hyperlative.com | signal vs. noise in distributed media

In the beginning we surfed the web but now a tsunami of crowd-sourced content threatens to overwhelm our craft. Should we plunge headlong into the waves and hope to remain bouyant in the social media storm or head for maven haven on the mountain top? The web is awash with water metaphors, from streaming video [...]

Chris Messina has published a passionate and beautifully-illustrated post about the tension between what Jonathan Zittrain describes as generative and tethered net applications, represented by Neo’s Cartesian dilemma. How insidious is the slide towards ease of use inside walled gardens such as Facebook and the iPhone? And how many users truly take the red pill [...]

A review of Free: The Future Of A Radical Price by Chris Anderson. Chris Anderson is Editor-in-Chief of the US edition of Wired magazine, a post he has held since 2001, and is also author of 2006 best-seller The Long Tail: How Endless Choice Is Creating Unlimited Demand. His latest foray into the lucrative non-fiction [...]

A partisan but pretty polemic comparing the search giant’s apparently insatiable monopolistic drives to those of a well-known authoritarian despot. Hosted on whose servers for free?

Jaron Lanier spoke at The RSA on 1 February 2010 to promote his new book You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto. This is essential reading for anyone involved with the online world. It takes a refreshingly honest look at the first generation of web applications and the way the web has evolved. Check out [...]

Kevin Marks delivering reliably essential insight at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York last Autumn. See also How Twitter Works In Theory and the subsequent Twitter Thoery Applied To Google Buzz for more about Flow, Faces, Phatic, Following, Publics, Mutual Media and Small World Networks.

A great collection of quotes from way back in the day. Look out for Douglas Hofstadter, Sherry Turkle and Steve Jobs on technology and identity.