Because of my lecture tour, I could not keep up with the weekly links recommendations, so here’s a monthly overview instead: P2P Business and Economics “Complementary” Currency Helps Local Communities Contrasts 2 different type of currencies: local and time-banks. Keeping the New Media new Who owns your content? Does the video-sharing service support sharing? Is… Continue reading
Date archives "December 2006"
The Shifting Hub
A new study by the New England Complex Science Institute looks at the stability of highly connected “hubs” in social networks (quoted from NECSI Press release): If you’re one of sixty million or so monthly visitors to social networking websites like MySpace or Facebook, you’ve probably noticed them— “network hubs,†people who have many more… Continue reading
DRM is death and has broken the IP consensus
Very important analysis in this reblogged summary of a talk on what Digital Rights Management has wrought in our culture: Excerpt: Jennifer Urban and Cory Doctorow spoke in tandem at the December 14 DIY Media seminar. I will post separate entries, although their presentations were closely related. “DRM is broken,” Urban declared, at the beginning… Continue reading
Commonism vs. Ownerism: who will win out?
Reblogged from the Transitioner. After explaining why the Internet is a “phronesis engine” (see the same entry), the author makes a number of propositions regarding the future of our economy, with a focus on the mode of ownership: For related ideas, see our entry on Peer Property. “Proposition: Economic revolutions occur when aspects of production… Continue reading
P2P Books of the Year in 2006
We have payed increasing attention on how the P2P meme is finding its way in the world of book publishing, and this is a recap page for our efforts. 1. The P2P Foundation Wiki Book pages URL = http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Books This is our most comprehensive list, where we maintain a Top 20, as well a list… Continue reading
AT&T Files Letter Of Commitment on Net Neutrality
Save The Internet Blog reports that AT&T has conceded in a letter to the FCC(PDF) to follow net neutrality principles for at least 24 months. The letter states in part that AT&T: According to AT&T’s letter, the merged company: “… commits that it will maintain a neutral network and neutral routing in its wireline broadband… Continue reading
Launch of the Law Underground collaborative
Reblogged from the Digital Universe: Law Underground is a rule-based expert system : “legal rules are entered in an if-then format, and the program uses them to dynamically generate interviews for end users. As a result, users are given information specific to their needs based on their responses. The site is motivated by the vast… Continue reading
Two cheers for the Creative Commons in 2007
1. Two cheers, not three. We will leave the third cheer in suspense, in honour of the critics who think that the CC licenses are insufficient, or even more radically, that it should be opposed because it distracts from the fight against the very notion of intellectual property. I have asked some other associates, to… Continue reading
Self-production of bliss vs. mystical theatrics
One of the very early and most serious critics of Ken Wilber was David Lane, who has an amazing collection of material on his Neural Surfer website. Back in 1996, he was one of the first to expose that systematic misinterpretation of other’s ideas was one of the main intellectual tactics in building that version… Continue reading
Attention Economy Recap and commentary from John Hagel
Last week we published excerpts of Michael Goldhabers book on the Attention Economy. Here’s the overview page for common access to the different pages, followed by an assessment of Goldhaber’s work by John Hagel at Edge Perspectives. Introduction page and first excerpt at http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=698 Second excerpt at http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=703 Third excerpt at http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=705 Fourth excerpt at… Continue reading
Digital sharecropping
Ed Felten reports on a blog entry by Nicholas Carr: “What’s being concentrated, in other words, is not content but the economic value of content. MySpace, Facebook, and many other businesses have realized that they can give away the tools of production but maintain ownership over the resulting products. One of the fundamental economic characteristics… Continue reading
An example of crowding out at Debian
In my P2P lectures, one of the point I discuss, and generates controversy in the business audience, is the ‘crowding out’ phenomemon. It means two things: that in community-based peer production (as opposed to crowdsourcing by unconnected individuals), paying out money to producers may have the opposite effect of discouraging voluntary labour. And secondly, that… Continue reading
Public Spaces on the Web
Unmediated mentions an interesting art experiment which demonstratest that Google Ads are not part of public space, but part of private space, like shopping malls. “A public space or a public place is a place where anyone has a right to come without being excluded because of economic or social conditions, although this may not… Continue reading
Is it necessary to design against homophyli and the logic of affinity?
We have recently updated the P2P Encyclopedia entry on Protocollary Power,which indicates how power is now hidden/exhibited in the design and architecture of social software, where it can constrain the freedom of individual agents. Related to this is a blog entry which discusses homophyli, defined as the phenomenon where we associate with like individuals because… Continue reading
The Internet as Phronesis Engine
Reblogged from the Transitioner: “The Aristotelean intellectual virtue of phronesis along with the related term episteme a are very important notions to consider in the context of “transitioning,” i.e. developing collective intelligence and wisdom. Episteme is the scientific rationality we are all quite familiar with. Phronesis is usually translated “practical wisdom” and is the kind… Continue reading
Rhizomatic militaries need distributed communication networks
We continue our exploration of the blog of Jeff Vail. For context, see our P2P Encyclopedia entry on Swarming, with theory and examples. From his own analysis of concrete cases and recent defeats of this tactic, we choose the concluding excerpt: “The success of a rhizome swarm depends in large part on its ability to… Continue reading