no_tag - David Parry on Diigo

05 Oct 09

Malcolm Gladwell reviews Free by Chris Anderson : The New Yorker

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There are four strands of argument here: a technological claim (digital infrastructure is effectively Free), a psychological claim (consumers love Free), a procedural claim (Free means never having to make a judgment), and a commercial claim (the market created by the technological Free and the psychological Free can make you a lot of money).
YouTube is a great example of Free, except that Free technology ends up not being Free because of the way consumers respond to Free, fatally compromising YouTube’s ability to make money around Free, and forcing it to retreat from the “abundance thinking” that lies at the heart of Free. Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube will lose close to half a billion dollars this year. If it were a bank, it would be eligible for TARP funds

Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business

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By giving away the razors, which were useless by themselves, he was creating demand for disposable blades. A few billion blades later, this business model is now the foundation of entire industries: Give away the cell phone, sell the monthly plan; make the videogame console cheap and sell expensive games; install fancy coffeemakers in offices at no charge so you can sell managers expensive coffee sachets.
"Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive ... That tension will not go away."
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- The Web is all about scale, finding ways to attract the most users for centralized resources, spreading those costs over larger and larger audiences as the technology gets more and more capable. It's not about the cost of the equipment in the racks at the data center; it's about what that equipment can do.
- As much as we complain about how expensive things are getting, we're surrounded by forces that are making them cheaper.
- Storage now joins bandwidth (YouTube: free) and processing power (Google: free) in the race to the bottom.
- The second trend is simply that anything that touches digital networks quickly feels the effect of falling costs.
- Even though they may never become entirely free, as the price drops there is great advantage to be had in treating them as if they were free. Not too cheap to meter, as Atomic Energy Commission chief Lewis Strauss said in a different context, but too cheap to matter. Indeed, the history of technological innovation has been marked by people spotting such price and performance trends and getting ahead of them
- The psychology of "free" is powerful indeed, as any marketer will tell you.
- To follow the money, you have to shift from a basic view of a market as a matching of two parties — buyers and sellers — to a broader sense of an ecosystem with many parties, only some of which exchange cash.
- There is, presumably, a limited supply of reputation and attention in the world at any point in time. These are the new scarcities — and the world of free exists mostly to acquire these valuable assets for the sake of a business model to be identified later. Free shifts the economy from a focus on only that which can be quantified in dollars and cents to a more realistic accounting of all the things we truly value today.

Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business

www.wired.com/...ff_free - Preview

A few billion blades later, this business model is now the foundation of entire industries: Give away the cell phone, sell the monthly plan; make the videogame console cheap and sell expensive games; install fancy coffeemakers in offices at no charge so you can sell managers expensive coffee sachets.
Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive ... That tension will not go away."

28 Sep 09

Internet Pirates Face Walking the Plank in Sweden -- Printout -- TIME

www.time.com/...0,8816,1880981,00.html - Preview

The proceedings are the latest twist in a long history of a global fight over property rights — a struggle that some say began in America with the country's Founding Fathers ( Benjamin Franklin was all for handing out for free the ideas for his inventions like the Franklin Stove) and extended through Yippie Abbie Hoffman (who named his 1971 book about conning the system Steal This Book).
Google News
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- ordinarily not liable for defamatory material contained in comments posted by readers
- heavy pressure from the recording and entertainment industry
- If a movie is available in the U.S., why shouldn't a computer user in China get to see it too — even if the movie won't be released in his own country for months?
- Netanel made just that proposal in a 2003 article in the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, arguing that a 4% levee on computers, MP3 players and all other devices used to enjoy digital media would adequately compensate the authors and the companies alike. "And look at all the effort it would save,

16 Sep 09

Boston Review — Evgeny Morozov: Texting Toward Utopia

bostonreview.net/...morozov.php - Preview

Such starry–eyed cyber–optimism suggested a new form of technological determinism according to which the Internet would be the hammer to nail all global problems, from economic development in Africa to threats of transnational terrorism in the Middle East.
Internet presents both opportunity and challenge for authoritarian regimes.
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- sites that feature user–generated content—Facebook, YouTube, Blogger—are especially unpopular with authoritarian regimes
- Such mobilization may indeed have been important in the final effort. But it is misleading to imply, as some recent studies by Berkman staff have, that the Orange Revolution was the work of as a “smart mob”—
- Regime change by text messaging may seem realistic in cyberspace, but no dictators have been toppled via Second Life, and no real elections have been won there either; otherwise, Ron Paul would be president.
- The answer depends, to a large extent, on whether the Internet fosters an eagerness to act on newly acquired information.
- The premise that providing access to information and fostering the norm of transparency could speed up democratization underpins their work.
- than the fact that people can have lots of information and very little power to act on it.
- The Internet makes it easier for us to find and join groups that we already agree with, which might, in turn, make our views even more extreme.
- According to Sunstein, avoiding this problem in the pre–Internet age was easier, as the front page of the major national newspaper provided the shared collective experience as well as a healthy dose of serendipity, exposing us to views and news that we may never encounter otherwise.
- Cyber–utopians’ biggest conceptual mistake is treating cyberspace as some kind of anarchist zone, which the authorities dare not enter except to shut things down. Media reports encourage this view of authoritarian governments as technophobic Internet censors.
- But why would authorities not pursue a two–pronged strategy, both restricting access to the most undesirable Web sites and using the Web to manipulate public opinion? This is precisely how authoritarian governments have dealt with more significant media threats in the past.
- they are also heavily polluted by government operators, making them indistinguishable from the old, tightly controlled analogue public spheres.
- However, outside of the prosperous and democratic countries of North America and Western Europe, digital natives are as likely to be digital captives as digital renegades, a subject that none of the recent studies address in depth
- “Iranian bloggers: major challenge to democratic change” and “Saudi Arabia: bloggers hate women’s rights.”
- The problem with building public spheres from above, online or offline, is much like that of building Frankenstein’s monsters: we may not like the end product

Habermas’ heritage

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emergence of a consumerist culture
the media serve as vehicles for generating and managing consensus and promoting capitalist culture rather than fulfill their original function as organs of public debate
23 more annotations...
- Central in Habermas’ thinking is the notion that the quality of society depends on our capacity to communicate, to debate and discuss: Reason is crucial to communication, sich auseinandersetzen.
- Published well before the digital revolution, the work addresses the implications of modern communications technologies only in a cursory and fragmentary fashion. Habermas’ work on the public sphere is frequently attacked by post–modernists who question the emancipatory potentials of its model of consensus through rational debate.
- conceptual rather than physical.
- Important focal points are the significance of the public sphere for democracy. Growth of information inequality threatens basic human rights; the power of state and corporation to engage in electronic surveillance in civil society threatens both the rights of groups to speak and organise and the privacy rights of individuals. New forms of citizenship and public life are simultaneously enabled by new technology and restricted by market power and surveillance. One might, for example, draw from Foucault’s concept of the panoptic society to argue that the spread of information technology is likely to lead to a loss of autonomy in many realms of political, economic, cultural and social life (Friedland, 1996).
- Do the new media like the Internet, then, merely offer a shallow substitute for "authentic" discourse, or do they contribute a new quality to the public sphere?
- Communication media are necessary but not sufficient for self–governance and healthy societies:
- we simply ‘feel involved’
- What these "skeptics" fear is primarily the classical argument in mass media research of commodification, the way electronic communications media already have pre–empted public discussions by turning media content into commodities.
- The public sphere is not just a "marketplace of ideas" or an "information exchange depot," but also a major vehicle for generating and distributing culture.
- The panopticon, Foucault argued, is not a value–neutral technology. It is a technology that allows a small number of people to control a large number of others that comes in many guises:
- "the Internet is dominated by white, well off, English speaking, educated males, most of whom are USA citizens,"
- Public opinion can only be formed if a public that engages in rational discussion exists.
- As far as information is concerned, communications and corporations’ overriding concern with the market means that their product is dedicated to the goal of generating maximum advertising revenue and supporting capitalist enterprise. As a result their content is chiefly lowest common denominator diversion" [8
- How do they affect journalism? It has often been stated that the traditional functions of journalism will erode even further as media technology advances.
- New communications technologies are being used in ways that extend democratic communication practices. As networks become structurally decentralised, ever wider publics gain access to them in ways that lead to an increase in the rate and density of public exchange. New citizens’ movements and practices have emerged, whose community–based technology projects democratic potential has been rarely explored.
- The technological infrastructure of communication networks is influencing the social structure of society; its development is closely related to the development of social structures in a process of interchange and mutual dependence [13].
- Are there new kinds of power relations occurring between communicating individuals? In other words, is there a new politics on the Internet? Poster approaches this question by making a detour from the issue of technology and raising again the question of a public sphere: If there is a public sphere on the Internet, who populates it and how? What kinds of beings exchange information in this public sphere? What kind of community can there be in this space? What kind of disembodied politics are inscribed so evanescently in cyberspace? What constitutes communities in cyberspace and cyberdemocracy?
- increasingly takes place across national boundaries.
- At the same time, he points at the danger of its fragmentation: Media globalisation does not automatically entail the creation of a singular global public sphere, but rather a process of gradual blurring and differentiation of the public sphere
- transnational and specialist news media increasingly serve a well–educated elite
- The alliance of the public sphere with a particular place or territory diminishes:
- Kellner uses the term "technocapitalism" to describe the synthesis of capital and technology to point out both the increasingly important role of technology and the continued primacy of capitalist structures.
- technologies are creating a new public sphere, a new realm of cyberdemocracy

14 Sep 09

The Tragedy of the Commons, by Garrett Hardin (1968)

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In our day (though not in earlier times) technical solutions
are always welcome. Because of previous failures in prophecy, it
takes courage to assert that a desired technical solution is not
possible.
Put
another way, there is no "technical solution" to the
problem. I can win only by giving a radical meaning to the word
"win."
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- The population problem cannot
  be solved in a technical way, any more than can the problem of
  winning the game of tick-tack-toe.
- We want the maximum good per person; but what is good? To one
  person it is wilderness, to another it is ski lodges for
  thousands. To one it is estuaries to nourish ducks for hunters to
  shoot; to another it is factory land. Comparing one good with
  another is, we usually say, impossible because goods are
  incommensurable. Incommensurables cannot be compared
- Has any cultural group solved this practical problem at the
  present time, even on an intuitive level? One simple fact proves
  that none has: there is no prosperous population in the world
  today that has, and has had for some time, a growth rate of zero.
  Any people that has intuitively identified its optimum point will
  soon reach it, after which its growth rate becomes and remains
  zero
- But he contributed to a
  dominant tendency of thought that has ever since interfered with
  positive action based on rational analysis, namely, the tendency
  to assume that decisions reached individually will, in fact, be
  the best decisions for an entire society.
- Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day
  when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality.
- Each man is
  locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd
  without limit -- in a world that is limited. Ruin is the
  destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best
  interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the
  commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.
- The individual benefits as an individual from
  his ability to deny the truth even though society as a whole, of
  which he is a part, suffers. Education can counteract the natural
  tendency to do the wrong thing, but the inexorable succession of
  generations requires that the basis for this knowledge be
  constantly refreshed.
- The National Parks present another instance of the working out
  of the tragedy of the commons. At present, they are open to all,
  without limit. The parks themselves are limited in extent --
  there is only one Yosemite Valley -- whereas population seems to
  grow without limit. The values that visitors seek in the parks
  are steadily eroded. Plainly, we must soon cease to treat the
  parks as commons or they will be of no value to anyone
- Using the commons as a cesspool does not
  harm the general public under frontier conditions, because there
  is no public; the same behavior in a metropolis is unbearable.
- One does not know whether
  a man killing an elephant or setting fire to the grassland is
  harming others until one knows the total system in which his act
  appears.
- n a welfare state, how shall we deal with the family, the
  religion, the race, or the class (or indeed any distinguishable
  and cohesive group) that adopts over breeding as a policy to
  secure its own aggrandizement? [13] To couple
  the concept of freedom to breed with the belief that everyone
  born has an equal right to the commons is to lock the world into
  a tragic course of action.
- f we ask a man who is exploiting a
  commons to desist "in the name of conscience," what are
  we saying to him? What does he hear?
- 1. (intended
  communication) "If you don't do as we ask, we will openly
  condemn you for not acting like a responsible citizen"; 2.
  (the unintended communication) "If you do behave as
  we ask, we will secretly condemn you for a simpleton who can be
  shamed into standing aside while the rest of us exploit the
  commons."
- When we use the word
  responsibility in the absence of substantial sanctions are we not
  trying to browbeat a free man in a commons into acting against
  his own interest? Responsibility is a verbal counterfeit for a
  substantial quid pro quo. It is an attempt to get something for
  nothing.
- Rather than rely on propaganda we follow
  Frankel's lead and insist that a bank is not a commons; we seek
  the definite social arrangements that will keep it from becoming
  a commons. That we thereby infringe on the freedom of would-be
  robbers we neither deny nor regret.
- A Madison Avenue
  man might call this persuasion; I prefer the greater candor of
  the word coercion.
- We must admit that our legal
  system of private property plus inheritance is unjust -- but we
  put up with it because we are not convinced, at the moment, that
  anyone has invented a better system. The alternative of the
  commons is too horrifying to contemplate. Injustice is preferable
  to total ruin.
- Perhaps the simplest summary of this analysis of man's
  population problems is this: the commons, if justifiable at all,
  is justifiable only under conditions of low-population density.
  As the human population has increased, the commons has had to be
  abandoned in one aspect after another
- The most important aspect of necessity that we must now
  recognize, is the necessity of abandoning the commons in
  breeding.

01 Sep 09

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The amorality of Web 2.0

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On the Internet, we're all bodiless, symbols speaking to symbols in symbols.
We become free-floating netizens in a more enlightened, almost angelic, realm
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- The Net turned out to be more about commerce than consciousness, more a mall than a commune
- In the future, according to Kelly, the Web will grant us not only the vision of gods but also their power
- Later that Machine may run faster, but there is only one time when it is born.
- Every few centuries, the steady march of change meets a discontinuity, and history hinges on that moment.
- The Machine provided a new way of thinking (perfect search, total recall) and a new mind for an old species. It was the Beginning.
- When we view the Web in religious terms, when we imbue it with our personal yearning for transcendence, we can no longer see it objectively
- When will the great Wikipedia get good? Or is "good" an old-fashioned concept that doesn't apply to emergent phenomena like communal on-line encyclopedias?
- The promoters of Web 2.0 venerate the amateur and distrust the professional. We see it in their unalloyed praise of Wikipedia, and we see it in their worship of open-source software and myriad other examples of democratic creativity.
- ts superficiality, its emphasis on opinion over reporting, its echolalia, its tendency to reinforce rather than challenge ideological extremism and segregation.
- I will take the professionals over the amateurs.
  
  But I don't want to be forced to make that choice.
- The Internet is changing the economics of creative work - or, to put it more broadly, the economics of culture - and it's doing it in a way that may well restrict rather than expand our choices.
- Implicit in the ecstatic visions of Web 2.0 is the hegemony of the amateur. I for one can't imagine anything more frightening.
- Like it or not, Web 2.0, like Web 1.0, is amoral

The Good, the Bad, And the 'Web 2.0' - WSJ.com

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any Internet user to become a journalist or filmmaker or music star
s it a remix of Disney's "Cinderella" or of Kafka's "Metamorphosis
25 more annotations...
- YOU! have forgotten how to listen, how to read, how to watch
- digital narcissism
- without that essential epistemological anchor of truth
- accountable expert is replaced by murkiness of the anonymous amateur
- no audience
- This time, of course, you might be right... especially since you and I seem to agree that the Web isn't yet another medium. Something important and different is going on
- But, the Web is also the continuing struggle to deal with that problem
- That's why we don't open up the Web at random
- The Web is abundance, while the old media are premised -- in their model of knowledge as well as in their economics -- on scarcity…
- Or is your epistemology in fact rooted in the scarcity that has silently shaped the traditional media?
- It's a mirror rather than a medium
- This is fascinating to a philosopher of knowledge like yourself, but for mere mortals who rely on their media to "understand the world", new digital abundance will lead to intellectual poverty
- ordinary people
- Traditional media has done a good job in discovering, polishing and distributing that talent.
- So, traditional distribution makes it look like talent is a you-got- it-or-you-don't proposition -- you're an artist or you're a monkey. That doesn't reflect the scarcity of talent so much as the scarcity of distribution, a result of the high cost of delivering the first copy of a mass produced item
- Knowledge is generally not a game for one. It is and always has been a collaborative process...
- In fact, since businesses learned long ago that knowledge is social, do you seriously maintain that the work of business
- The problem, however, with Web 2.0 is that most of the conversation seems to be taking place anonymously, conducted -- in a manner of speaking -- by people who are more interested in vulgar insult than respectful intellectual intercourse.
- The issue of talent is the heart of the matter. How do we traditionally constitute/nurture/sell talent and how is Web 2.0 altering this?
- But the problem is that gatekeepers -- the agents, editors, recording engineers -- these are the very engineers of talent…
- These professional intermediaries are the arbiters of good taste and critical judgment
- It panders to the market. If you want to see the "democratization" of talent you fear, just look at a Top 40 chart…
- That's why your polemical use of the term "monkey" is not only intentionally obnoxious but essentially false and misleading.
- Sites like Boing Boing are flushing away valuable culture.
- Andrew, the mud you throw obscures the issues you raise

27 Aug 09

Get Smarter - The Atlantic(July/August 2009)

www.theatlantic.com/...3 - Preview

From the perspective of those who find that they’re much more productive using this form of enhancement, it’s no more cheating than getting a faster computer or a better education.
but we’re more likely to see a populace stuck in overdrive
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- searching out the last bits of competitive advantage, business insight, and radical innovation.
- “Shortly after, the human era will be ended.”
- most of these changes wouldn’t be jarring; instead, they’d be incremental, almost overdetermined,

Get Smarter - The Atlantic(July/August 2009)

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Increasingly, we buttress our cognitive functions with our computing systems, no matter that the connections are mediated by simple typing and pointing.
Humans won’t be taken out of the loop—in fact, many, many more humans will have the capacity to do something that was once limited to a hermetic priesthood. Intelligence augmentation decreases the need for specialization and increases participatory complexity.
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- Such attention filters—or focus assistants—are likely to become important parts of how we handle our daily lives.
- We’ll move from a world of “continuous partial attention” to one we might call “continuous augmented awareness.”
- akin to collaborative intuition—in which everyone is effectively augmenting everyone else.

Get Smarter - The Atlantic(July/August 2009)

www.theatlantic.com/...intelligence - Preview

by getting smarter. But this time, we don’t have to rely solely on natural evolutionary processes to boost our intelligence. We can do it ourselves.
“
intelligence augmentation.”
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- a collective consciousness created by the deepening interaction of human mind
- Of course, we’ve been augmenting our ability to think for millennia. When we developed written language, we significantly increased our functional memory and our ability to share insights and knowledge across time and space.
- “continuous partial attention,”
- And it’s easy to mistake more voices for more noise.
- Strengthening our fluid intelligence is the only viable approach to navigating the age of constant connectivity.

Is Google Making Us Stupid? - The Atlantic(July/August 2008)

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“Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.
The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
6 more annotations...
- universal medium
- literary types, most of them
- It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.
- But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brain’s plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level.
- till, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized.
- Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.

25 Aug 09

BBC NEWS | Technology | Multitaskers bad at multitasking

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In a series of three classic psychology tests for attention and memory, the "low multitaskers" consistently outdid their highly multitasking counterparts.
Again, low multitaskers were significantly better at correctly spotting the repeated letters. Not only did the high multitaskers do worse from the beginning, they got worse at it as time went on.
2 more annotations...
- The shocking discovery of this research is that [high multitaskers] are lousy at everything that's necessary for multitasking," Professor Nass said.
- The pressing question that remains, Professor Nass said, is one of cause and effect: are those people with a dearth of multitasking skills drawn to multitasking lifestyles, or do the lifestyles dull the skills?

24 Aug 09

Time's Person of the Year: You - TIME

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He believed that it is the few, the powerful and the famous who shape our collective destiny as a species. That theory took a serious beating this year
scale never seen before
8 more annotations...
- hat will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.
- It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter
- by looking at the backgrounds of YouTube
- ca loves its solitary geniuses—its Einsteins, its Edisons
- Who are these people? Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I'm not going to watch Lost tonight. I'm going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I'm going to mash up 50 Cent's vocals with Queen's instrumentals? I'm going to blog about my
  state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at
  the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?
- The answer is, you do. And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME's Person of the Year for 2006 is you.
- stupidity of crowds
  as well as its wisdom
- This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person. It's a chance for people to look at a computer screen and really, genuinely wonder who's out there looking back at them.

O'Reilly Network: What Is Web 2.0

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The pretenders are given the bum's rush, the real success stories show their strength, and there begins to be an understanding of what separates one from the other.
1. The Web As Platform
33 more annotations...
- Both DoubleClick and Akamai were Web 2.0 pioneers, yet we can also see how it's possible to realize more of the possibilities by embracing additional Web 2.0 design patterns.
- framed the automobile as an extension of the familiar, Netscape promoted a "webtop" to replace the desktop, and planned to populate that webtop with information updates and applets pushed to the webtop by information providers who would purchase Netscape servers.
- never sold or packaged
- continuous improvemen
- database management
- never need be distributed but only performed,
- Google happens in the space between browser and search engine and destination content server, as an enabler or middleman between the user and his or her online experience.
- software as a service
- What's more, they eschewed publisher/ad-agency friendly advertising formats such as banner ads and popups in favor of minimally intrusive, context-sensitive, consumer-friendly text advertising.
- every downloader also became a server, and thus grew the network.
- the service automatically gets better the more people use it
- harness collective intelligence:
- grows organically
- a method of using the link structure of the web rather than just the characteristics of documents to provide better search results.
- that "with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow," to content creation.
- all "folksonomy" (in contrast to taxonomy), a style of collaborative categorization of sites using freely chosen keywords, often referred to as tags.
- You can almost make the case that if a site or product relies on advertising to get the word out, it isn't Web 2.0.
- Network effects from user contributions are the key to market dominance in the Web 2.0 era.
- But as Rich Skrenta notes, the chronological organization of a blog "seems like a trivial difference, but it drives an entirely different delivery, advertising and value chain."
- "the incremental web." Others call it the "live web".
- RSS is now being used to push
- If an essential part of Web 2.0 is harnessing collective intelligence, turning the web into a kind of global brain, the blogosphere is the equivalent of constant mental chatter in the forebrain, the voice we hear in all of our heads. It may not reflect the deep structure of the brain, which is often unconscious, but is instead the equivalent of conscious thought. And as a reflection of conscious thought and attention, the blogosphere has begun to have a powerful effect.
- This is not just a competition between sites, but a competition between business models.
- The recent introduction of Google Maps provides a living laboratory for the competition between application vendors and their data suppliers. Google's lightweight programming model has led to the creation of numerous value-added services in the form of mashups that link Google Maps with other internet-accessible data sources. Paul Rademacher's housingmaps.com, which combines Google Maps with Craigslist apartment rental and home purchase data to create an interactive housing search tool, is the pre-eminent example of such a mashup.
- The race is on to own certain classes of core data:
- the shift from software as artifact to software as service that the software will cease to perform unless it is maintained on a daily basis
- Users must be treated as co-developers,
- "Microsoft's business model depends on everyone upgrading their computing environment every two to three years. Google's depends on everyone exploring what's new in their computing environment every day."
- Support lightweight programming models that allow for loosely coupled systems.
- Think syndication, not coordination.
- Design for "hackability" and remixability.
- A Web 2.0-style address book would treat the local address book on the PC or phone merely as a cache of the contacts you've explicitly asked the system to remember.
- Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
  Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
  Trusting users as co-developers
  Harnessing collective intelligence
  Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service
  Software above the level of a single device
  Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models

David Parry's Library tagged no_tag → View Popular

Malcolm Gladwell reviews Free by Chris Anderson : The New Yorker

Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business

Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business

Internet Pirates Face Walking the Plank in Sweden -- Printout -- TIME

Boston Review — Evgeny Morozov: Texting Toward Utopia

Habermas’ heritage

The Tragedy of the Commons, by Garrett Hardin (1968)

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The amorality of Web 2.0

The Good, the Bad, And the 'Web 2.0' - WSJ.com

Get Smarter - The Atlantic(July/August 2009)

Get Smarter - The Atlantic(July/August 2009)

Get Smarter - The Atlantic(July/August 2009)

Is Google Making Us Stupid? - The Atlantic(July/August 2008)

BBC NEWS | Technology | Multitaskers bad at multitasking

Time's Person of the Year: You - TIME

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