idea is not dissimilar to that of the VC model: No one has a clue as to what business ideas will become successful, just as the Hollywood studios don’t know what movies will become blockbusters. The incubator bets on a fairly large range of ideas and gives each company a small amount of seed capital for an equity stake.

With open source software, cheap bandwidth and distributed teams that don’t need office space, the cost of failure will be minuscule compared to the return if the incubator manages to bet on and support an idea that becomes a blockbuster.

Now, the high turnover incubator has come to London in the form of Seedcamp.

Seedcamp is run by two VCs, Saul Klein from Index ventures (who also runs the OpenCoffee) and Reshma Sohoni from 3i.

Sam Sethi, who formerly edited TechCrunch UK and later Vecosys, announced yesterday that he’s launching blognation, a blog network that will report on European web start-ups.

Sam is well connected into what’s happening in the UK web2.0 start-up scene and Vecosys (as TechCrunch UK was before it) is a must-read for those who are enthusiastic about European web culture.

According to the announcement, Sam has secured editors from various European countries, including Iceland. Being an Icelandic expatriate, I found this very interesting and I’m looking forward to seeing who the Icelandic editor is.

Iceland has a strong and vibrant economy and has everything it takes to foster interesting web start-ups. Strangely enough, one of the most innovative companies on the Icelandic web is Árvakur, a newspaper publisher founded in 1919.

Their blogging platform is the country’s biggest thanks largely to how they integrate their newspaper’s website and the blogs. They even publish excerpts from the blogs in the paper itself - a powerful incentive for those who want their voices to be heard.

It will be interesting to see how blognation will fare in the coming months. Good luck to Sam and his fellow editors.