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complexity, pragmatism, critique
According to Theory, Culture and Society we are having a complexity turn. From John Urry’s introduction to the special issue on the topic: Overall, complexity approaches both signify and enhance a new ‘structure of feeling’; one that combines system and process thinking…such an emergent structure involves a sense of contingent openness and multiple futures, of…
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Call for Papers: IR 7.0
CALL FOR PAPERS IR 7.0: INTERNET CONVERGENCES International and Interdisciplinary Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers Brisbane, Australia 28-30 September 2006 Pre-Conference Workshops: 27 September 2006 INTERNET CONVERGENCES The Internet works as an arena of convergence. Physically dispersed and marginalized people (re)find themselves online for the sake of sustaining and extending community. International and…
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Bits
Birthday greetings to Herman Hesse, wherever he is. From my favourite agent provocateur and radical hacker, David Berry, come the libre commons licenses: This is a project to develop non-legal licenses that will operate in the shared space that can non-bureaucratically and non-instrumentally be formed resisting law, the intellectual property regime and state violence. These…
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Guest Post: David Berry on Ethics and Enterprise in Open Source Communities
I’m so pleased that David Berry came through with a response to the WordPress/Google Adwords controversy, and in double-quick time too. By way of introduction (filched from his homepage on the Sussex University website): David M. Berry is a doctoral candidate at the University of Sussex, exploring the critical political economy of free/libre/open-source culture. The…
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WordPress’s Googlegate and the Politics of Open Source
danah boyd, in discussing WordPress’s Googlegate, raises some very interesting questions about friendship, ethics, and the politics of ‘community’ and commercialisation in relation to FLOSS (Free/Libre and Open Source Software) and other ‘user-led’ online communities. I’ve asked David Berry to comment on this, because he doesn’t have a blog (but should!) and if Mohammed won’t…
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flickr gets snapped up
So now that SixApart owns LiveJournal, and Google owns Blogger, what next? The rumours were true, Yahoo has bought Ludicorp and flickr. They say the API will remain open, so let’s wait and see…
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Annotating the web
If you like trying out new toys and have an interest in the annotated web, webbed footnotes wants you. Part of an MSc project at MIT, webbed footnotes is a firefox plugin that allows users to post annotations to web pages, as well as read and rate the annotations of others. It’s very news-focused, at…
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The BBC and technodemocracy
One of the things I learned at Wednesday night’s talk by Paula le Dieu was that among the rash of early 80s microcomputers was something called the BBC micro (an Acorn). It came out of the BBC Education “BBC computer literacy project” – apparently, the Beeb wanted to build a microcomputer that could do everything…
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Creative Commons Loot and Conference Schmoozing
The first day of the OCL conference (see previous entry) went not too badly, so here’s some extremely random highlights. In our conference packs we got copies of the Creative Commons copy me/remix me CD (but I really wanted the Wired one), CC buttons and stickers, and a v. nice QUT pen…Larry Lessig gave his…
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Cultivating Intercreativity…
…that’s the title of a short paper I’m giving tomorrow at Open Content Licensing (OCL): Cultivating the Creative Commons (pdf) at QUT, with guest star Larry Lessig. I’ll be appearing as a proxy for the Youth Internet Radio Network (YIRN), which I’ve been involved with as a researcher, but which isn’t really “my” project. YIRN…