Category: The Power of Many

Last month I posted an entry about Platial and commented that “I think it’s kind of cool that so many of these new companies have community outreach people, even if it is still sometimes hard to tell them from publicists or PR professionals in general.” This prompted Tracy Rolling to write me a long interesting…

Robert Birnbach, who shot the awesome author photo on the page-cover book-jacket flap of The Power of Many writes to tell me about an evening lecture suries he is helping start called The Grattan Speaker Series, “featuring locally and nationally renown authors, educators, activists and thinkers, and focused on themes that resonate with San Francisco…

When I have a moment, I’ll upload the lo-qual cellphone pictures I snapped and embed them here. Maybe I’ll even get around to cleaning up these raw notes into something coherent or even listing who all was there. For now, all I have time to do is dump the notes I t9’d into my “smartphone”…

Mario Rizzuti pointed me to his vaguely Digg-looking discussion-forum project called glorum. I asked him to describe the purpose or “mission” of the site and he responded thusly: >It is an attempt at building a concept for online discussions alternative to the usenet model. > >The key ideas are > >1. using tags (no groups)…

Here’s Jay Rosen’s announcement of a $100,000 grant for his NADN project: PressThink: Editing Horizontally: Thanks to Reuters, NewAssignment.Net Can Hire Someone My first thought was, “This sounds like a job for George,” but George already has a job…. I like that Rosen wants to have both a paid editor and a paid “network wrangler”…

Tracy Rolling, the community advocate for Platial.com (“the people’s atlas) recently sent me a heads up about a new styling feature for the DIY maps that Platial makes it so easy to, er, make. And, by the way, I think it’s kind of cool that so many of these new companies have community outreach people,…

Blogger (and former Kos front-page poster) Kid Oakland has been gradually building a network called Blogs United to help local political bloggers learn from and support each other: Local bloggers are citizen journalists and activists. They are a vital part of the emerging netroots infrastructure. My goal this election season is to show how local…

Back in late July, NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen announced an initiative called NewAssignment.Net. (Full disclosure: I am one of a medium-sized set of advisors to this project.) The goal of NADN, in my words, is to leverage blog networks and traditional editorial expertise to define, assign, write, and edit news articles covering assignments that…

Karl Martino says “paradox1x: Social software can’t be a fad since the WEB is social software“: The fact is the most successful web services – since the beginnings of the web – were social software applications. The Web’s participatory architecture lends itself to them. It’s always been a Two Way web as Dave Winer would…

My friend Freeman Ng alerted me to this post at Slashdot: Slashdot | Bloggers 1, Smoke-Filled Room 0: MarkusQ writes “A few days ago a bi-partisan bill (PDF) to create a searchable on-line database of government contracts, grants, insurance, loans, financial assistance, earmarks and other such pork was put on ‘secret hold’ using a procedure…

The day after last year’s Personal Democracy Forum I attended a Civicspace workshop event and Gregory Heller conducted a brief interview with me talking about PDF, Civicspace, and how to run conferences with an “open API” so that other events can plug-in and piggyback.

practicalist: authentic media, exhibit b — pictures of the family of the person who stole my cell phone posted to my flickr account: …what a great illustration of how social media, inadvertently or not, blows away all normally private separate identities and separate worlds! I don’t just know something about the person who took the…

I think 12 frogs is onto something here with Why social software is good for introverts.

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Brian Dear from EVDB wrote me recently to bring to my attention the Eventful Demand service on Eventful.com (the event-planning website powered by his EVDB service). He is justifiably proud of this new feature: We premiered it at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference in San Diego in March. Eventful Demand is a set of tools…

Paul Bissex has released Jabberwocky 2.0. Of course it’s still in beta (unlike Flickr, which has recently upgraded to gamma).