The psychology of Creative Commons advocacy tells us alot about how real creativity is valued.
Or more accurately, how it isn't.
"Just who would want to vandalise an entry on cheese?" wonders Skip, a Wikipedia administrator. Watching the online encyclopaedia's raw submission queue in real time can be unnerving. The online reference site that anyone can edit is defaced 20 times a minute and cheese, it seems, is one of the most popular targets for creative embellishment.
In the administrator's console, another fresh article - Wikipedia has more than a million now - scrolls past: "James is my fren," it reads in its entirety.
How then are we coping with this glut of unreliable information?
A measure of how mature the software is can also be gleaned from this blog post. Writely gained the feature "delete from trash" five weeks ago, a lower priority for the team than "new toolbar". When the ability to remove your own work from a hosted web service is considered less important than cosmetics, you have a fair idea of the software designers' values.
...That's because of the kind of work people are doing now, which co-founder Sam Schillace explained to NPR recently, is - "Lightweight, high-velocity and very connected."
That's because of the kind of work people are doing now, co-founder Sam Schillace explained is - "Lightweight, high-velocity and very connected." Or did he mean the people behind such 'Web 2.0' software are lightweight, high-velocity and very connected?
»»The middle class is on the march!
"The Internet is becoming more and more widespread and will increasingly represent a scientific random sample of the population," claims ICANN's newest board member, Joi Ito.
Quite what scientific experiments he will wish to perform, once the desired sample size has been reached, remains a mystery. But like many people who spend too long in front of their computers, he's talking about a Platonic ideal rather than the real world.
A survey by the US Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration shows that the internet has entrenched the divide between rich and poor, and the races. Statistics reveal an internet that's overwhelmingly white, wealthy and urban.
Diversity in action: blogdom's Rainbow Nation
We stared and we stared. But all we saw was little sighs and coughs trying to be words, words trying to be catchphrases, and catchphrases trying to be paradigm-shifting, world-changing ideas. It still didn't make much sense.
Ambushed by the "Blackberry lifestyle". I survived. Just.
Will Davies has written very well about the need to put up barriers. Some people, evidently, have convinced themselves they're comfortably with the incessant demands of always-on data.
It's a crippled view of human creativity. Beethoven doesn't need to be re-mixed - he needs a good orchestra. And Billie Holliday isn't enhanced by overlaying some beats. Nor is something special simply because it's passed through a DMA bus, or a Cisco router. History in the end judges what endures and what doesn't, so our responsibility - and it's such a burden! - is to celebrate what's good.
»»There's much fretting about what Web 2.0 really is. It's twice as cosmic, but what is it?
Conference organizer Tim O'Reilly's first attempt to explain it spanned five pages, and produced the following. Apparently it's a fridge magnet game.
We stared and we stared. But all we saw was little sighs and coughs trying to be words, words trying to be catchphrases, and catchphrases trying to be paradigm-shifting, world-changing ideas. It still didn't make much sense.
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is the very model of a modern politician. A telegenic eunuch without any ready hinterland or beliefs, he presides by gesture and photo-opportunity. Policy is replaced by stunts, whose success is measured by publicity they generate; and political leadership means setting a gently optimistic mood music.
If this sounds familiar to United Kingdom voters, that's not surprising, as Newsom is cut from the same cloth as Tony Blair. Both are technocrats who view any substantial policy task as a question of process issue, or a set of managerial tweaks. (HP's new very model of a modern CEO, Mark Hurd, takes the same approach).
All this is important in the context of municipal Wi-Fi. With their passion for technocratic efficiency, politicians like Newsom and Blair need grand gestures - preferably grand gestures that don't cost the public very much in the short-term - and a municipal city-wide Wi-Fi network fits the bill perfectly.