Stuff You’re About To Know

Add fine arts and media arts to this total, and you’re talking real money:

Department of Cultural Resources Secretary Linda A. Carlisle today unveiled the findings of a new research study which shows that the professional craft industry contributes $206.5 million into Western North Carolina’s economy each year.

Ever kick yourself for not buying more domain names when they were available.  It would have been nice to have bought battery.com or shamwow.com, eh?  Well there’s another gold rush on the way:

A sea change may be coming to cyberspace with Web addresses ending in anything from .a to .z. That has businesses increasingly worried they will have to spend millions to guard their brand names.

The familiar .com, .net, .org and 18 other suffixes — officially “generic top-level domains” — could be joined by a seemingly endless stream of new ones next year under a landmark change approved last summer by the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers.

Lots more in ReadMoreLand after the jump…

Asheville Chamber of Commerce offers up its March, 2009 Economic Report on teh UtOObZ:

The YWCA presents its annual report on a similar YouTubular device.  If you don’t know much about the Ydub, then give this a watch.

Lastly, Whiskey Fire has been following the teabag brigade as they prepare to teabag the nation.  WF uncovers paranoid rants about how ACORN, Code Pink, and George Soros are coordinating with the Obama administration to infiltrate the All-American, gubmint hatin’, Frodo Teabaggins.