“I’d had a career as a professional musician and what I started to see is that once we made information free, it wasn’t that we consigned all the big stars to the bread lines.” (They still had mega-concert tour profits.) “It was the middle-class people who were consigned to the bread lines. And that was a very large body of people. And all of a sudden there was this weekly ritual, sometimes even daily: ‘Oh, we need to organize a benefit because so and so who’d been a manager of this big studio that closed its doors has cancer and doesn’t have insurance. We need to raise money so he can have his operation.’ And I realized this was a hopeless, stupid design of society and that it was our fault. It really hit on a personal level—this isn’t working. And I think you can draw an analogy to what happened with communism, where at some point
you just have to say there’s too much wrong with these experiments.” [more inside]
posted by philip-random
on Jan 9, 2013 -
105 comments
Turntable.fm DJ for a virtual room at the newest attempt at music-sharing 2.0. Listeners can vote songs up or down, or DJ themselves. Other similar projects like
Muxtape and
Listening Room have unfortunately not survived long.
posted by melissam
on Jun 22, 2011 -
14 comments
Gist is an online contacts management system that knows about your social media contacts as well as your IRL friends...
[more inside]
posted by benzo8
on Nov 2, 2010 -
29 comments
Lately, the organizations that make up the American Republican Party/GOP have been experimenting with
going online. The House Republicans have created
America Speaking Out, a website for the people to give their ideas to "an arrogant congress." There, visitors can upload ideas they would like the government to carry out.
posted by mccarty.tim
on May 25, 2010 -
191 comments
NPR Backstory is an automated Twitter feed providing helpful links to news items from the past 14 years that might be relevant to current events. For example, when masses of people started googling
medical information after a news item about 200,000 patients' medical histories being accidentally exposed, NPRbackstory linked to an April 2008 analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of storing patient records online.
[more inside]
posted by ardgedee
on May 14, 2009 -
7 comments
York University is no
stranger to
strikes (even breaking
its own length record), and the latest is shaping up much like the previous -
TA & Lecturers' union on the picket line, admin in the ugly concrete buildings, and undergrads looking cold and confused all around (YT).
But since the last strike in 2001, a few things have changed. No, not the issues (same as always - living wages for TAs, job security for lecturers) or the effect (disruption of undergrad education) - but last time there were few
discussion forums, no
facebook groups or
videos by the local newspaper, and definitely no (somewhat
obvious, but still
mildly entertaining)
Apple ad parodies.
[more inside]
posted by jb
on Dec 18, 2008 -
15 comments
Koblo, a company from Denmark that makes virtual synthesizers, seeks to reinvigorate it's name with a mash-up of social networking, distributed music production and interactive music distribution.
[more inside]
posted by Pecinpah
on Oct 17, 2008 -
14 comments
Tired of the current web? Have all the cool domain names already been registered?
The second web bills itself as
geocities 2.0 with a web browser-esque interface stuck on top of it "a completely new World Wide Web. A new Web Browser, a new domain name system and completely new websites."
posted by slater
on Sep 30, 2008 -
46 comments
iHitch is to hitchhiking that
CouchSurfing is to hotels. iHitch is just an idea, but key technologies (GPS phones, GPS in cars, Web2.0) are coming available in critical mass that could transform 'hitchhiking' into a mainstream, safe, reliable and cheap form of transportation. Some metro area
carpool websites have already successfully started down this road.
posted by stbalbach
on Aug 14, 2008 -
21 comments
So Open it Hurts. Web 2.0 visionaries Tara Hunt and Chris Messina blogged and twittered about their romance to all of geekdom as if it were one of their utopian open-source projects. Sharing their breakup has been a lot harder.
[more inside]
posted by chunking express
on Jul 29, 2008 -
53 comments
Google is testing a Digg-like social interface to Google Search results, Techcrunch has an early
preview video. This is bad news for Jimy Wales's
Wikia since this is what they have been trying to build. Perhaps related it looks like
Google is buying Digg.
posted by stbalbach
on Jul 23, 2008 -
59 comments
Revenge of the Experts. The individual user has been king on the Internet, but the pendulum seems to be swinging back toward edited information vetted by professionals. "Fueling this is advertising revenue, it is easier to woo advertisers with the promise of controlled content than with hit-and-miss blog blather. 'Nobody wants to advertise next to crap' ".
posted by stbalbach
on Mar 10, 2008 -
25 comments
Frrvrr uses cutting-edge technology to identify topics you might be interested in based on your browsing history, public records, health records, email activity, legal filings, and web profiles.
posted by dhammond
on Feb 23, 2008 -
19 comments
The murky demimonde of Amazon's Top Reviewers. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised, but I had imagined Amazon's customer reviews as a refuge from the machinations of the publishing industry: "an intelligent and articulate conversation ... conducted by a group of disinterested, disembodied spirits..."
posted by farishta
on Jan 28, 2008 -
44 comments
Twatter - A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: Who are you doing?
posted by chrismear
on May 14, 2007 -
33 comments
Doxory. Often in life we are faced with a choice of 2.0 possible courses of action. Should I do X or Y? Now you can harness the wisdom of the web crowds to resolve those painful dilemmas for you!
posted by chrismear
on Mar 18, 2007 -
27 comments
FanNation | The Republic of Sport It was bound to happen. A fully-featured social networking site for Sport Fans, includes, ability to track community events on a regional basis, hot topic tracking,
blogging capability,
player tracking, and ability to gather articles and stories from
favorite news sources. Overall, a nice set of functionality, even if at launch, it is only focused on US Sports. Our beloved
SpoFi probably doesn't have much to worry about until this site builds a following, but it does seem to have something new to offer sports fanatics.
posted by psmealey
on Mar 3, 2007 -
12 comments
