imagine if a group of self-organized individuals could come together on the Internet to create valuable products and services – and to establish their own “operating agreement” among themselves, according to their specific goals — and yet still receive the benefits of “legal personhood” that corporations enjoy. This is now possible thanks to a new… Continue reading
Date archives "December 2008"
Usenet not dead, but growing
The newsgroups have been under attack in recent months, led by NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. His efforts have forced a number of ISPs, such as Comcast, Verizon, and RoadRunner, to eliminate or significantly curtail access to the binary newsgroups. This action, it seems, has not dampened interest in the newsgroups. I haven’t used Usenet… Continue reading
Community mapping and the sensor citizen
Receiver magazine (published by Vodafone) has a remarkable special issue on the state of geolocation services and the Geospatial Web. Amongst the many interesting articles is the one by Anne Galloway on community mapping: “We often think of mobile technologies simply in terms of their communication capabilities, but their increasing ability to trace our movements… Continue reading
The Good News of 2008?
Catherine Austin Fitts, a very astute financial observer and localization advocate, has published the last Solari Report this year, which is a very readable and useful year-end “wrap-up” looking back at events in 2008 and discussing what they mean to our future. Apart from her analysis of the impact of the financial crisis, she also… Continue reading
Nova Spivack on Web 3.0 and the Semantic Web
New Digital South has been undertaken a series of interesting interviews; the latest one with one of the technology thinkers that I respect most: Nova Spivack. (in fact, I know of no other analyst with such a clear and realistic vision of the further development of collaborative technologies) Please note that our wiki keeps an… Continue reading
Swedish Pirate Party no longer marginal
(if this isn’t a harbinger of cultural change, then I don’t know what would qualify …) Via Torrentfreak: “Things are looking really good for the Swedish Pirate Party. Running up to the 2009 European Parliament elections more than half of all Swedish men under 30 are considering voting for them. Thanks to the Internet, its… Continue reading
A Critique of the Abstraction and “Numbers Only” Approach of Mainstream Economists
Steve Talbott, of the Nature Institute, (dedicated to neo-Goethean ‘wholistic’ science approaches) is a very thoughtful author on technology, who publishes a stimulating newsletter called Netfuture. In the December issue, he reflects on the meltdown and what has been wrong with the justifications of the economists. Here’s only the introduction. The full text is well… Continue reading
Film in the age of vernacular video
This post is a reflection on Tom Shermans essay ‘Vernacular Video’ and my weekend at Different Directions film festival – http://www.differentdirections.ie/ Manifesto on Art / Fluxus Art Amusement by George Maciunas, 1965 – “ART To justify artist’s professional,parasitic and elite status in society, he must demonstrate artist’s indispensability and exclusiveness, he must demonstrate the dependability… Continue reading
Design and architecture as sustainable platform building
Excerpts from an editorial by John Robb: “Designers will need to focus less on macro or global level needs and much, much more on the needs of the local. Why? The solutions to macro level instability will be found in the development of local community’s that build systems and organizations that enable them to both… Continue reading
George Siemens on the Peer 2 Peer University
I missed this when it came out, i.e. George Siemens’ appreciation of the Peer 2 Peer University project: “What do I disagree with? I disagree with the notion of “sense makers”. We make sense personally. No one makes sense for us. I’m also somewhat unsure of the formality of this approach. It bears within it… Continue reading
The future of learning
Stephen Downes has published a “ten-year-after” update of his classic essay on The Future of Online Learning. The Hennistalk blog has an extensive presentation of this important 40-page document, which includes the key excerpts. We’ve chosen those that highlight the general stance taken by Stephen Downes (in italics, general commentary is from the Hennistalk blog)…. Continue reading
Homeschooling goes mainstream
Home Schooling goes Mainstream is a good feature story about the growing popularity and contribution of home schooling in the education sphere in the U.S., by Milton Gaither, Education Next. Snippets: “From 1999 to 2003, the number of home-schooled children grew by 29 percent; among minorities, home-schooled children increased by 20 percent despite a modest… Continue reading
Wikimapia: P2P mapping tool in beta release
Wikimapia is a tool that allows users to freely annotate maps in either satellite or streetmap view. The beta release (www.wikimapia.org/beta/) became available some three months ago. Its main features are 1. Two main interactive layers – Wikimapia map and Wikimapia satellite (outlines on satellite map). 2. Adding information to the map: -places (with real… Continue reading
Douglas Rushkoff initiates new radio show
an application of the hacker ethic and net collectivism to everything Important announcement: “This participatory radio show looks at both sides of Life Incorporated: how life has been literally “incorporated” by business and economics, and how can we incorporate LIFE back into our world: local commerce, community, social currency, and other emerging forms of participatory… Continue reading
Research on social entrepreneurship
Book: The Search for Social Entrepreneurship. Paul C. Light, Brookings Institution Press 2008 The author of a new book investigating the successes and failures of social enterpreneurship is interviewed by the Cause Global blog. Excerpt with the first two questions: “Why did you write this book? I’ve been monitoring management reform in nonprofits and government… Continue reading
The city as a (p2p) grid: appeal for research assistance
This is a project started by Florent Thiery on our p2pfoundation wiki. Here is just the introduction: “This transversal article is a mere attempt to isolate items of the emerging shapes of a globally, distributed p2p-oriented city model. It is intended as a placeholder for resources linked to a hypothetical City-as-a-grid model, where resource creation… Continue reading