Category: The Power of Many

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 (