In a previous post, I mentioned our efforts around lowering barriers to entry for participation, i.e. empowering consumers with tools that transform them into creators.� Tagging is perhaps the simplest and most direct example of how lowering a barrier to entry can drive and spur participation.

Elatable | Bradley Horowitz

We assembled an eclectic group of�thinkers to identify the trends that will shape our future. It included an Internet entrepreneur who owns a basketball team, a mother who writes about the American family, a specialist in popular culture and an Op-Ed editor at a large city newspaper. We heard a fascinating conversation about how video games are making kids smarter, how consumers are turning into inventors and why some of us are taking longer showers. Listen to most of that discussion at TIME.com Here are some excerpts:

Around The Corner

My old sparring partner and current NYU colleague Mark Dery and I have been having an interesting exchange in the comments thread about the presence of The Bell Curve in my personal "canon." This morning, I started typing out a longer response, and thought I'd bump it up to the front door, since others may be interested.

Readers Want To Know: What The Hell Is The Bell Curve Doing On My Bookshelf?

In setting up my new study, I did something with my books I've never done before in the twenty-odd years that I've been building this library: I alphabetized them. Not all of them, actually. That would take a week. I've brought down to the study what I'm unofficially calling the canon: roughly two hundred books that have been influential in some way over the past two decades, even if in some cases I haven't actually, you know, read them. The rest remain scattered randomly through the bookshelves in the rest of the house.

stevenberlinjohnson.com: Uploading My Library

This is old news, but I missed it the first time around.

Download Google Earth - Mac or PC


Google Earth is a broadband, 3D application that
not all computers can run.

Desktop computers older than 4 years old may not be able
to run it.
Notebook computers older than 2 years old may not be able
to run it.

Google Earth - System Requirements

mp3

Howard Rheingold podcast on cooperation theory

Jeremy Zawodny is hiring.

One of the benefits of del.icio.us now being part of Yahoo is that we can afford to hire more people to give the service the attention it needs to grow bigger, faster, and better. In fact, we're looking to beef up all of our "social search" efforts. That includes Yahoo! Answers, MyWeb, del.icio.us, and more.

Following that theme, we're hoping to use people (you) to find other people (more Yahoos). Specifically, we're looking for people in the following three roles:

Web Development (aka, front-end engineering): PHP, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, AJAX
Operations Management: monitoring, outages, reporting, hardware upgrades
Engineering Management: specifically with experience in Web Services, APIs, Databases, and Open Source

Are you interested or do you know anyone you can recommend?

Yahoo! Search blog: Know Any Good Engineers or Operations Managers?

When those of us who think about IA think about IA, its is usually the relationships between different bits of information and how you represent that in useful, occasionally rational ways.

A Networked World: Information Architecture as Scaffold

This 1972 documentary entitled "Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing" covers the early years of ARPAnet, the precursor of the Internet, through interviews with the heroes of the internetworking revolution. Tightly wound internetworking geeks like the legendary JCR Licklider intensely recite the benefits that internetworking will shortly deliver, sliding in digs at the telecoms industry, the Bellheads who have no desire to see this future realized. This is a fantastic 30 minutes of paleo-nerd memorabilia.

Documentary on the state of the Internet in 1972

Tribler is a new, free/open source P2P network designed by Dutch academics to provide greater scalability and relevance to BitTorrent-style networks. Tribler defaults to sharing among your friends (and discovers new friends based on who's sharing stuff like the stuff you like), donates bandwidth to your friends, and so accelerates downloads. Tribler's authors present their technology as a means of delivering high-bandwidth material, like HD video, over the Internet, with a recommender engine that helps you find the stuff you don't know you're looking for.

Tribler: social P2P system helps you share files and bandwidth with friends