Dissing Information
4 days of intense collaboration have passed. 1 more day left to go. I’m tired. Networking with new collaborators Today we have finally got better about receiving external help. When I started to write about GIT vs. SVN as references for collaboration systems I checked out Jonah Bossewitch‘s Versioning Dissonance paper which he sent me … Continue reading Collaborative Futures Day4: Web 3.0 is bullshit too
It has been another intense day of recursive collaboration at the Collaborative Futures book sprint here in Berlin. Currently at around 23,000 words. Not bad for just 1, 2, 3 days… Attribution The people in the room have quite strong feelings about concepts of attribution. What is pretty obvious by now is that both those … Continue reading Collaborative Futures Day3: Who is I?
This is so much fun! On the second day of our “Collaborative Futures” book sprint (read the posts about it and about day 1) I was still very skeptical about our process and our chances of success. But as the day progressed the project started taking shape and I’m actually even more excited about it … Continue reading Collaborative Futures Day2: “Knock, knock.” “Who’s there?”
Berlin is beautiful in the snow, though we get to experience it mainly through the window. Day 1 of the “Collaborative Futures” book sprint (more about what it is in my previous post) was fascinating and intense. I feel very privileged to have met this group of talented people, all coming with strong experience and … Continue reading Collaborative Futures, Day #1
During the upcoming week I will be working in Berlin with 6 super smart people (Adam Hyde, Mike Linksvayer, Michael Mandiberg, Alan Toner, Aleksandar Erkalovic, Marta Peirano) on writing a whole book from scratch titled “Collaborative Futures”. The format for this collaborative writing was developed by Adam Hyde and the Floss Manuals community which is … Continue reading Towards the (week of) Collaborative Futures
Apparently, there’s a certain parasite in cats stool that makes us love them. What does it tell us about cats as pets? about LOLCATS memes? about free will? Radiolab, a popular-science radio show and podcast from NPR had a show about parasites. The whole episode was great, but the one segment that really blew me … Continue reading Why we take shit from cats? (and love them for it)
In the second day of Wordcamp NYC last month I was asked to repeat my Open Source Design presentation in a 5 minutes version for the whole of the conference audience. I just realized somebody uploaded a video of it to YouTube, but since it’s a bit shaky and the image quality could be better … Continue reading short+audio – my Open Source Design slides
Kevin Connor & Matthew Skomarovsky from LittleSis.org (an involuntary facebook of powerful Americans, collaboratively edited by people like you) & David Nolen and myself of ShiftSpace have teamed up and together with Eyebeam have submitted an application for the Knight News Challenge. It is a cross between what LittleSis and ShiftSpace do best, applied to … Continue reading NewsShift: watchdog journalism with a long tail [Grant application]
Questionable priorities of archeological facts on Google Maps, divisive cross-lingual links on Wikipedia… Are the ideological distortions of history on so-called balanced online services here to stay? As I was working with Laila El-Haddad on the 2009 version of You Are Not Here, we were looking for interesting locations to feature on our mediated/dislocated tour. … Continue reading A Subtle Zionist Occupation of Gaza through Google Maps
Last week Google have announced a somewhat surprising initiative, to digitize the artefacts and documents of the Iraqi National Museum. The first ring of this is great! A private American company helping with the reconstruction of the ravaged Iraqi cultural heritage and making it available to the public online. And all for free.
I do acknowledge that there’s a high level of paranoia whenever Google announces anything. And while I definitely share some of the suspicions, I do not wish to align this post with the side of the conspiracy theorists. Yet I believe it is not hard to suspect that there is more than pure altruism in play here. Google has been expressing frequent PR attempts lately to fight against the inevitable (just a matter of time) anti-trust lawsuit by aligning itself on the side of the public interest.
Still licking the wounds of its somewhat failed book deal (digitizing the world’s books for free), Google is still trying to make an attempt to dive into publishing (rather than indexing) public content on the web. It seems like Google is impatient with the world’s pace of uploading its knowledge online, every failed Google search is a net loss for Google and almost every new service it has announced lately is geared towards increasing this process.