Read and weep, and then resist!! Excerpt from a report in The Star from Canada, by James Motluk: “Recently, private interests have been using trademark and copyright laws to fence off large chunks of our common language Last year, in an attempt to wrestle a few pennies of the GST from the tight-fisted grip of… Continue reading
Date archives "January 2008"
Richard Poynder’s Open and Shut interviews
Worth mentioning again: Richard Poynder continues to interview and profile luminaries of the various “open” (access, data, content, etc…) movements. It’s an extraordinary record of our changing times and knowledge practices. Here’s a sample: – with Peter Murray-Rust: who “is working at the frontline of what has been dubbed Science 2.0, an online interactive environment… Continue reading
Video activists starting “New Screw Tube” campaign against YouTube dominance
From the activists at Transmission, which is a network of citizen journalists, video makers, artists, researchers, programmers and web producers who are developing online video distribution tools for social justice and media democracy. They write that the “No Screw Tube†campaign, which aims to encourage people to use other video-sharing resource sites than just YouTube,… Continue reading
From Citizendium to Eduzendium
Great initiative, read via Peter Suber. Announcement: “…Traditional teaching saw students laboring to produce essays that to them felt onerous and oftentimes pointless. Once read by the lecturer their writing was generally consigned to the dustbin…. [T]he online reference encyclopedia project Citizendium, in collaboration with expert teachers and lecturers, has launched Eduzendium. The Eduzendium project… Continue reading
What happens when you have true broadband?
Geoff Daily writes about how a fiber network is altering community dynamics in Vasteras, Sweden, “arguably the fullest realization of what an open access, multi-service network can be.” He writes: “The fact that blew me away was about them and how the deployment of a fiber network impacted their use of broadband. Before this community… Continue reading
The emergence of an Asian creative Commons
One of the unsung heroes of the Asian internet, is Frederick Noronha, who has been tirelessly reporting for years about the Asian scene from his base in Goa. Here he is reviewing how Asian artists are taking up the sharing ethos and practices that have been largely enabled by the Creative Commons. The excerpt we… Continue reading
Spiritual expression in the peer to peer era (3): some current trends
Last part of the exploration, after the theory, some practical expressions of what we have indicated the two previous days. At the bottom of these examples, you will find my conclusions of the exploration so far. The following is not aimed to be a comprehensive review of religious-spiritual trends that are influenced by the 3… Continue reading
Larry Taub’s Spiritual Imperative reaches number one in Japan
Last year, I recommended a remarkable little book that sets you thinking about macrohistory and the future of mankind. I summarized some of the main points of the book: “Taub has written the type of book you may find many details wrong with, but which overall, sets you thinking, and its immense value lies in… Continue reading
Spiritual expression in the peer to peer era (2): towards a theory of the spiritual commons?
We continue our explorations of participatory forms of spirituality, that we started yesterday. Developments in theory: the participatory and relational spirituality approaches by Jorge Ferrer and John Heron John Heron makes a very strong case for a relational approach to spirituality, for which he defines 8 characteristics: “the spirituality of persons is developed and revealed… Continue reading
Patrick Anderson on the rivalry of non-rival resources
At Oekonux, Patrick Anderson makes the very useful point that we cannot ignore the materiality of so-called immaterial resources. Patric Anderson: “I would like to discuss what appears to be an almost universal confusion about the nature of reality itself that causes us to think rivalry (finiteness) is limited to certain *TYPES* of things (such… Continue reading
Spiritual expression in the peer to peer era (1)
I posted the draft of an essay entitled “The Next Buddha will be a collective: spiritual expression in the peer to peer era” This is what is is about: Religious and spiritual expression is always embedded in societal structures. If social structures are moving towards the form of distributed networks, what kind of evolution of… Continue reading
The Economics of Free
Mike Masnick at Techdirt has summarized a Grand Unified Theory on the Economics of Free. As this is only an excerpt, go to the full article, and at the bottom of it, you will find links to the whole series, up to now 15 entries. There is also a vivid discussion in the comment field…. Continue reading
European Greens agree that sharing ain’t stealing
This video from the European Greens is significant not just because it is a useful counter-propaganda against the criminalization of sharing, but because it is probably, as far as I know, and except for the obvious Pirate Party, the first political movement to take such positions as ‘a whole’, and not just on the basis… Continue reading
Critique of the Digg governance process
This echoes Wikipedia Reviews’s earlier summary of criticisms of the Wikipedia governance process. Here is a similar approach from the blog RevoltNation, a group of users who are leaving Digg. Here is an excerpt where they are summarizing the reasons why: Critique of the Digg Governance Process: “Digg is, in part, a game. It always… Continue reading
Decentralized Co-Creation of Value as a New Paradigm in Commerce and Culture
David Bollier has produced a new report that distills the proceedings of a conference of the Aspen Institute and is entitled, The Rise of Collective Intelligence. Here is a summary of some of the topics covered by the report, from David Bollier: “bottom-up knowledge empowers ordinary individuals to approach market transactions on a more equal… Continue reading
Announcement: An experiment in blog-based peer review
Forwarded by Ben Vershbow: MIT Press has authorized what is probably one of the first blog-based peer reviews for a forthcoming book by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, digital media writer, artist, and professor of coummincations at the University of California, San Diego. Every weekday over the next ten weeks, Wardrip-Fruin will post a section of his new… Continue reading