From Technology Review, Web 0.1 Before the Internet, there was videotex. Web 1.0 is likened to the simple ability to read content over the Internet, 2.0 offers read-write powers, and Web 3.0 will expand this to include read-write-execute. What does execute mean? Virtual dreams, real politics: The net embodies the information society long imagined by knowledge elites in east and west, so why is utopia no closer? A review of Infotopia by Cass Sunstein. The Net was supposed to dissolve anachronistic national borders and cultural boundaries. But the real territorialization of the Internet - the redrawing of its internal contours and the withdrawal of its libertarian foundations - is more pernicious, all-pervasive, quotidian, and surreptitiously gradual.
From Wired, Assignment Zero: Can crowds create fiction, architecture and photography?; and article on Creative Crowdwriting: The Open Book; a look at why Open-Source Journalism is a lot tougher than you think; and an interview with Andrea Grover is a curator of crowdsourced art and the founding director of the "Aurora Picture Show". From PressThink, an interview with James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds, on what crowds can and cannot do. Play peak oil before you live it: Collaborative intelligence wiz Jane McGonigal designs alternate reality games to solve the world's biggest problems. Enviros love her — but so does the military. A review of Second Lives: A Journey through Virtual Worlds by Tim Guest. Online, Second Life avatars are prosing and poetizing.
Covering almost 7.5m pages in more than 250 languages, Wikipedia is by far the biggest encyclopaedia ever written. But is it a vast online fount of human knowledge or an extreme example of "digital Maoism", as some critics claim? Tim Adams meets Jimmy Wales, the man behind the phenomenon, to get to the facts. All the News That’s Fit to Print Out: How did the world’s biggest online encyclopedia turn into a leading source of daily journalism? An interview with Kevin Rose, founder of Digg. A review of The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen (more and more and more).
Old Friends on Facebook: The college students' favorite website begins to conquer social networking's final frontier: grownups. Etiquette pitfalls in the social web of wannabe friends: Schoolchildren, trendy teenagers, yuppies, celebrities all are having to say yes or no to an age-old plea: can I be in your gang? YouTube this! Will the all-seeing eye of the Internet help keep us all in line? Ask Bin Laden or the Mafia if they're worried about being embarrassed. Porn 2.0, and Its Victims: A look at how "private" sex tapes flood user-fed sites like YouPorn. Watch and Learn: Two sites aim to teach you everything you want to know how to do, one video at a time.
