Stanford Spammer On TechCrunch…? It is still not quite clear to me whether the recent TechCrunch article “The Secret Strategies Behind Many “Viral†Videos” is some “clever” publicity stunt (as some comments suggest), or if indeed the author means and does what he claims to do. It is an interesting article, so read it and… Continue reading
Launching a P2P research list for discussion
One of the positive results of the Nottingham Peer Production Workshop is the launch of a mailing list for further discussions. Thanks to the kindness of Ned Rossiter and the Institute for Network Cultures in Amsterdam, you can subscribe here, if you want to contribute to discussions about the further emergence of peer to peer…. Continue reading
Amazon’s Kindle ebook not so kind to reading rights
The Diving Mark blog has a stringent critique of the DRM implications of the new ebook system proposed by Amazon, written as a ‘play in six acts’. Please do read it in full, here are just some salient negative features of the system: 1. You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise… Continue reading
Providing open local public access to the internet: OPLAN Foundation
We met Malcolm Matson during a breakfast meeting at The Hub in London (an incubator for social innovation), and were very inspired by his efforts to create a worldwide infrastructure of free local access to the internet at the local level, by way of the OPLAN Foundation. Here’s a basic explaination of these efforts: OPLANs… Continue reading
The political economy of peer production: Adam Arvidsson and the Ethical Economy
I’ve just returned from Nottingham, UK., where I participated in the first-ever academic workshop on p2p concepts, a conference/workshop on “the political economies of peer production”. I plan on giving a review of each presentation in blog postings here. This first post is about Adam Arvidsson’s amazing, and thought provoking presentation on what he is… Continue reading
The Open Rights Group needs your support
We got the following message from Michael Holloway, of the Open Rights Group, kind of a UK version of the better known US-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, and doing excellent work on preserving “digital rights”. The organization exists two years already and here‘s a report of its activities so far. Michael Holloway: “Open Rights Group is… Continue reading
Franz Nahrada on global villages
Franz Nahrada is one of the persons I admire most in the world, and he has been tirelessly working for others, most of his efforts going to establishing Global Villages that combine relocalized production with global connections. At this point he is facing heart surgery and I wish him the very best for a recovery…. Continue reading
Report on Japan a leader in complementary currencies
The following is a summary of a lecture by Bernard Lietaer, showing the vibrancy of alternative monetary systems in Japan. Japan as a world leader in seeking new approaches by promoting complementary community currencies to solve the economic strife that has been constantly plaguing Japan since the early 1990‚s. Bernard explained that since money is… Continue reading
Report from the Nottingham Trent Peer Production workshop
This was the very first academic conference exclusively devoted to peer production, and to my mind, it has therefore a ‘historic’ importance. We already know that it will be held again next year, though at a different place, so this will also be the start of a peer to peer research movement that will likely… Continue reading
Video: Real News television – peer-funded, no advertising.
Going back to the edge
Danny O’Brien has started a nine-part investigation about how we can avoid the centralization of our sharing and return ‘the data back to the edge’ i.e. back to our personal (but shareable) servers … The dominance of players like Google is not a fact of nature, but a design decision, so this investigation into the… Continue reading
P2P Spirituality
In a series of blog posts I would like to research the meaning and relevance of a P2P (peer-to-peer) approach to religions and spirituality in our contemporary world. In a first post I would like to restate the P2P approach as I understand it, and give an overview of three attitudes towards religious pluralism, or… Continue reading
The produsage revolution: a stellar new book
Axel Bruns. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. Axel Bruns has been so kind as to send me the manuscript of his new book on Produsage, and I must admit that while reading it I could hardly contain my enthusiasm. This is nothing less that the… Continue reading
Smart objects and the coming convergence of the digital and the physical as the Third Book of Nature
Our friend Kim Veltman has written a very interesting conference presentation on the new convergence between the digital and the physical world. I find such an approach interesting because it goes beyond the onesided attention to a independent “Internet of Thingsâ€, or the business-oriented approach of Bruce Sterling’s Spimes, which assumes an unchanged copyright regime… Continue reading
New introduction to peer to peer, for beginners
Mauro Bieg has just rejoined the ranks of our wiki-contributors. He wrote us that he wanted to tackle some of the complexity of our writings and presentations, which are certainly not accessible to everybody: “I feel like all the free culture, creative commons, free software, open source, open access, anti-DRM, etc. movements have a lot… Continue reading
An update on the thriving field of product hacking and open hardware
Canadian Stephen Vermeulen keeps a regularly updated list of open hardware initiatives, which he calls product hacking. This is a good occasion to refer readers to our own page, which contains a full listing with links, on the various projects we know of. Go to that page for the links and further exploration. We can… Continue reading