What a great essay / presentation by Clay Shirky. A couple quotes that stood out to me:
And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.
We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan’s Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. [...]
Cool flash infographic in the latest issue of Wired that shows what happens to your blog post after you click the ‘publish’ button (I’ll save you the hassle of actually viewing it: after you click the ‘publish’ button, exciting things like ping servers, data miners, search engines, text scrapers, aggregators, social bookmarking sites, online [...]
Jason Kottke and a couple other people blogged Eric Bonabeau’s talk on Biological Computing using Hydra. Biological computing is an amazing concept. Seems like we programmers spend 99% of our time creating ‘palaces of abstraction’; (to steal a phrase from Josh), reducing the world to manageable bits. Biological computing lets all that [...]
Rael was on TechTV w/ Cory Doctorow talking about the upcoming Oreilly Emerging Technology Conference. If you don’t have cable or your Tivo didn’t tape it, you can watch it online.
Steven Johnson’s latest article is online @ discover.com: Emerging Technology: Who Loves Ya, Baby?
His thesis is based on Cat’s Cradle, which “… explains how the world is divided into two types of social organizations: the karass and the granfalloon.” I was thinking on the way home tonight how the exposure of massive amounts structured [...]
On openp2p.com: Interesting interview w/ Eric Bonabeau, relevant quotes:
“And that swarm intelligence offers an alternative way of designing “intelligent” systems in which autonomy, emergence, and distributedness replace control, preprogramming, and centralization.” — The words ‘autonomy, emergence and distributedness’ are somewhat freeing from a software development standpoint. In complex systems, instead of taking x [...]
The Social Life of Books: Visualizing Communities of Interest via Purchase Patterns on the WWW
“An irony in Amazon’s drive to sell more books to its existing customers through value-added information is that these services could provide an opportunity to the businesses that Amazon competes against.” [source: boingboing]
LOGO (mentioned in the Emergence book I just read), has been re-released in Java as StarLogo by a group at MIT [slashdot]. According to the StarLogo site, it is a “… programmable modeling environment for exploring the workings of decentralized systems — systems that are organized without an organizer, coordinated without a coordinator. With [...]
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