Wikipedia And The Death Of The Expert - "McLuhan prefigured the Internet era in a number of surprising ways. As he said in a March 1969 Playboy interview: 'The computer thus holds out the promise of a technologically engendered state of universal understanding and unity, a state of absorption in the Logos that could knit mankind into one family and create a perpetuity of harmony and peace' ... Wikipedia, along with other crowd-sourced resources, is wreaking a certain amount of McLuhanesque havoc on conventional notions of 'authority', 'authorship', and even 'knowledge' ... Knowledge is growing more broadly and immediately participatory and collaborative by the moment."
posted by kliuless on May 29, 2011 - 90 comments

A Bicycle Built for Two Thousand
posted by flatluigi on Mar 12, 2009 - 42 comments

"The Quake-Catching Network is a collaborative initiative for developing the world's largest, low-cost strong-motion seismic network by utilizing sensors in and attached to internet-connected computers." The Economist's writeup notes that, since network communications are (sometimes) faster than the speed of sound in the earth's crust, a distributed network's observations of a temblor might reach a warning network before the quake itself reaches a traditional seismometer. [more inside]
posted by fantabulous timewaster on Sep 30, 2008 - 8 comments

Electric Sheep: Collaborative Fractal Generation
Electric Sheep is a distributed screen-saver that harnesses idle computers into a render farm with the purpose of animating and evolving artificial life-forms.The project is an attention vortex. It illustrates the process by which the longer and closer one studies something, the more detail and structure appears.

You can look at some fresh samples or you can read the Interpretation, watch the Sheepumentary, post a comment, design your own or design them and post them to their server or download a copy and play along at home.
You can even get a copy of the source code to play around with if you're so inclined.

Me? I'm just gonna look at the pretty pictures.
posted by fenriq on Feb 1, 2005 - 17 comments

Distributed Proofreaders is a collaborative effort in proofreading ebooks before they are submitted to Project Guttenberg. [more inside]
posted by phyrewerx on Dec 22, 2002 - 7 comments

Google Compute is a distributed computing project involving users of the google toolbar. It's a light application which uses idle processor cycles to analyse data for "carefully selected charitable projects, with the guiding principle being to help humanity and advance scientific knowledge".
posted by walrus on Nov 1, 2002 - 5 comments