Not really lurking

The phenomenon of lurkers and lurking has been well studied and noticed over the past decade. Other than the observation they exist almost as a norm in certain online communities, the fact that they actually make up the majority of members in online communities is staggering. Katz (1998) and Mason (1999) reported that lurkers make… Continue reading

Bandwidth as P2P currency

Peer-to-peer is frequently associated with illegal downloading, especially music and video. For this purpose, downloading video, peer-to-peer can also be considered as positive for once. What is the case? Research workers of the Technical University of Delft, the Free University of Amsterdam and Harvard’s School of Engineering are working on the development of a video… Continue reading

Bifo: Does connectivity kill sensibility?

The following is a disturbing but very interesting and stimulating essay by Bifo, which however requires you to navigate quite some bit of post-modern jargon. The main thesis is that the current stage of connected capitalism is destroying inter-human sensibility, both in the current generation of western youth, but ominously, the economically-driven mass child abandonment… Continue reading

Building wireless meshworks with recycled computers

Interesting technical solution that could be used in both developed and developing countries: From World Changing: “CUWiN — the Champaign-Urbana community WIreless Network — brings together a bunch of worldchanging ideas into one useful package: Free/Open Source software to create ad-hoc municipal wireless networks using recycled old PCs. The software — which can be downloaded… Continue reading

Rob Myers critique of Open Source

Very interesting take by Rob Myers on Open Source as a movement that intends to obscure the principles of Free Software. This piece has an interesting critique of Wikipedia, but is generally addressed to the relationship of FS/OS with the art world, and what artists should do. A critique of Open Source Yochai Benkler describes… Continue reading

Why money?

This is a really excellent presentation by Robert Upton of Altruists.org, on why it makes sense for people to produce their own money, rather than rely on institutional middlemen. (slideshare presentation in this post)

Who’s been censoring the Wikipedia?

The Independent mentions how Wikiscanner has identified the various institutions that have been doctoring and censoring negative reviews of their actions in the Wikipedia. This deserves to be known, so please go to the article to read the facts that they wanted to see removed.

Nurturing as the root of non-reciprocity

In my recent meditation on abundance and scarcity, I made a distinction between non-reciprocal peer production, and reciprocity or exchange based formats, with the two latter applicable in conditions of scarcity. If we are to believe this interesting contribution by Genevieve Vaughan, at the root of non-reciprocity lies the nurturing role of the mother, who… Continue reading