Here is my review of Clay Shirky's new book, which was originally published on the great metamute site.

Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody is reputed to be the best book ever written on Web 2.0. By why the strange silence on questions of copyright, privacy and ownership? Felix Stalder delves beneath the slick prose and upbeat message.

‘Communication tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.’ If a single sentence can represent the entire book, it must be this one. For one, it's great writing. Precise, condensed, clear. Shirky's book is full of it. It shifts attention to the right level, away from the tools and to what people do with them. It also contains the dilemma that the entire book grapples with: how to write about technology once that technology has become mundane? Lastly, it leaves a lot of things out. How do technologies become mundane? Which ones are legitimate and which ones are not? Why are some providers of ‘boring technologies’ worth billions (e.g. YouTube) while others subject to high-pressure litigation (e.g. ThePirateBay)? But Shirky doesn't want to go there, he prefers to keep the message safe and positive.

Referring to his unauthorized use of material for his major "Histoire(s) du cinema" Jean Luc Godard said in an interview in 1996:

Amit Singhal, Google Fellow has written a series of "official" posts explaing how google creates its ranking system. It's light on details, but gives an impression of the enormeous complexity of search engines.

Hadn't know this journal before.Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology
From the most recent issue:

CLIVE LAWSON An Ontology of Technology: Artefacts, Relations and Functions

This is an older text, from 2005, but it's still one of the best on the issue of the paradoxical relationship between the attempts to privatize knowledge and its inherent tendency to be social, because it's based on a shared language.

The gentrye are all round, on each side they are found,
Theire wisdom’s so profound, to cheat us of our ground
Stand up now, Diggers all.
The Diggers’ Song, Gerrard Winstanley & Leon Rosselson

First Monday published my paper in its current edition. Below is the abstract, the full text is here

Hype Machine is a blog that aggregates music blogs and automatically generates playlists and let's you "spy" on what other people are doing on the blog.

http://reason.com/blog/show/127444.html

Uh, things are getting interesting. Open Source, capable of producing a working copy of itself. A bit geeky still, but who knows for how long.
Source: http://www.reprap.org/bin/view/Main/WebHome