Finnaly came around reading some articles i marked 2read long time ago.  Here an interesting quote from an article about yahoo buying del.icio.us and flickr

“In topology search, what you’re really doing is conferring to webmasters the privilege of deciding what’s important for everybody. They cast their votes on what’s important by building links – and they do it in a way that smears it out for everybody, so we all get the same results.” The concept of personal search and social search, he says, “democratises that process, and says ‘why should webmasters be the only authority we trust and confer that privilege to?’. Why can’t I pick other authorities of trust, like for instance my friends? What is their opinion?”

So instead of getting the same results as everybody who searches a term, you get results that are filtered through your social group. You choose your own peers – friends, family, colleagues, interesting strangers – and they provide your answers. And by including different levels of friendship, you can increase the size of your net dramatically. Even if you have just 10 contacts, and those contacts have another 10 each, that’s still more than 100 potential sources within two hops. The concept is useful, perhaps, but maybe not for everyone.

“If you’re trying to find the population of London, you don’t need social search,” admits Horowitz. “But if you’re trying to find a restaurant to eat at, a blog to read, or a plumber who’s reputable – the kind of things you depend on the expertise of others to know – that’s where the social search phenomenon comes in.”

I’ve just been invited for a conference in Pensylvenia: The hyperlinked society. They say they’ll even cover my hotel, meal and part of my travel budget … how about a cheap holiday??
Although I’m not sure if it is a scam yet, i found an interesting link on their website: an extensive list of web 2.0 apps Impressive.

Updat:e it’s not a scam This means that i can enjoy a good conference and a cheap holiday at the same time

Who controls the information? In this modern age, search engines have a distinct influence on the retrieval of information from the internet. Your average user will, when prompted with the need to look up information, go to google and look for the pages. This gives google power: when google decides a certain topic, company, organisation or whatever is not acceptable they can keep it out of the search result. In effect, the major search engines bias what the average user sees of the internet.

In order to remedy this situation, we came up with the OpenSearch idea: a search engine that is distributed, not under central control and therefore difficult to manipulate.

Technorati has a new beta. In the words of Sifry:

1. - We’ve improved the user experience, making Technorati accessible to more people and, specifically, people who are new to blogging. We’ve tried to make it very simple to understand what Technorati is all about, and make it easy to understand how we’re different from other search engines.
2. - We’ve learned from the incredible success of tags, and brought some of the those same features into search, as well as expanding tag functionality. Now, if your search matches a tag, we bring in photos and links from flickr, furl, delicious, and now buzznet as well.
3. - We now have more powerful advanced search features. You can now click the “Options” link beside any search box for power searching options.
4. - We’ve added more personalization. Sign in, and you’ll see your current set of watchlists, claimed blogs, and profile info, right on the homepage, giving you quick access to the stuff you want as quickly as possible.
5. - New Watchlist capabilities have been added. For example, you no longer need a RSS reader to watch your favorite searches. Now you can view all of your favorite searches on one page. Of course, you can still get your watchlists via RSS, and it is even easier to create new watchlists. You can also get RSS feeds for tagged posts, just check the bottom of each page of tag results!

via nettime.nl:

Datum: Zaterdag 28 mei a.s.
Plaats: Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (TU/e), Auditorium, Blauwe Zaal.

Cyberspace geeft de ruimte aan die ontstaat door de koppeling van computersystemen. In deze ruimte bestaan de grenzen van de fysieke wereld niet meer. Afstand vormt geen beperking meer voor e-mail, voor telebankieren en zelfs niet voor chirurgische ingrepen. Maar de grenzeloze ruimte kan veel meer inhouden, want ook fantasieën kunnen erin tot leven worden gewekt. In de virtuele wereld kunnen levensechte ervaringen gecreëerd worden die eigenlijk fysiek onmogelijk zijn: bewegen dwars door muren heen, herleven na de dood of teruggaan in de tijd. Maar wat doet dit alles met ons mensen, met onze identiteit en met ons wereldbeeld?

Het symposium op zaterdag 28 mei begint om half tien en wordt omstreeks half vijf afgesloten.
Het symposium Cyberspace wordt georganiseerd de Radboudstichting en door het Thijmgenootschap.
Sprekers zijn onder meer: Jos de Mul (Rotterdam), Petran Kockelkoren en René Munnik (Enschede), Palmyre Oomen (Nijmegen, Eindhoven)

Van de Rotterdamse Jos de Mul heb ik de boeken ‘Cyberspace Odysee‘ en ‘Filosofie in Cyberspace’ gelezen. Beide best wel interessante nederfilo, worth the (re-)read.

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Great little PBS docu (8min) about internet in Indian slums. Talking about reducing the digital divide …

The videos of Publieksdag Philosophy of Information: The World as a Computer are now online. Scroll down on this page: http://www.illc.uva.nl/HPI/.

CitizenLab :: Version 4.0
The Citizen Lab is an interdisciplinary laboratory based at the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada focusing on advanced research and development at the intersection of digital media and world civic politics.

The Emerging Economic Paradigm of Open Source

* Bruce Perens
* Senior Research Scientist, Open Source
* Cyber Security Policy Research Institute, George Washington University.
* Last edited: Wed Jan 19 09:18:19 PST 2005

Abstract
Open Source developers have, perhaps without conscious intent, created a new and surprisingly successful economic paradigm for the production of software. Examining that paradigm can answer a number of important questions.

It’s not immediately obvious how Open Source[1] works economically. Probably the worst consequence of this lack of understanding is that many people don’t understand how Open Source could be economically sustainable, and some may even feel that its potential negative effect upon the proprietary software industry is an overall economic detriment. Fortunately, if you look more deeply into the economic function of software in general, it’s easy to establish that Open Source is both sustainable and of tremendous benefit to the overall economy.

Open Source can be explained entirely within the context of conventional open-market economics. Indeed, it turns out that it has much stronger ties to the phenomenon of capitalism than you may have appreciated.

Folksonomies – Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata
Adam Mathes
Computer Mediated Communication – LIS590CMC
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
University of Illinois Urbana-‍Champaign
December 2004

This paper examines user-‍generated metadata as implemented and applied in two web services designed to share and organize digital media to better understand grassroots classification. Metadata – data about data – allows systems to collocate related information, and helps users find relevant information. The creation of metadata has generally been approached in two ways: professional creation and author creation. In libraries and other organizations, creating metadata, primarily in the form of catalog records, has traditionally been the domain of dedicated professionals working with complex, detailed rule sets and vocabularies. The primary problem with this approach is scalability and its impracticality for the vast amounts of content being produced and used, especially on the World Wide Web. The apparatus and tools built around professional cataloging systems are generally too complicated for anyone without specialized training and knowledge. A second approach is for metadata to be created by authors. The movement towards creator described documents was heralded by SGML, the WWW, and the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. There are problems with this approach as well – often due to inadequate or inaccurate description, or outright deception. This paper examines a third approach: user-‍created metadata, where users of the documents and media create metadata for their own individual use that is also shared throughout a community.