bootstrapping.net

“Ya see users like Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit and Flickr because they are contributing to true, free, democratic social platforms devoid of monetary motivations.”
Kevin Rose, co-founder, Digg

Al-Noor Ramji, Chief Executive Officer BT EXact and Group CIO, “At the end of the day, we (BT) are a telco… and by that I mean, we are fundamentally an infrastructure company”.
Five minutes later on the same panel:
Neil Rogers, Managing Director 21CN, BT says, “We are fundamentally a services company”
as reported by Malcolm Matson.
(Not that there’s anything wrong in being a bit confused about who you are - i’m that all the time - just not something that’s currently accepted in the corporate non-human world).

Who Writes Wikipedia? (Aaron Swartz’s Raw Thought). Essential read from Aaron Swartz about who really writes Wikipedia - contradicting the analysis Jimbo Wales has presented many places including at reboot.
Perhaps Wikipedia really is the hive mind when it comes to core creation, allthough when it comes to “formatting” it’s a small community. At least a very important discussion to have about the essential icon of a new era that Wikipedia has become.
Coincidently i wanted to vote for Aaron for the Wikimedia foundation board but got this message.
“Sorry, you are not qualified to vote in this election here on the English Wikipedia. You need to have made 400 edits here before 00:00, 1 August 2006; you have made 5″.
Nails Aaron’s argument pretty strong since i’ve contributed to at least 50 wikipedia articles anonomously - which isn’t valued - but getting to 400 edits is pretty simple. It seems Wikipedia could have a major governance issue here - since it’s the “formatters” that are going the be running the place - not the contributors.

In the coming urban city of screens the essential zoning regulation entity is gonna be “the frame rate” - as in the average number of frames per second/minute/hour allowed on the screens on that particular part of the city. A new quantifyer of the vividness of cities could be the overall average frame rate of the screens in the city. What frame rate do you wanna live in?

The number of houses for sale in Denmark is at an 6 year all-time high at 47.019 today. (it might be even more years since the 6 years is as long the data goes back.)
The real scary number though is that the number of houses for sale on the market have gone up 47% just the last 7 months and is showing no signs of recovering.

About three years ago about 60 danish bloggers united to discuss everything related to the specifics of blogging and everything related to figuring out what it is that’s really going on.
We’re a couple of bloggers who are taking the initiative to do another blogforum gathering this time Sunday October the 8th in Islands Brygge Kulturhus, Copenhagen. To unite bloggers, to unite the thinking, to have a good time.
In the spirit of sharing and openness all of the planning will happen in a couple of open meetings - everyone that meets up co-creates the event. The first meeting will take place this coming sunday at 11am in downtown copenhagen. Comment on this post if you wanna join.

A very scary scenario from John Robb on where we’re heading.

This tension and confusion has now reached a tipping point, akin to the situation that preceded WW1. Nation-states, confused and locked into antiquated mindsets, are likely to stumble into a global war. To wit: Israel’s loss to Hezbollah and the US loss of Iraq to civil war puts both countries into an untenable strategic situation. Instead of blaming themselves for an inability to reach victory, they are priming themselves for a confrontation with the perceived ’source’ of the problem: Iran. As it stands right now, war with Iran is likely inevitable. It really doesn’t matter whether it is caused by a US (or Israeli) air campaign against Iran, an Iranian pre-emptive special operation, or a simple error: it’s on the way.

Seymour M. Hersh has a good behind the scenes description in the new yorker of the process leading up to the current Lebanon crisis.

Eugene Eric Kim will be in town the coming friday and we’re throwing a blogger meetup for him. Eugene is a thinker and do’er on collaboration, wiki’s, open source and digital history. Eugene also recently has worked with Doug Engelbart trying to implement his ideas in this new context.
We’ll have some beer and good conversation - and dinner afterwards for people that are hungry .

Date:
Friday the 18th 18.00 at Barbar Bar, Vesterbrogade 51, Copenhagen V and dine afterwards 19.30 at Carlton, Halmtorvet 14, Copenhagen V

How to signup:
- comment on this post so we have an idea of who’s coming.

Yours truly,

oschlag, pollas, trine-maria, mygdal

Essential read from James Boyle.

It is not that openness is always right. Rather, it is that we need a balance between open and closed, owned and free, and we are systematically likely to get the balance wrong. Partly this is because we still do not understand the kind of property that exists on networks. Most of our experience is with tangible property; fields that can be overgrazed if outsiders cannot be excluded. For that kind of property, control makes more sense. We still do not intuitively grasp the kind of property that cannot be exhausted by overuse (think of a piece of software) and that can become more valuable to us the more it is used by others (think of a communications standard). There the threats are different, but so are the opportunities for productive sharing. Our intuitions, policies and business models misidentify both. Like astronauts brought up in gravity, our reflexes are poorly suited for free fall.

Just a short question that has surfaced in my head lately. When and how did the means to achieve something become the goal itself in many fields?
For example profit/sustainability/economic freedom only being the means to achieve the goal.
Lately experienced through discussions with journalists/media people (even for half-way public service broadcasters) being infuriated by the suggestion that profit/sustainability only is the mean to achieve the goal of independent media, the fourth state power, the medium for a local community, a platform for conversations leading to shared meaning, the democratizing power of information and knowledge, etc. and not the goal itself.
How and when did we got lost in the game of means and lost sight of the big goals - in such a substantial way that the game of means is our only perspective?
(thought probably partly inspired by Doc).