An Empirical Analysis of Filesharing
7 September, 2009 - 16:22 by felixOlson’s Paradox Revisited : An Empirical Analysis of Filesharing
Thierry Pénard, Sylvain Dejean, Raphaël Suire (June, 2009)
Abstract:
UNU-Merit Survey of Wikipedia Readers and Contributors
4 September, 2009 - 14:44 by felixRishab Aiyer Ghosh 's Groups, UNU-MERIT, has done a large survery of wikipedia readers and contributors (130'000 completed surveys). Among the key (preliminary) results with regard to gender are:
The Internet has not transformed civic engagement... yet
2 September, 2009 - 15:02 by felixArs Technica reports on the new study The Internet and Civic Engagement which found that there is a strong correlation between income and political activity and that there is little difference between online and offline, except that online more people sign petitions. Looks like the Internet is not really broadening the social basis of political involvement.
Collaborative Filtering with Ensembles
2 September, 2009 - 14:43 by felixArticle on new collaborative platforms for software development
semiotic subversion in china
19 April, 2009 - 15:44 by felixCNN 报道 caonima 草泥马
Tanda Foundation: community funding for culture
3 April, 2009 - 21:05 by felix
Commons: A rough definition
21 January, 2009 - 22:00 by felixLast week, I spent a few days at a small but intense workshop where we were looking at a the political dimensions of various forms of commons. The discussions were open and far ranging. I tried to distill some of these into a definition of commons that tries to take its various dimensions into considerations and separates structural from political issues. Far from perfect....
COMMONS, A DEFINITION
A commons is a resource held as joint property by a community. Thus, it is distinct from private property (held by natural or legal persons) or public property (held by the state). Typical for commons is that the management of the resource is oriented towards use-value for its members, rather than towards exchange-value within society at large. The separation between producers and consumers is minimized. Thus, commons are also distinct from other forms of collective ownership (such as co-operatives) that produce for the market.
All commons are social institutions, they depend on a community to create and maintain it. A resource that is freely available to all but not managed in a meaningful way by a self-aware community (e.g., the fish in the open sea) are not a commons. Like in all communities, questions of membership (boundaries) and internal decision-making are subject to ongoing, more or less conflictual, negotiations.
It is these questions that define the political quality of the commons, which can serve as defensive mechanism against market encroachment (e.g., in the case of indigenous commons), as a project of exclusion (e.g., in far-right conceptions of the body national) or as the basis of open cooperation (e.g., in the case of Free and Open Source Software).
Online Collaboration goes legit
28 December, 2008 - 23:04 by felixDavid Bollier writes:
It is one thing to talk about the “virtual corporation” and online commons as new organizational forms. It’s quite another to have those forms be legally recognized. Yet in a little-noticed law enacted in June 2008, the State of Vermont has formally conferred “legal personhood” on online communities that wish to form limited-liability partnerships.
[....]
The Vermont law strikes me as an ambitious next stage in the evolution of tech and legal infrastructure that started with free software and Creative Commons. The General Public License (for free software) and CC licenses authorize new forms of sharing and collaboration, and have the force of law. We’ve seen the explosion of new online creativity and collaboration that has resulted. The new Vermont law has the potential to authorize all sorts of interesting new collaborative organizations that would have the full legal standing to “compete” with conventional corporations.
My friend John Clippinger of the Berkman Center has described the virtual corporations law as the first step toward imagining a new type of “cloud law.” He is referring to “cloud computing,” the next generation of computing that will locate software systems in the “cloud” – remote server-farms that are accessible from anywhere, through one’s iPhone, laptop or other portable device. Cloud computing will be sold as a utility – like electricity or phone service – and will enable even more powerful modes of Web 2.0 collaboration. For economic reasons, tech experts regard the Cloud as the virtually inevitable next stage of computing.
Visualization of remix Culture
30 October, 2008 - 20:15 by felixGiorgos Cheliotis, assistant professor of Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore done one of the, if not the, first network analysis and network visualization of a remix community, based on the ccMixter.
Opentape invites RIAA to play whack-a-mole post-Muxtape
27 August, 2008 - 18:17 by felixSeems like there is no learning in the music industry. What happens when you kill a centralized service that might not have all the right licenses, but at least an address and presumably someone willing to do business (think Napster)? Well, a decentralized service appears with no address and no business model (think Bittorrent, the protocol, not the company).
So, here we are again. Ars Technica writes:
