Category: The Power of Many

A day or so after reading that a number of national governments are unhappy about Google Earth’s aerial views of their sensitive buildings and installations, I read in the Telegraph (UK) about Insurgents ‘using Google Earth’. There’s no real way to avoid these trade-offs, is there?

First Typepad had its embarassing outage and now Delicious is feeling some pain: Due to the power outage earlier in the week, we appear [sic] a number of continued hiccups. We’ve taken everything offline to properly rebuild and restore everything. I apologize and hope to have this resolved as soon as possible. Thank you for…

I got a call from a producer of a CBC show, The Hour, last night, looking for someone who could discuss the Siegenthaler brouhaha on Wikipedia from both a cultural and technical perspective. Hey, I’m that guy! They taped five minutes with me this morning and it should be airing about now. Since I don’t…

Sheesh! What Web 2.0 startup or blog fad *won’t* Yahoo acquire? del.icio.us: y.ah.oo! Yes, this is envy speaking. Jeremy Zawodny comments on potential synergies between Delicious (I stopped typing the dots a while ago) and MyWeb 2.0.

Suzanne Stefanac is writing a book for Peachpit / New Riders’ “Voices that Matter” series, called Dispatches from Blogistan. She is interviewing a number of bloggers (including yours truly) and of course blogging the process of writing the book. Now she has posted an entire chapter in her blog:

When Napster hit it big a lot of people pointed to the success of the Grateful Dead despite having almost no hit records and ascribed it to their liberal tape-trading policies. Part-time Dead lyricist and EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow spread the gospel of music sharing and how a liberal intellectual property regime had fueled…

Micah Sifry wrote up a Rasiej Campaign Post-Mortem analyzing how Andrew Rasiej’s campaign for Public Advocate in New York City managed to fall so short of success despite its embrace of open-source philosophies, techniques, and themes. Gregory Heller responds in Thoughts on the Sifry Postmortem of the Rasiej Campaign, suggesting that Sifry may be blaming…

I meant to post a link to Free Alternatives to Meetup back in September: Meetup is a Ghost Town I checked out the list of largest vegan meetups on Meetup.com and over half of the once active groups are now inactive for lack of an organizer. Meetup seems to recognize this as a problem. I…

Reader Nicolai wrote a comment on the blog telling me that I’ve been tagged (by name) for the first time, adding “how’s that for digital identity?” His comment led me back to a review of this book (in Danish) on his blog. He kindly translated it into English for me: The power of many The…

Chris Pirillo and his Lockergnome cohorts launch yet another social meta crawler-y tag search engine site. This one’s called gada.be. I first looked at it a week or so ago when Chris was showing it around in beta. I guess it’s still in beta. So was that alpha? Pre-launch stealth beta? Whatever. The main cleverness…

Congratulations to Andy Baio (and Gordon Luk and Leonard Lin): Waxy.org: Daily Log: Yahoo and Upcoming, Sitting In A Tree I’m a day late and a dollar short here, but had to note this. Yahoo is really getting aggressive about their whole Web 2.0 strategy. A lot of the big names are being gathered under…

Another from the “meant to post this a while ago” files. A fellow named Mike Reining from MindValley wrote me to tell me about their BlinkList service. Mike successfully got my attention by showing awareness of this site (and also You’re It), writing to me about MindValley’s passion for “how online tools are transforming the…

The Onion, America’s Finest News Source, reports: Congress Abandons WikiConstitution: WASHINGTON, DC – Congress scrapped the open-source, open-edit, online version of the Constitution Monday, only two months after it went live. “The idea seemed to dovetail perfectly with our tradition of democratic participation,” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said. “But when so-called ‘contributors’ began loading…

Over the long weekend I witnessed a flurry of email messages from the network of activist techies and techie activists I’m connected to since the Dean campaign and the work on this book. Some of this coalesced into the PeopleFinder project to help cross-correlate all the missing persons and I’m OK data being gathered across…

A few weeks ago, Kent Bye, director of the Echo Chamber project, tipped me off to a new vlog (video [web] log) he’s producing. This first episode includes an animation that tries to illustrate the folksonomy concept as well as interviews “about the upcoming media revolution” conducted at the most recent Personal Democracy Forum. He…

Chris Nagele from Wildbit gave me a head’s up about a 35-page report on social networks his company is offering for download as an Acrobat file free of charge: Social Networks Report He says My company, Wildbit, is currently working on a social network and community web site. Part of the research to understand and…

I’m in the Saturday morning opening session at blogher, which is about whether women should “learn to play by the rules” or “change the rules.” danah boyd just got up to clarify a misstatement claiming that women don’t do social networking as much as men do. danah explained that women and men (tend to) do…

Lots of buzz around this week about Marc Canter et al. announcing the GoingOn network, a meta social network that will provide a platform for stitching together existing social network and digital identity systems and standards, or something like that. JD Lasica interviewed Valerie Cunningham for a better explanation of what’s going to be going…

When I posted about my panel at the Sierra Summit, Philippe Boucher wrote in suggesting we try to arrange for bloggers to meet at the conference or to offer some sort of workshop or hand’s on event for people interested in blogging: Maybe this conference deserves more than a half hour on Saturday about the…

Laura Lemay just sent me a LinkedIn invitation that made me laugh out loud (or LOL), although I realize that it would only be funny to a geek: #include <linkedinsuckup.h>

Picked up a print copy of the Onion in a coffee bar yesterday and saw they had taken the piss out of online social networks (The Onion | 13 July 2005 | Infograph). Because the link will rot eventually, I stole the graphic, too.