Finally, The Internet As Intended.

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VOIP is being banned by third world countries to protect government sponsored telecom monopolies. That is isn’t too suprising, but this is:

San Jose State University, just down the road from Skype’s parent company eBay, has apparently decided to block all Skype use on campus.

You know your technology is disruptive when it starts being unexplicably banned.

technorati tags:p2p

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I am constantly using the web browser on my Treo 700p. I am also constantly frustrated at how much more usable it could be. I actually miss the PQA days, when I could get a native palm app that just used the web for its data. Today I stumbled upon Ajit Jaokar’s post about using Ajax for SoonR mobile:

This week, SoonR launched the first true Mobile Ajax application. Based on the Opera platform, SoonR’s service truly leverages the power of Mobile Ajax.

Wow. Mobile browser support of Ajax could result in a boom in usage. Why? Because developing mobile applications today has two big barriers:

1. You have to support multiple platforms
2. You have to know ‘higher level” development languages to produce the application

Ajax on the mobile browser removes both of these, and could unleash the web-developer community onto the handheld app market. That could be exciting.

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In late May, The Edge.org published a fascinating dialogue among many of the web’s most respected pundits in response to Jaron Lanier’s essay Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism, in which he casts the desire of web software to harness collective intelligence as dangerous and potentially destructive to the individual.

Quite an A-list weighed in with responses: Douglas Rushkoff, Quentin Hardy, Yochai Benkler, Clay Shirky, Cory Doctorow, Kevin Kelly, Esther Dyson, Larry Sanger, Fernanda Viegas & Martin Wattenberg, Jimmy Wales, George Dyson, Dan Gillmor, and Howard Rheingold. I caught wind of the debate belatedly via JP Rangaswami’s post lamenting that he too had only belatedly discovered the conversation.

I’ll let you read the dialogue for yourself - and if you are interested in the future of social software, you should - but Kevin Kelly had the most insightful remark, for me. :

…Our technological systems are marked by the fact that we have introduced intelligent design into them. This is the top-down control we insert to speed and direct a system toward our goals. Every technological system, including Wikipedia, has design in it. What’s new is only this: never before have we been able to make systems with as much "hive" in it as we have recently made with the Web. Until this era, technology was primarily all control, all design. Now it can be design and hive. In fact, this Web 2.0 business is chiefly the first step in exploring all the ways in which we can combine design and the hive in innumerable permutations. We are tweaking the dial in hundreds of combos: dumb writers, smart filters; smart writers, dumb filters, ad infinitum.

- Kevin Kelly

It puts a finger on what Lanier did not recognize, that social software isn’t the hive mind - it is, for the most part, individualist design attempting to extract wisdom from it. It underscores a few things I’ve said before, that successful Web 2.0 companies and applications are baking the power of the network right into their offerings. And that excellent social software is bionic - it does not simply playback user participation, it amplifies it intelligently.

Lars Ploughman pens the "10 to 1" rule that demonstrates why email vs online collaboration tools like ProjectSpaces (shameless plug for my company’s product) is a no contest:

Imagine for a moment that you are managing a project with ten other participants. Let’s say that an important change to the subsequent phase of the project has just been agreed with the sponsors and you need to communicate it to the project team. If you do it via email, this may be the result:

• 9 people read the email
• 8 people file the email (in their private folders, thereby duplicating effort)
• 7 people are interrupted in their work or thoughts when the email arrives
• 6 people will never be able to find the email again
• 5 people didn’t actually need to know about the change
• 4 people joining the project in the next phase wouldn’t have received the email
• 3 people will be able to find the email again, should they need to
• 2 people will check back to the email at a later date when they need the information
• 1 of them will understand the email in context, be able to find it at a later date and action it