From an interesting post by Robert Cringely: “I’ve been hearing that peer-to-peer file sharing has declined a bit. Actually, it’s the rate of growth that has declined, but in a market where volume is always rising and prices always falling, even a decline in growth can be significant. This is happening for lots of reasons… Continue reading
Date archives "September 2008"
Contract manufacturing as distributed manufacturing
Eric Hunting writes: The intermediate level of industrial demassification that is underway today and not necessarily dependent upon open source technology or peer-to-peer activity, creates a fertile ground for the immediate future and drives the complementary trend in the miniaturization of machine tools One of the key underlying trends that we see as supporting the… Continue reading
An update on Christian Siefkes’ Peer Economy (2): The Commons Network
Christian continues his report from the Peer Economy workshop: “”Free design is an important building block for spreading peer production, but it is not enough. A second topic discussed in Hiddinghausen was therefore how to facilitate and encourage the sharing and the shared production of physical goods and of services in all areas of life…. Continue reading
Waiting for Anathem and the open design monasteries
Following a remark one day by Franz Nahrada, I often use the analogy of the early medieval christian monastics to explain the logic of open design, imagining the same kind of support that society then gave to its monks, but which is today needed to support open design efforts. Turns out one of my favourite… Continue reading
Can we trust ‘trusts’?
Chris Cook’s contribution below can be seen as a response to the Irish appeal we published yesterday, and which favourably looks on establishing an Atmosphere Trust, as proposed by Peter Barnes. Chris takes issue with the organizational format of a trust: “While “Custodians” or “Stewards” of productive assets in common ownership are a key part… Continue reading
Networked resistance and labour struggle
Free market mutualist Kevin Carson has recently published an interesting analysis of networked resistance and how it could be applied to contemporary labor struggles. It’s called “the ethics of labor struggle”. Incredibly, it has been seized by the local police in Minneapolis. I was not successfull yet in quoting from the pdf document, so in… Continue reading
Policy Debates: How the Predator State hampers the new technological revolution
Gordon Cook is very enthusiastic about James Galbraith’s deconstruction of the predator state under Bush and Cheney. Here is a general presentation by the author himself. Gordon Cook provides two selections of significant excerpts here and here, which we also reproduced under one heading in our wiki. Here are some key citations: 1. “Whereas in… Continue reading
Feedbooks: an open source platform for e-books
Feedbooks has developed its own technology to generate e-books on the fly. It promises “an easy way to find, publish and download e-books in a large number of formats, while focusing on creating the best experience for e-books”. I asked Hadrien GARDEUR, co-founder of this Paris-based initiative, whether his project was open source, my question… Continue reading
Monetizing a political project
Now we know. From a “little applet using Technorati’s API which computes and displays your blog’s worth using the same link to dollar ratio as the AOL-Weblogs Inc deal” My blog is worth $66,615.72.How much is your blog worth?
Expansion of the Eco-Patent Commons
We covered the launch of the Eco-Patent Commons last January. It’s described as “a first-of-its-kind business effort to help the environment by pledging environmentally-beneficial patents to the public domain” Michael Maloney of IBM Media Relations sent us an update on its expansion. Here’s the rundown: “The newly-pledged patents include: — A Xerox technology that significantly… Continue reading
Wikiklesia: book on the global interconnected Church
Book Wikiklesia Volume One: Voices of the Virtual World: Participative Technology and the Ecclesial Revolution. By Len Hjalmarson and John La Grou. Wikkiklesia Press, 2008 Another gem from Lulu, which discusses the intersection between technology and faith, and how peer to peer dynamics influence global christianity. The abstract explains: “VOICES explores the growing influence of… Continue reading
An update on Christian Siefkes Peer Economy: the Universal Production Set
After a weekend workshop to further explore the ideas in his book From Exchange to Contributions , Christian Siefkes proposes a next step, i.e. the elaboration of a Universal Production Set. Here’s the announcement, but go to the original Keimform blog entry for the full details and links. Christian Siefkes: “A weekend workshop on peer… Continue reading
Urban seeding and the city as computer
Here’s another take on a kind of peer to peer approach to urbanism, from an advance draft sent to us by Nikos Salingaros. Despite the complex sounding title, this is an entirely accessible essay: “Geospatial Analysis and Living Urban Geometry” By Pietro Pagliardini, Sergio Porta & Nikos A. Salingaros. To appear in: Bin Jiang and… Continue reading
Abolition of net neutrality not needed for internet video
Important technical essay by Andrew Odlyzko, which explains why Net Neutrality needs not be abolished to enable widespread video distribution on the internet. Excerpt from the introduction: “”Even if we allow video the dominant role in shaping the future of the Internet, we have to cope with the second delusion captured in Cicconi’s quote, namely… Continue reading
An Irish appeal for a global p2p architecture for climate change
Via Helen Titchen Beeth and Chris Chapman: Topic: Citizen’s initiative to start building an independent global climate architecture Who else is thinking along these lines? Basis of the appeal: * “The latest news from the climate scientists leaves no doubt that climate change presents humanity with an unprecedented challenge – we face an emergency which… Continue reading
Autonomous P2P Publishing at Lulu
I’m hoping that our community can uncover more books of interest at Lulu.com, as these book deserve extra coverage. Here’s a sample of what I recently found. Book 1: Open Field Production: A Reverse Archaeology. by Alastair Parvin. Lulu.com, 2008 URL = http://www.lulu.com/content/3244105 “Open Field Production is a project produced by Alastair Parvin at the… Continue reading