"To the credit of today's social networks, they've brought in hundreds of millions of new participants [...] but they haven't shown the web itself the respect and care it deserves, as a medium which has enabled them to succeed. And they've now narrowed the possibilites of the web for an entire generation of users who don't realize how much more innovative and meaningful their experience could be."
Anil Dash laments
The Web We Lost, and offers some suggestions for moving forward.
posted by oulipian
on Dec 13, 2012 -
74 comments
From the mid 40s to the mid 50s
Coronet Instructional Films were always ready to provide social guidance for teenagers on subjects as diverse as
dating,
popularity,
preparing for being drafted, and
shyness, as well as to children on
following the law,
the value of quietness in school, and
appreciating our parents. They also provided education on topics such as the connection between
attitudes and health,
what kind of people live in America,
how to keep a job,
supervising women workers,
the nature of capitalism, and
the plantation System in Southern life. Inside is an annotated collection of all 86 of the complete Coronet films in the
Prelinger Archives as well as a few more. Its not like you had work to do or anything right?
[more inside]
posted by Blasdelb
on Nov 1, 2012 -
41 comments
"You know how annoying it is when you're sitting on the train with a magazine and the person sitting beside you starts reading over your shoulder? Welcome to every single moment of your future. Might as well get used to it. It's an experience we'll all be sharing." --
Charlie Brooker on sharing, and why the world is doomed
posted by bardic
on Jan 29, 2012 -
101 comments
Proust is a way for you and your family to share and preserve your stories, one question at a time.
The site takes its name from the
Proust Questionnaire. Stories can be viewed in several different ways and be set as private or
public.
posted by unliteral
on Jul 19, 2011 -
17 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
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
Work Sharing - "Work-sharing schemes, in many different forms, are becoming the norm in Holland and Denmark, and have made inroads in France and Germany. The key element in any such approach is to separate work from income.
[more inside]
posted by kliuless
on May 22, 2011 -
25 comments
Artist Aram Bartholl (creator of
CAPTCHA business
cards) has embedded USB sticks in various walls, buildings and curbs accessible throughout New York City for
Dead Drops: "an anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public space." (
Flickr)
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Nov 1, 2010 -
58 comments
Shared social responsibility -
When customers could pay what they wanted in the knowledge that half of that would go to charity, sales and profits went through the roof ... Gneezy describes the combination of charitable donations and paying what you like as 'shared social responsibility', where businesses and customers work together for the public good. (via
mr) [also see
1,
2,
3]
posted by kliuless
on Jul 28, 2010 -
19 comments
Children Full of Life - grade 4 students in Kanazawa, Japan learn deep life lessons from their incredible teacher and from each other. I strongly recommend this as awesome, but one caveat: keep tissues handy. (5 parts, 40 minutes total, English)
posted by madamjujujive
on Jul 25, 2009 -
48 comments
Inspired by comments Brian Eno made in his book
A Year with Swollen Appendices,
Duncan Sheik released White Limousine with two discs: One, a CD labeled
Mine and the other a DVD labeled
Yours. The former contains his stereo mixes, while the latter contains WAV files of the individual elements of the mixes for each song. Sheik is requesting that people remix his CD to their liking, and has even provided
a place for people to upload their efforts. The best remixes will be streamed on the remix site, and some will even be released as downloads.
posted by terrapin
on Sep 23, 2006 -
16 comments
WinMX is back (kind of). It was such an unbelievably awesome file sharing program that its makers had to pull their peer caches after being served a cease and desist order in September 2005. Now it has been reincarnated as
MXpie. Even better . . . it's not spyware or adware.
posted by augustweed
on Jul 25, 2006 -
46 comments
23. It's like Flickr,
a lot like Flickr--and maybe better. Better at some things.
Stories. Upload limits.
The layout. Ordering prints. They are doing things from the beginning that Flickr worked a couple years to figure out in the
first place. Flickr of course is
way ahead of 23 in numbers (people and money). Does it make sense to challenge that lead? (And to do so with an
overt knock-off?) If 23 provides a better service, should they lose out for being second to the party? How can they pay their
debt of gratitude to Flickr for being the obvious inspiration and an open-book instruction manual, and should they? When does the flattery of imitation become legitimate--or illegitimate--competition? Notice in the
terms they claim ownership of the concept and the design. Can 23 apply for any of the street cred Flickr may have given up in favor of being Yahoo!ed? Is it reasonable to expect better work from a
scrappy upstart than a happy sell-out? Can two successful photo sharing sites
co-exist, or join forces? Is there enough community to support
more than one
good one?
posted by airguitar
on Nov 26, 2005 -
32 comments
Yet another del.icio.us ? "One of the main purposes of social bookmarking systems is allowing people to see what other people are bookmarking. I frequently find things that people are linking to very interesting, and thought it would be nice to slap together a system that could tell me, automatically, what lots of other people have just bookmarked. Thus, oishii was born".
posted by azul
on Jan 11, 2005 -
10 comments
Rivers Cuomo produced by fans. Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo has been chatting with his fans about their new album. So far so usual. Except it hasn't been released yet and they've been listening to the rough cuts via mp3.
posted by nedrichards
on Jan 14, 2002 -
12 comments
