I was looking at the Haddock blogs aggregator and in their links gutter I came across a transcript of a presentation given at Notacon 3 (whatever that is) in April of this year by Jason Scott. You can listen to the audio if you prefer.
I tend to like the Wikipedia idea, warts and all, but this talk is a pretty compelling look at its flaws. Here are a few choice excerpts that jumped out at me:

What Wikipedia has taught us now, is that in a vacuum of politics, politics will be created. There is no vacuum of politics. People who are encountering this space where they can not lord over others for technicalities and gain power for themselves will then proceed to invoke technicalities, take power from other people. They just do this. This is what human beings do.

and

One of the big fallacies that people currently have is “well, even if people undo your work, at least you can see it.” It’s not true. People will go to the history of an article that’s disputed, and they will find that that history’s actually been utterly and completely purged from Wikipedia. The history is gone.

and, also

Wikipedia tends to be, at this point, the first hit for most proper and
non-proper nouns. Putting in anything gives you the Wikipedia entry. In fact, if you have Trillian, Trillian has an automatic setting so that any word you have in there that matches on Wikipedia ends up as an underlined word. You click on it, and it tells you what the answer is. To someone who’s using instant messaging, they don’t know where this entry came from when they clicked on it, they also tend to be out of date because they index it across the Trillian … and so on. So as a result, you can’t say just go in and change it, because it’s actually using older and older indexes. That’s what I mean by the concern I have, the worry that I have, when I make these big points.

Kaliya “Identity Woman” Hamlin writes:

Webwide distributed SSO is finally happening… Learn more from the core guys behind this emerging standard for user-centric digital identity.
August 10th 6-9 in Berkeley at 2029 University, Upstairs.
RSVP to me kaliya (at) Mac (dot) com and please pass this along to those who might be interested…
OpenID is the emerging standard for web wide distributed single sign-on. It works with OpenID enabled URLs and i-names.
The goal of the evening is not to geek out on identity but to connect with developers working on applications that require users to log in.
Find out more about what it is… how it works… how you can install it. The incentives to learn are high with the $5000 bounty for having OpenID in Open Source projects.
Presenting and answering Questions:

• David Recordon formerly of Live Journal/Six Appart now of Verisign will be presenting a bit about the origins of OpenID but most importantly how it works… and how you install it.
• Andy Dale from ooTao will talk a bit about i-names and how they work with OpenID2 and looking forward to what comes next after authentication – profile sharing. ooTao is also data sharing, are running ibroker services.
• Scott Keveton from Jan Rain a development shop in Portland that has been ond of the leading instigators of OpenID. He just posted a walk through on his blog.
• Mary Hodder CEO of Dabble will talk about the work happening around the development of itags.

If you know a developer – pass the word along.

Perhaps the vision of a universal single sign-on on the Web isn’t just a utopian pipedream after all?

David Hinojosa has got a project called Stock Artist that offers a simulation (for now) of a rationalize the art market.
I’m not sure I fully understand the concept, but this appears to be the nut of it:

The central nucleus of Stockartist is the “transformed art piece’s concept.” This concept consists in dividing the value of one work, or a group of them into little pieces called “stock-art.” The stock-arts have two characteristics: they represent one part of the value of the “transformed art piece” and they are themselves art works. In other words, the stock-arts are at the same time art works and an instrument of investment that besides of representing their own value, they represent other’s. The stock-arts share some common physical characteristics as: maximum weight, maximum size, security codes, etc, and they contain unique characteristics imposed by their creator.

Adrian Chan asks Is attention over time not identity? while suggestiing, semifacetiously, that Creative Commons and AttentionTrust should merge.

Is what I make, and what I pay attention to, over time, not, basically, my identity? That’s how an Amazon would look at it. The consistency of my choices over time is, well, it’s what I like, and therefore to any commercial enterprise, it’s who I am (as far as they care).
Perhaps we could use a CC/AT/ID mashupcamp. Call it EgoCamp?

I seem to recall playing with a prototype of PeepAgg back in the heady social-web miniboom of 2003 but it seems that the real thing is now in alpha.
I was invited, I joined it, and I’m poking around. In many ways it looks like other social network systems, especially Yahoo! 360 and Tribe, in that, like both of them, it allows you to integrate content hosted elsewhere (such as Flickr photos, Delicious bookmarks, and presumably blog posts and other RSSable streams, most likely including events and reviews and such).
There’s a fairly subtle friendship model, though subjective of course, with five distinct levels, from haven’t met, to acquaintance, through friend, good friend, to best friend.
(PA founder Marc Canter considers me, and no doubt countless others, as a good friend.)
There are both Groups and Networks and I haven’t figured out what distinguishes them. I also haven’t figured out how to plug in my content from elsewhere, and I’m reluctant to hand-populate yet another profile.
More as I have time to explore.

dKo draws my attention to A Shift Among the Evangelicals by E. J. Dionne Jr. in the Washington Post (Friday, June 16, 2006; Page A25):

Sometimes very important elections receive very little attention.
When the Southern Baptist Convention elected the Rev. Frank Page as the group’s president… One other force was at work in this year’s Baptist voting: the rise of the blogosphere.
Over the past several years, an active network of Baptist bloggers has opened up discussion in the convention and given reformers and moderates avenues around what Parham called “the Baptist establishment papers” and other means of communication controlled by the convention’s leadership. Thus may some of our oldest and most traditional institutions be transformed by new technologies.