On indefinite hiatus
I’m parking this Tumblr blog for now. I have learned loads about openness.
What if Flickr fails? →
Doc Searls:
“realize that the pendulum has now swung full distance in the silo’d direction — and that it’s going to swing back in the direction of open and distributed everything. And there’s plenty of money to be made there too.”
"Why wasn't I consulted?" →
An insightful way of looking at the web
If you tap into the human need to be consulted you can get some interesting reactions. Here are a few: Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, Hunch, Reddit, MetaFilter, YouTube, Twitter, StumbleUpon, About, Quora, Ebay, Yelp, Flickr, IMDB, Amazon.com, Craigslist, GitHub, SourceForge, every messageboard or site with comments, 4Chan, Encyclopedia Dramatica. Plus the entire Open Source movement. If you spend more time on sites like those listed here than you do reading books, watching TV, or visiting sites like ESPN.com or NYTimes.com, then, like me, the web is now your native medium.
The obvious example of WWIC at work is Wikipedia, created for free by unpaid labor. It tapped into the basic human need to be consulted and never looked back.
Then there’s YouTube. It was created so that anyone could upload and distribute videos. So that’s one level of WWIC—to hell with TV, people should look at me! The site has comments, so people can discuss the videos—a second level of WWIC. But there are now also thumbs-up/thumbs-down icons so that you can rank the comments and the video, a third level of WWIC.
Once you see that third level, a website is complete. You’re down to the bedrock. A boolean or integer value is the digital equivalent of a grunt. You can’t get any more basic than a like, or a thumbs-up, or a favorite.
The Philosophy of Facebook (or, the real reason Facebook doesn’t care about privacy) →
“This sort way of thinking about the world long pre-dates Facebook, indeed, it runs throughout the philosophies embedded in the modern internet. It is the culture of the Californian Bay Area that has codeveloped along with the technologies it has created. Described most simply, it is a form of technological utopianism whose rhetorical roots lie in Nortbert Wiener’s cybernetics of the 1940s and 1950s and 1960s American counterculture fused with the computing and digital networking technologies of the 1980s and 1990s. One of the core tenants of this mode of thinking was the belief that flattened hierarchies and the blurring of traditional boundaries — enabled by computing and networking technologies — would bring about a more equal and democratic world where individuals could be themselves and would be free to determine their own destinies. The 1990s saw the infusion of the New Right‘s celebration of free markets and economic liberalism into the mix, which further blurred hierarchies and the boundaries between work/play, personal/professional and producer/consumer.”
Wikileaks: The Blast Shack by Bruce Sterling →
“The Wikileaks Cablegate scandal is the most exciting and interesting hacker scandal ever. I rather commonly write about such things, and I’m surrounded by online acquaintances who take a burning interest in every little jot and tittle of this ongoing saga. So it’s going to take me a while to explain why this highly newsworthy event fills me with such a chilly, deadening sense of Edgar Allen Poe melancholia…”
Blog, poke, twitter and be damned →
“But it doesn’t follow, as the president suggested, that posting weird (to older people) things on the web — in blogs, social networks and the like — should be an automatic turnoff or disqualification for a responsible job later on. The notion of punishing someone decades later for what he or she said or did as a teenager or college student just feels wrong to me.”
Good piece from 2009 by Dan Gillmor
It seems to me that at the end of this chain is BitTorrent. That when WikiLeaks wants to publish the next archive, they can get their best practice from eztv.it, and have 20 people scattered around the globe at the ends of various big pipes ready to seed it. Once the distribution is underway the only way to shut it down will be to shut down the Internet itself.
New York Times: The Decision to Publish Diplomatic Documents →
NY Times rationale for posting WikiLeaks documents
Wikileaks plans to make the Web a leakier place →
WikiLeaks’ release strategy, from Oct 2009
The embargo period is a key part of the plan, Assange said. When Wikileaks releases material without writing its own story or finding people who will, it gains little attention.
“It’s counterintuitive,” he said. “You’d think the bigger and more important the document is, the more likely it will be reported on but that’s absolutely not true. It’s about supply and demand. Zero supply equals high demand, it has value. As soon as we release the material, the supply goes to infinity, so the perceived value goes to zero.”
