our tools are broken

Regular Reminder - Our tools Are Broken: social networking tools and other information infrastructure that are not publicly owned (and by that I mean licensed under the General Public License or Copylefted -see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft) are fundamentally broken. Because anything less than public ownership severely limits the extent to which we can use, fix, experiment, and grow these into useful universal assets .. This is especially true in the long term.
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The list of our broken tools include Facebook, Google search, Twitter, and the operating systems Windows, Mac-OSX, IOS, and bits of Android. Linux is completely ours. Most of Android and the software that serves up and browses the world wide web is also properly public property.

Distributed/Federated social software that could easily replace Facebook and Twitter already exists (see Diaspora and Identica). Publicly owned search engines won't have to start from scratch either.

Its just going to take us some time to realise that all the complaints that we have about our social software - about the abuses of power that extend from privacy violations to the manipulation of search results and manipulation of our social signalling - all of these cannot be fixed until we switch to Free (as in speech) Software.

a reminder - mindfulness training and the neuroscience supporting it

The secular practice of mindfulness training or meditation, and mindfulness based cognitive therapy has been gaining momentum in the mainstream for a while now... This google-tech-talk describing mindfulness training is old, but pretty useful, and it presents the (then preliminary) neuroscience supporting the practice nicely.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peA6vy0D5Bg (an hour long google tech-talk by Matthieu Ricard)

Ricard is a buddhist monk who earned his PhD in molecular genetics at the Pasteur Institute before turning his attention to the practice and study of Tibetan Buddhism -- and worth suffering those opening jokes for.
 

(I've posted on him and this subject before - http://jaysenn.blogspot.com/2007/06/mindtraining.html)  

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here's more:

• http://www.diydharma.org/science-meditation-mattieu-ricard
• http://www.diydharma.org/audio/by/album/happiness
• http://www.matthieuricard.org/en/
• http://www.matthieuricard.org/en/medias/categories/meditation-and-mind-training

our tools are broken

Regular Reminder: Social networking tools and other information infrastructure that is not owned by us (copylefted) is almost by definition, fundamentally broken - because anything less, severely limits the extent to which we can use, experiment, and grow these into useful universal assets .. esp true in the long term.

the list of our broken tools include facebook, google search, and the operating systems windows, mac-osx, ios, and bits of android. (linux is completely ours)

google+ public circles

It would be nice if google+ extended the circle metaphor to include public circles, that people can discover and join, giving us a way to easily make and follow channels with a narrow subject on Google+

What this would solve is the following basic problem:
I don't want to hear mumbles on random topics, from people I follow for one subject in particular. For example, if I follow you for your technology knowledge and opinion, I dont want to hear about the food you're eating on your latest visit to china.

I should be able to join your technology circle, provided you've made it public, and by so doing I should be able to see only the posts you send to your technology circle.

rms on google

http://stallman.org/archives/2010-nov-feb.html#29 January 2011 (Investigating Google)

As for Google, it does some very good things but also some bad things. (For instance, many of its services distribute proprietary software to users.) I would not put Google at the head of the list of large companies that need to be broken up; however, if we start breaking up large companies (as we should), and get that far down the list, I would not say "stop here"

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i agree

google sidewiki as a real wiki.. or maybe a host of other real sidewikis to choose from

@google: give us a truly wiki-like public entry on SideWiki, with wiki functions like revision and restore and spam-reporting and we will garden it.

There'll probably be large scale spam and trolling, but with some good design, wiki revisions and restores, along with maybe a tight linking to google accounts before granting edit, perhaps wiki principles will out.

Oh, and there's no reason why the public entry shouldn't work as just another entry alongside all the others, only rising to the top if it gets voted there.

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update (20100117)

I remember digging the first "wiki margin for the internet" i saw, i think about 5 years ago. wikalong - a firefox extension and a promising idea i thought - a firefox extension that let one create/edit a wikipage for any web page out there.

so when google recently(ish) announced their Sidewiki , and it turned out to be more of a side blog i tried shouting out that bit above.

But now maybe I'm not so sure anymore. Maybe, rather than google's one and only sidewiki, we need an open extension that allows us to choose which side wiki community we want to follow and contribute to..

like a host of wiki channels for discussing the web. many internet margins - with choices between real wiki's, public and private, and sideblogs (like the current google sidewiki)