Category: The Power of Many

One of the two panels I’m speaking on at this year’s South by Southwest Interactive conference (in just under two weeks), is on the subject of Open Source Marketing, with Firefox as a case in point. To prepare for the panel, I’ve been doing some online research and I’ll be posting the links here mainly…

I’m continually impressed by the thinking and writing of Stephen Downes, who was also, I believe, the first person to perform Blogistan Pie before a live audience. In the abovelinked post, Community Blogging, Downes explored some ideas about how a self-organizing community of bloggers might subvert the dominant power-law dynamics. Highly recommended.

Quoting Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger: First chapter posted on our corporate blogging book We’ve posted our first chapter over on the Red Couch. Steve Lacey already praised it. Thanks! Bob Wyman, founder of my favorite blog search engine, Pubsub.com, wonders if the book will still be useful by the time it’s published. Yes, what is…

Quoting from Introduction to Activism on the Internet: John of Social Design Notes has built an excellent resource in “An Introduction to Activism on the Internet”, touching on key issues like the role of geography and gender in access, privacy and anonymity, and current topics like advocacy tools, and blogging. Timely, accessible, and attractive.

Checking my ego feed in my news aggregator yesterday I saw that two bloggers had posted reviews of the book. The first, Scot Hacker, a personal friend and longtime web colleague, liked the book quite a lot, calling it “an exploration – at turns straightforwardly journalistic, nearly stream-of-consciousness, and scholarly – on the transformative power…

Almost posted about this here first but instead filed it over at Radio Free Blogistan: Kottke at the mercy of his readers. Interesting test of the “power of many” to support the blogging work of one.

Quoting from There are Feeds and Then There are Feeds And about a year ago, I started adding Technorati watchlists, as well as Feedster and Pubsub search feeds, and del.icio.us, Furl and flickr feeds on tags, and looking up terms on Blogpulse and Bloglines, to see who linked to my blog, wrote about key words…

Jay’s book is entitled Gatekeepers without Gates and if it’s anything like his wonderful weblog, it will become required reading for anyone who cares about the future of the press and the impact of the living web on the media in general. (Announcement: PressThink: Publishing News at PressThink)

I haven’t taken this software out for a spin yet, but WikidPad (WikidPad – wiki notebook/outliner for windows) appears to be fairly similar to my favorite OS X application, Voodoo Pad. I find the wiki format to be a convenient and addictive way to take notes and link together lists and work in progress.

In A Liberal Long March? at Greater Democracy, Jock Gill calls for a sort of Gnostic Liberal movement to revitalize the left (although to my mind his emphasis on disintermediation seems to point more to the Protestant Reformation than to Gnosticism). How ideologies grapple with heretical views may be instructive here, though it appears we’re…

Personal Democracy Forum is hosting a State of the Union BackChannel Chat, Tonight: We will be using “A Really Simple Chat” (ARSC), the simplest way we know of to do group chats. Unlike other chat tools, ARSC is a program that lets anybody with a Web browser — any browser — join in a discussion…

Bridgepoint Health, a health care complex in Toronto, has a web page where people can send messages to residents. Most residents don’t have Internet access, but inbound webmail is printed out for them. This came to my attention because a regular on the Copyediting-L e-mail list went offline for a couple of days. When other…

Hoder, who blogs in English and Persian at Editor: Myself says Orkut and Yahoo Messenger have become political footballs in Iran (Orkut, a hot political issue in Iran): In no other country but Iran you’ll hear politicians use “Orkut” and “Yahoo Messenger” in their sentences. Nasser Nassiri, a radical MP last week called for a…

The diagram that illustrates research into the romantic entanglements of an entire high school look remarkably to my eyes like molecular chains. I realize that some of that is a matter of choices about how to visualize data, but comparing the smalelr groups to the giant daisy chain (the popular kids?) really gets across the…

In tomorrow’s Sunday Times, writer Steven Johnson discusses a program called DEVONthink and the general improvement in personal note-taking and idea-management assistance emerging in today’s tools and user-interface advances (

OK, I admit that Who Banged Who is just a slick parody, but is it really all that far-fetched?

I was syndicating the feed from my Upcoming public event calendar using the same blog plug-in I use to syndicate blog headlines nad descriptions, but my approach wasn’t generating proper links for the events. Then I noticed that George Kelly was using a service called RSS Digest to accomplish the same thing with properly functioning…

2nd Conference on Online Deliberation: Design, Research, and Practice / DIAC-2005: May 20 – 22, 2005 The Second Conference on Online Deliberation: Design, Research, and Practice / DIAC 2005, will bring together software developers, social science researchers, and practioners of online deliberation for three days of presentations and workshops on the Stanford University campus in…

Om Malik quickly tamps down a virally spreading rumor:

former FCC chair Reed Hundt has written a mixed editorial/primer on the topics of frequency, spectrum, and licensing. The link is to a copy of the piece on the site of San Francisco radio station KCBS; I stumbled across it while trying to track down a story reported on air this morning, in which several…

Newspaper mentions of blogs this weekend: AP story on tired blog/journalism/ethics intersection. At least it bothers to quote Jerome Armstrong, Rebecca Blood, and Pew. Knight-Ridder story on Super Bowl blog contest. Notable for clearly un-hip experts: “The Internet is becoming a water cooler on steroids.”* “It’s like meta-commentary.” SF Chronicle special report: how your blog…