An interesting feminist take on the difference between exchanging and gifting, which I found here. Our own wiki entry with definitions and citations are here. Genevieve Vaughan: “One particularly important loop in the thread of gift giving is the double gift: giving in order to receive a return gift – what we call ‘exchange’. Exchange… Continue reading
Date archives "June 2007"
Pat Kane: from well being to well becoming
Back in February, play theorist Pat Kane wrote a commentary in The Guardian about the happiness policy debates in the UK, and it was recently republished in the IDC mailing list. Though it has some parts that may require knowledge of the local context, the text makes very interesting general points that are very much… Continue reading
Robin Good TV Calls For Grassroots News Reporters
Social Media Blogger Robin Good is looking for some Grass Roots Digital Television news reporters. Please blog about this, and help Robin spread the word and get a critical mass of participants.This is a great opportunity to break into digital media and show off your skills and talent. If you are interested in reporting, by… Continue reading
One Loaf Per Child
Bread and software are more the same than different. We tend to think of software as a special product because it is appears to exist in a virtual world of zero rivalry. But that is incorrect. While any digital information can be quickly and almost effortlessly copied from one physical medium to another, the costs… Continue reading
iCare: A Peer To Peer Charity Marketplace Online
The iCare project emerged from ideas shared by two Berkeley College students, while watching he devastation of Hurricane Katrina unfold: After hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast, Berkeley Engineering graduate students Ephrat Bitton and Anand Kulkarni watched with the rest of the world as logistical snafus, bureaucratic red tape and communication breakdowns prevented charitable aid… Continue reading
Assignment Zero, open-source journalism
I stumbled upon this site, which is about open-source journalism. Their about page: “Inspired by the open-source movement, this is an attempt to bring journalists together with people in the public who can help cover a story. It’s a collaboration among NewAssignment.Net, Wired, and those who choose to participate. The investigation takes place in the… Continue reading
Video:Software and Community in the Early 21st Century
“This is an extraordinary lecture on video in which Eben Moglen, the lawyer of the Free Software Foundation, explains that we have achieved an extraordinary moment in history, in which the whole of human knowledge can be shared with everyone, at marginal reproduction costs. In this context, sharing becomes the most economically fruitful strategy, and… Continue reading
Cosma Orsi on the Political Economy of Solidarity and the Partner State
One of the highlights of my recent visit to Denmark, which included speaking at Reboot 9, extended conversations with my much admired friend Adam Arvidsson, meeting Uffe Elbaek, Jytte and Simon Kavanagh at the incredible Kaospilots.dk school at Aarhus, was an unexpected meeting with Cosma Orsi who is associated with the University of Roskilde. I… Continue reading
Top 5 P2P Books of the Week
Did we mean participate or Did we mean something else? by Markus Miessen & Shumon Basar, Editors From www.didsomeonesayparticipate.com Flatness? Today, the need to identify and instrumentalise “spatial practices†becomes significant due to the unprecedented visibility of what one might call “globalization at workâ€: from Iraq to Nepal, Dubai to Mumbai, a new atlas is… Continue reading
Video: a three minute film on 500 years of female portraits
Thanks to Raul for this cultural entry, a three minute film on the morphing face of woman in art and history (time).
Should we worry about Web 2.0 takeovers?
The IDC mailing list recently carried a flurry of exchanges critiquing the corporate takeovers and mergers of web 2.0 platforms, with particular worries about what would happen with personal and private data. I’ve always thought that web 2.0 represents a social contract that says: “let us share and collaborate, and in turn, we accept that… Continue reading
Video: Free Hugs Campaign
” Free hugs is a real life controversial story of Juan Mann, A man whos sole mission was to reach out and hug a stranger to brighten up their lives. In this age of social disconnectivity and lack of human contact, the effects of the Free Hugs campaign became phenomenal. As this symbol of human… Continue reading
Why should a company go open source?
Our friend Francois Rey is a big fan of the Collaber collaborative software. See http://blog.collaber.com/ He recently sent them a blog posting which outlines not just the benefits of going ‘open source’, but gives an indication of different hybrid business an licensing models which may have the effect of creating a convergene between business and… Continue reading
Book of the Week: Devices of the Soul, conclusion
Our last excerpt from Steve Talbott’s new and strongly recommended book. There is nothing in the online world that can stand in for place. When, a couple of years ago, a Florida man was arrested for routing children to pornography sites on a large scale, a U.S. attorney said, “Few of us could imagine there… Continue reading
On The Need For Business Stewardship, and Open Services
Burak Arikan recently wrote about the acquisition of services and data by services providers like Google, and yahoo. Arikan writes After the feed stats company Feedburner is acquired by Google, the AdWords integration to feeds became the dominant discussion. Great! Your blog business can now be managed from a single Google interface right. This also… Continue reading
Book of the Week: Devices of the Soul, part 4
We continue our publication of excerpts from Steve Talbott’s new book. Today: what to think of transactional efficiency as the be all and and all of development. Praises for the Internet’s efficiency were from the beginning so extreme, so exhilarated, so full of revolutionary expectation (“frictionless capitalism”!) – and, in their own narrow terms, so… Continue reading