Category: The Power of Many

In the world of web design, especially among those developing community sites or sites for collaboration, 37 Signals’ Get Real philosophy is all the rage, but frankly those guys are too timid. They come close to a breakthrough but then they fall back on safe ideas and the tried and true. Thus its falls to…

According to Boing Boing, the recent LA student immigration protests have been organized on MySpace. The revolution will be smartmobbed? Update: Here’s danah boyd on the same topic. Check her next post too, in which MySpace inadvertantly takes down the NPR when Tom sends the community there.

I’ve just ducked down to my room on the 8th floor of the Hyatt Regency Vancouver to get some money to buy drink tickets at the welcoming cocktail party at the IA Summit. Ran into David Weinberger, who’s been refining the plenary keynote he’ll be giving to kick off the official proceedings tomorrow. We talked…

Seems like a lot of the Web 2.0 skeptics come out of Australia. Not sure why that is. Personally, I hate the whole “2.0” concept. It’s already played out as a meme and it means nothing (or everything, which has the same effect). Now a blog called Squash claims to have detected a sign of…

I’ve nearly recovered or recreated all the pages and templates that were damaged by the nasty little scriptkiddy who hacked our server. I’d rather not go into detail about how it happened, at least until I’m sure we’ve locked the barn door.

Here are my raw notes for beyond folksonomies: knitting tag clouds for grandma: from pidgen to creole tags popularized by (delicious, flickr, technorati) hodder on usability problems a lot of web 2.0 sites, hoping people will fill in all the info, but interfaces poorly done … half-done systems because others got critical mass (which makes…

I just got off the phone with Jeannie Yandel, the producer of a show called The Conversation on an NPR station in Seattle, KUOW 94.9 FM. She asked me about how online communities cross over into the real world, what did I think about the rash of bad-news stories about teens on MySpace lately, and…

Sketch Swap gives you space to draw a picture. When you’re done, you submit it and get someone else’s picture in return.

Dispatches from Blogistan says that Amazon is experimenting with product wikis. I hope they have better luck with that than the LA Times did with their “wikitorials” experiment. At least Amazon already hosts a culture used to giving feedback (with their reviews feature). I’m still hoping for a way to aggregate product feedback and reviews…

Aaron Swartz is building infogami in public. So far, it lets you set up a site more or less instantly(junkyard) and edit it like a wiki. The site comes with a blog. Not sure what else it’s going to do. Looks like there are Google text ads down the side. Guess that’s the business model.…

danah boyd has posted her “crib notes” for a talk she gave at an American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in February, Identity Production in a Networked Culture: Why Youth Heart MySpace. Worth reading for everyone curious (or fretting) about MySpace’s popularity with the young.

The good folks at Participatory Culture have unveiled a key component of their “Democracy Internet TV” platform, the desktop Democracy Player software (for Windows only, so far): > This Windows version, while still in beta, means that we now have a complete set of tools for democratizing online video — and marks the beginning of…

Interesting trend over on Kos of late. Senators and reps have been posting on Kos for at least a year or two. The first one I happen to remember was from Senator Boxer, and folks just loved her for it. But the frequency of these big-name-posts has definitely been on the rise, especially over the…

I’ve always felt (and I said this all over the book) that it was wrong to think that the Internet inherently isolates people or makes them behave antisocially. A Pew report issued Wednesday, supports the idea the use of the Internet expands social contact: > The Pew Internet and American Life Project also finds that…

It looks like Dan Gillmor is rebooting. Bayosphere didn’t work out exactly as he had hoped, but he’s got a new project already launched in cooperation with UC Berkeley’s J-School and a star-studded cast of advisors. I wonder if the Pajamas Media guys are watching?

I was trying out Technorati’s new ego-charting feature on my last name and discovered a few sites out there mentioning the book or linking to this blog. For example, Know More Media lists The Power of Many under Blogging Books that Influenced Us, We Media 2.0 lists it under Appendix: Books – Other, and it…

I’m blogging from the [SXSW Interactive](http://sxsw.com/interactive/) party in downtown San Francisco. It’s still the depths of winter but I can imagine the spring thaw. It’s time to add an SXSW badge to my blog and make my travel plans for Austin, Albuquerque, and [Vancouver](http://iasummit.org). Update: Before I left I saw Min Jung Kim, Renee Blodgett,…

I swear, all the cool kids are at Yahoo now: Susan Mernit’s Blog: Newsflash: I’m joining Yahoo!

Tired of end-of-the-year top ten lists and predictions? Try Blake Ross’s Ten predictions for the new year. Here’s my favorite: > Yahoo, acclerating its bid to dominate the social space, will announce that it is buying the actual societies of 32 cash-strapped governments. Citizens will be allowed to link their existing names to their Yahoo…

Ron Fournier, political writer for the Associated Press, put an article on the newswires on Christmas Eve summing up a trend over the past few years: Internet Fosters Local Political Movements. Sound like a familiar premise? The examples he cites include MoveOn, Meetup, and BlogsforBush.com. Not sure what prompted the article, but there’s no time…

Bookmarklets were always a hack, says Kevin Burton in his Feed Blog: Bookmarklets 2.0?. Is it time for some (don’t say it!) standards?