Here Comes Everybody!

Great new book about the technology!

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky.

Notes from a review at Amazon.Com...

+ New technologies enable new kinds of groups to form.

+ "Message" is key, what Eric Raymond calls "plausible promise."

+ Can now harness "free and ready participation in a large distributed group with a variety of skills."

+ Cost-benefit of large "unsupervised" endeavors is off the charts.

+ From sharing to cooperation to collective action

+ Collective action requires shared vision

+ Literacy led to mass amatuerism, and the cell phone can lead to mass on demand education "one cell call at a time"

+ Transactions costs dramatically lowered.

+ Revolution happens when it cannot be contained by status quo institutions

+ Good account of Wikipedia

+ Light discussion of social capital, Yochai Benkler does it much better

+ Value of mass diversity

+ Implications of Linux for capitalism

+ Excellent account of how Perl beat out C++

Check out one of the author's video lectures...

Isn't This Google Docs?

Doesn't this sound exactly like Google Docs?

Ray Ozzie first talked about Mesh in a speech at last month's Mix '08 event in Las Vegas.

"Just imagine the possibilities of unified application management across the device mesh, centralized, Web-based deployment of device-based applications," he said. "Imagine an app platform that's cognizant of all of your devices. Now, as it so happens, we've had a team at Microsoft working on this specific scenario for some time, starting with the PC and focused on the question of how we might make life so much easier for individuals if we just brought together all your PCs into a seamless mesh, for users, for developers, using the Web as a hub."

So much for "innovation" at Microsoft!

"Printable" Solar Panels

Thanks to Mike Hursh for bringing this to my attention!

"Printable" Solar Panels are now available using inkjet technology!

Available from Konarka Technologies.