Date archives "May 2006"

Wired magazine on crowdsourcing and distributed labour networks

Interesting article in Wired, which we recommend reading: “Just as distributed computing projects like UC Berkeley’s SETI@home have tapped the unused processing power of millions of individual computers, so distributed labor networks are using the Internet to exploit the spare processing power of millions of human brains.” We have some other entries related to labour… Continue reading

On the difference between IP TV and Internet Television

Christopher Herot usefully distinguishes the two concepts: For background, see also our entry on P2P-TV. IPTV “The recent Streaming Media East in New York brought into focus the difference between two seemingly similar terms, IPTV and Internet Television. Both refer to the use of Internet Protocol and associated technologies to deliver video to consumers. Both… Continue reading

Jaron Lanier’s rant against online collectivism and its relational alternative

Jaron Lanier has just written one of those potential much-talked about essays, which is essentially a rant about certain types of reductionist, lowest-common-denominator, forms of online collectivism, for Edge. They form the danger of the dark side of peer to peer processes, where the balance between group think and individual genius gets lost in favour… Continue reading

New version of TechnoCalyps is out: six theses on the cyber-sacred

A non-p2p subject, echoing the last post about Remi Sussan’s webcast. During the years 1997-1998, I worked with director and video artist Frank Theys on a 3-hour TV documentary on the ‘transhuman’ future of humanity, called TechnoCalyps (with as original subtitle ‘the metaphysics of technology and the end of man’. It was shown twice on… Continue reading

Tom Attlee’s culture of deliberation

We are republishing an important contribution from P2P News 104, in which Tom Attlee brings a summary of the evolution of deliberation, from simple dialogue, to complex decision-making processes. Tom Attlee’s analysis brings together two strands, the emergence of new practices of dialogue and deliberation, and the spread of holistic philosophies and spiritual practices. The… Continue reading

James Love on the Ten Laws of the Natural Commons

This blog’s key interest is on the cultural Commons. The following laws, distilled by James Love, concern our physical commons, and were recently published in the On the Commons blog. Read the full entry for its context. “Ten Tenets: the Law of the Commons of the Natural World 1) The commons shall be passed on… Continue reading

Network future scenarios

Automata:What if ad-hoc, self-organizing mesh networks were all we needed to communicate? and a few more network neutrality harbinger of doom scenarios: 1. What if Telcos and Cable companies were in complete control of the networks’ future? 2. What could happen if United States’s Congress passed a network neutrality law? via University of South California… Continue reading

The Open Source model is not a democratic model – Clay Shirky

Clay Shirky, in a reaction to a earlier and rather inane piece by Nicholas Carr, has some very interesting remarks on the balance between hierarchy and community, as it operates in open source models: “The open source model is not a democratic model. It is the combination of community and hierarchy that makes it work…. Continue reading

Social Sculpture

‘Every human being is an artist, a freedom being, called to participate in transforming and reshaping the conditions, thinking and structures that shape and condition our lives’ Social Sculpture refers to a conception of art, framed in the 1970s by Beuys, as an interdiscplinary and participatory process in which thought, speech and discussion are core… Continue reading

Danah Boyd on Superpublics and Wikipedia’s difficulty of dealing with domain expertise

Danah Boyd introduces, tentatively, a new concept, to discuss audiences that you don’t know about, i.e. Superpublics. I also recommend this post, a personal testimony of the difficulty on reconciling the open process at Wikipedia, with the expertise of domain experts. “Historically, we have talked about the public, as in the public sphere (Habermas). Implicated… Continue reading