For those literate in Italian, there’s an interesting book, Networking: The Net as Art, on the intertwining histories of art and network culture in Italy which is freely available online as well as in print. From the description at networkingart.eu: The book represents a first tentative reconstruction of the history of artistic networking in Italy,… Continue reading
Date archives "January 2007"
P2P Video and Micro Knowledge Transfer
Visuarios is not another “funny videos” site – their tagline “broadcast your skills” is also a clever variation of the more general YouTube one “broadcast yourself”: Visuarios lets you “share your videos about everyday knowledge with everyday people.” Obviously a service like this is only as good as the user submitted content and probably needs… Continue reading
How Societies Work
David Ronfeldt of RAND (one of the authors of the brilliant book Networks and Netwars) continues his elaboration of a framework for societal evolution that he began in Tribes, Institutions, Markets, Networks in his new work: IN SEARCH OF HOW SOCIETIES WORK Tribes — The First and Forever Form By: David Ronfeldt Not only is… Continue reading
BarCampBank In Paris
If you are in Paris on Feb 03 2007, be sure to check out: BarCampBank In French Saturday February 3, 2007, from 2:00pm to 7:00pm faberNovel, 42, boulevard de Sébastopol – 75003 Paris The aim of BarCampBank is to foster innovations and the creation of new business models in the world of banking and finance…. Continue reading
P2P Subjectivity and the Practice of Friending in boyd’s “Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8”
One of the clearest signs of the depth to which online social networks have enmeshed themselves into our culture is demonstrated in the acceptance of the verb “to friend.” danah boyd tackles the practice of “friending” in these networks (MySpace in particular) in her piece “Friends, friendsters, and top 8: Writing community into being on… Continue reading
Enhancing Cellphone Networks with P2P-reliability
Interesting posting from science-fiction author David Brin. Thanks to Scott Carpenter for alerting us. Excerpt: “…. almost no attention has been paid to improving the reliability and utility of our cell networks, to assist citizen action during times of emergency. To the best of my knowledge. no high level demand has gonenout – from FEMA… Continue reading
Bitmunk – P2P distribution?
Bitmunk has an interesting business model for distributing music and other digital content. It has some important features that could make it successful: Bitmunk provides a secure base for the business of exchanging digital goods and money. All users are authenticated. Artists can register their work directly and set their own prices. Others are encouraged… Continue reading
What is the relation between the peer to peer paradigm and collective intelligence?
To answer this, I will be drawing on an excellent answer by CI pioneer George Por. I want to precede it with my own version of a nested hierarchy of forms of knowedge, which I developed back in my cybrarian days in the early nineties. Data are just snippets, the basic units that are as… Continue reading
P2P as a guidepost for cultural institutions: The effects of culture
The term ‘culture’ is a big word. It is frequently disputed and differentiated by researchers locating culture in institutions (think organisational culture), national culture (societies such as the American culture that is distinct from all other societies), and for cultural institutions, there is the cultural phenonema – such as the collective cultures of museums. This… Continue reading
The Life-cycle of Emergence (part 2)
This is a continuation of our previous posting on the essay of Margareth Wheatley et al, which offers a three-stage model of social change, based on emergence. Stage One: Networks. We live in a time when coalitions, alliances and networks are forming as the means to create societal change. There are ever more networks and… Continue reading
How does the world change? Through networks and emergence.
The following is from a remarkable essay by Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze, which I consider a must read. It is entitled: Using Emergence to Take Social Innovation to Scale The starting quote is right of the mark: Despite current ads and slogans, the world doesn’t change one person at a time. It changes when… Continue reading
The Long Tail of Control: can we realistically accept an Enterprise 2.0 model?
Interesting posting by Dion Hitchcliffe which reviews the debate between Andrew MacAfee and conservative Nicholas Carr about the potential of the Web 2.0 to transform the enterprise. It also carries an interesting graphic on the Long Tail as it affects power and control. Here is the conclusion: “And this is where this shift of control… Continue reading
Saskia Sassen on panarchy
I posted a long post about Saskia Sassen’s recent work and its relation to panarchy (p2p politics): Saskia Sassen on Panarchy
Are free software licences obsolete in an age of open networked applications?
This is certainly not a new issue for the free software community, but for our general readers, I recommend the following blog article. It starts by noting that as most of applications are now on the web, rather than running on our own computers, the free software protection of public code becomes less useful. Rather… Continue reading
Skype Founder’s Joost/Venice Project
Via: Hands On with Skypes Joost/Venice Project – AppScout The founders of Skype have announced the “Joost” project/product. I have not yet had a chance to actually try the beta (windows only) version of Joost, but it apparently is an attempt to bring high quality television-type experience to the internet. (Playfuls has a great overview… Continue reading
Structured self-organization in Curitiba, Brazil
Charles Leadbeater’s new book, We Think, which will shortly be featured as Book of the Week, promises to be an extraordinary interesting book, full of concrete real-life examples of mass creativity at work. Chapter 11 for example, features the experience in a city in Brazil, which I recommend reading in full. Here’s the crux of… Continue reading