(image) It’s an odd collection of news that caught my eye today, perhaps because I spent the better part of the day getting twenty times your average dose of radiation (I was on a plane, thinking about radiation, Japan, nuclear power…). To the somewhat strange links:

Robot Pains And Corporate Feelings (Philosopher) What, exactly, is a corporation after all? I ask this in all sincerity, because I’m starting to (try to) think about Twitter or Facebook as “people” that I am in a “relationship” with, and I am starting to wonder if they “get” me, you know?

Beware the spyware model of technology – its flaws are built in (Cory/Guardian) A damn fine argument: “By the time I need a hearing aid or an artificial joint, I fully expect it to include one or more networked, general-purpose computers. I don’t want things in my body that are designed to run code against my wishes, or to prevent me from changing the programs that run on them.”

New Facebook Patent: the Huge Implications of Curated Search (Cnet) See also Facebook Patents Social Search (SEL) In short, Facebook has been thinking about search a long time. But has yet to do anything significant. Will it? I doubt it, because Facebook has a very tenuous relationship with “the rest of the web.”

Newspaper ad sales hit 25-year low in 2010 (Newsosaur) Well this ain’t odd. As they say in the news biz: Dog bites man.

Visa Adds Person-to-Person Payments in U.S. (FC) This feels important to me, because until now, Visa has not had a direct relationship with consumers. This is a smart move and defensive against Square, I’d wager.

Fortune Global 100 Social-Media Savvy, Getting Savvier (MarketingProfs) Twitter comes out a winner here.

Demand Media Relaunches eHow, Tyra’s typeF Goes Live (PC) Demand continues it’s brand-burnishing moves.

And because it’s Thursday, which after all is the day before Friday, here’s a video that just makes me happy, and I hope it does you as well (thanks to John Heilemann for the tip). We could all use a good Unicorn Chaser from time to time:

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