It would be a desirable and enviable existence just to earn a decent wage at a worthwhile job and spend all one’s leisure hours improving one’s aesthetic appreciation. There is so much to appreciate, and it is all available for peanuts. One can plausibly aspire to seeing, hearing and reading everything that matters. The times [...]
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Tags:art·Culture
Keating was less successful in the battle over Telecom’s future, since cabinet decided to support Beazley’s proposal. After intense factional negotiations Beazley and the government carried the day at the special conference, where debate was spirited and at times – especially concerning Telecom – very technical. Grappling with the intricacies of telecommunications was, Beazley remarked, [...]
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Tags:ALP·ICT·Labor·policy·telecommunications
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts … A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the non space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. [...]
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When he tired of official reports and memoranda and minutes, he would plug his foolscap-sized Newspad into the ship’s information circuit and scan the latest reports from Earth. One by one he would conjure up the world’s major electronic papers; he knew the codes of the more important ones by heart, and had no need [...]
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Synopsis: By lowering the transaction costs of group action, the Internet has made possible a new model of production – commons based peer production. Not market driven, not government directed and not organisationally controlled, peer production within online communities of interest represents a qualitatively new form of production. Benkler was the first to identify it. [...]
Tags:Yochai Benkler
Synopsis: University of Chicago Professor of Jurisprudence and polymath at large, Cass Sunstein reviews traditional models of aggregating and filtering information in the context of the impact of rapidly evolving technological change. If it was published on Twitter, I’d give it a re-tweet. My Take: The best summary of Cass Sunstien’s “Infotopia” comes from a [...]
Tags:Cass Sunstien
Another post, another excuse for sparsity of posting. Life remains professionally intense (though interesting) and Blogging the Bookshelf has had to take a backseat this month while I’ve focused on the day job. Thankfully while my blogging has suffered, my reading time has held up well (the one saving grace of interstate commuting) and I’ve [...]
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Synopsis: First novel (in order of release, not chronology) of the seven volume Foundation series tracing ‘psychohistorian’, Hari Seldon’s efforts to restore civilisation in the wake of the collapse of the Galactic Empire. My Take: I’m not usually a fan of Science Fiction (and I’m NEVER a fan of fantasy. Yes that includes The Lord [...]
Tags:Isacc Asimov
Synopsis: As search, storage and distribution costs trend towards zero in an increasingly digital world the economics of commerce are changing. While massively selling high-demand ‘hits’ remain important, lower costs have made it economical to trade in an ever increasing ‘Long Tail’ of low (but not zero) demand niche products a la iTunes, Amazon, eBay [...]
Tags:Chris Anderson
