contentious.com

"There is no crowd in crowdsourcing. There are only virtuosos, usually uniquely talented, highly trained people who have worked for decades in a field. Frequently, these innovators have been funded through failure after failure. From their fervent brains spring new ideas. The crowd has nothing to do with it. The crowd solves nothing, creates nothing.

"What really happens in crowdsourcing as it is practiced in wide variety of contexts, from Wikipedia to open source to scientific research, is that a problem is broadcast to a large number of people with varying forms of expertise. Then individuals motivated by obsession, competition, money or all three apply their individual talent to creating a solution."

I put in my request months ago. Hoping I get lucky and get and Invite tomorrow. Really wanna check this out!

"This 100,000+ user test is focusing on three groups: The public users who signed up early to test, developers, and a select group of Google Apps users. The last group will be kept very small, and the team expects it will only go out to select schools in the Sydney area so that the team can do some hands-on work with students and faculty that use the product. The first two groups, the developers and the public, will make up the core audience of Wave now, after these past months of being available only to a select group of developers."

The neuroscience of Girl Talk

mathew Ingram: "I don’t think it has to be a binary choice. I think a smart reporter or writer won’t say things that would damage his or her credibility, either on Twitter or anywhere else."

Q: "Are you worried about what you’ll have to do to get the F.C.C. the right kind of power to actually regulate net neutrality?"

Genachowski: "No, I am not worried."

"Well this is interesting. Fresh off a wave of good karma following the revelation that it was not behind blocking Google Voice on the iPhone, AT&T appears to be looking to draw the ire of consumers with regards to the service once again. The telco giant has sent a letter (attached below) to the FCC asking them to investigate Google Voice. Yes, you read that right. But this actually goes much deeper than that. Once again, this is about net neutrality."

JD Lasica says AP isn't trying to be evil or harsh with its new content registry. I say they're backpedaling in the face of deserved criticism, and leaving the door open to crack down on fair use of their content. They've said elsewhere they want to build a huge business out of licensing their headlines.

In any event, I sincerely doubt AP's registry technology would work (it seems easier to undermine/avoid than to comply with). But AP has repeatedly demonstrated an obsession with control through threats and bullying that rivals the RIAA. Enough with their statements that they won't undermine fair use — where's their legally binding policy to that effect?

"Rating a swath of phones (BlackBerry Curve and Storm, G1, iPhone), the report found that only the iPhone and Pre balanced the three factors in a way in which consumers felt the higher price tags were warranted. More to the point, only the Pre and the iPhone 3GS managed to strike that balance at all; offerings such as the two BlackBerrys were lopsided"

Very basic and superficial, but a good starting point if you have zero idea what to do.

"At first, I thought this was a waste of advertising dollars. Why go to the trouble of building an iPhone application that would only be useful for a short period of time? That’s silly, isn’t it? Well, not really. There are three excellent reasons for these “disposable” iPhone apps…"

"Micro-blogging service based on the Free Software StatusNet tool. Join now to share notices about yourself with friends, family, and colleagues!"

I'll be live-tweeting this event.

"Rather than reviewing tactics and social media platforms, this workshop will provide you with a strategic overview of how to evaluate key areas of your company including customer service, marketing communications and human resources and determine why and how they might benefit from social media participation. Don't expect breathless cheerleading expect a strategic overview of what you need to know to make solid management decisions in this new communication paradigm."

clay Shirky on the temporary alignment of advertising-based business models and difficult journalism:

"…it was an accident. There was a set of forces that made that possible. And they weren’t deep truths — the commercial success of newspapers and their linking of that to accountability journalism wasn’t a deep truth about reality. Best Buy was not willing to support the Baghdad bureau because Best Buy cared about news from Baghdad. They just didn’t have any other good choices."

"The FBI declined to comment on the program.

"Among the data in its archive, the NSAC houses more than 55,000 entries on customers of the Cendant Hotel chain, now known as Wyndham Worldwide (includes Ramada Inn, Days Inn, Super 8, Howard Johnson, Hawthorn Suites). Entries are for hotel customers whose names matched those on a long list the FBI provided to the company.

"Another 730 records come from the rental car company Avis, which used to be owned by Cendant. Those records were derived from a one-time search of Avis’s database against the State Dept’s old terrorist watch list. An additional 165 entries are credit card transaction histories from the Sears department store chain. Like much of the data used by NSAC, the records were likely retained at the conclusion of an investigation, and added to NSAC for future data mining.

"It’s unclear how the FBI got the records. In the past, cos have been known to voluntarily hand over customer data to government data-mining experiments."

David Cohn: "Here's what I wrote last week to the editor: "To work with Spot.Us you have to be transparent about where you would spend your freelance budget. Every organization that works with Spot.Us is transparent about where they are putting their dollars or at least where they are putting their editorial efforts."

"The editor responded that it would be scary to make an editor's freelance budget so public. That's exactly the point!"

"Designing a platform for smartphone users could lead one astray. Every student we spoke with had different versions of phones that used a native web browser. We initially considered this reality and were encouraged by our advisors to do so, but we didn't realize how dead-on the advice was until we interacted with some of our users.

"So there are two takeaways here: organize events that allow you to interact one-on-one with different groups of your core users; and gear your mobile development towards dumphones. You can always build that slick mobile app later."

A crucial cultural resource. It includes my favorite! "The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies (1964)"

"The American Press Institute's effort to launch a national newspaper classified advertising portal in the U.S. is dead. (At least for now.)"

So who is using this? Is this getting any traction?

"Microsoft Tag creates unlimited possibilities for making interactive communications an instant, entertaining part of life. They transform physical media (print advertising, billboards, product packages, information signs, in-store merchandising, or even video images)—into live links for accessing information and entertainment online.

"With the Microsoft Tag application, just aim your camera phone at a Tag and instantly access mobile content, videos, music, contact information, maps, social networks, promotions, and more. Nothing to type, no browsers to launch!."

"As far as I can tell, if you subscribe to an external calendar on iCal, that doesn't translate into it being disseminated across your Mobile Me account, so you might have to move some appointments from one calendar to another if you want to edit them or see them on your remote device.

"In terms of just seeing more than one calendar, however, it's pretty easy. To do this you'll want to be logged in to your Google Calendar account and have already accepted the sharing invitations from your colleagues so that their calendars also show up. You'll also want iCal running…"

Kara Andrade, en route to Guatemala: "Now that I’ve clocked over 1000 miles on Mexican highways, byways and calles, I feel like I have enough street cred to write up a little guide for my fellow American drivers who are thinking about traveling here by car. If you’re an aggressive, fast and furious driver like me you’re going to have a blast. All you granny drivers out there will be OK too- the Mexicans will figure out how to get around you one way or another. So without further delay, here’s the quick start guide for my gringos…"

"Why is e-mail reactive? Because you are always responding to events that happen to you – namely, an email arriving. In other areas of work this kind of behaviour would be called “fighting fires” – there’s always a new outburst of flame demanding attention. No client or methodology is particularly well suited to saying “I’m going to ignore this email for a while, and then efficiently process it as a batch with similar emails (at a time that suits me)”. I.e. No client is supporting proactive email processing.

"The FCC's proposal will take into account the bandwidth limitations faced by wireless carriers, according to people familiar with the plan, and would ask how such rules should apply to current networks.

"The rules could encourage big Internet companies to launch new data-intensive services by establishing that their traffic can't be slowed or blocked. In the business market, companies that make Internet-phone services or video-conferencing software may invest more heavily in those services, some analysts say.

"The rules are likely to be a big boon to smaller tech companies, like Silicon Valley start-ups and small makers of mobile software for Apple Inc.'s iPhone and other devices, that wouldn't be able to afford paying Internet providers for special access.

"Any company or piece of software that becomes popular, generating a lot of traffic, would tend to benefit," said Jonathan Zittrain, the co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

"The new rules, expected to be announced Monday by Julius Genachowski, the FCC Chairman, will outline requirements for ISPs to treat all traffic on the Internet equally. This means that Comcast can’t decide that Google gets less bandwidth and Microsoft/Bing (Bing) gets more for any reason (i.e. one pays for preferential treatment).

"It’s also expected that the net neutrality rules will apply to wireless services, meaning they would be in effect for Internet data via your phone and 3G networks. The impact of this cannot be understated, especially as iPhones and other smart phones make the mobile web a major part of our lives.

"This will likely garner opposition by ISPs. There’s already a court case from Comcast challenging a ruling from the FCC that it had violated its policies. However, with specific rules in place, it will be tougher for the ISPs to challenge net neutrality mandates."

Local group I think I'll check out…. They have a meetup in Berkeley tonight

"By placing the URL for any website after “http://kanyelicio.us/”, you can help spread the word about Beyonce’s superior web design skills."

I'm not going to go to full ONA conference, but I might attend one of these