solanasaurus.com

Something less serious; which on a serious note is evidence of a particular kind of collaborative content production on the internetz. Pictures and text. All the kids are talking about it.

cuteoverload.com
stuffonmycat.com
overheardinny.com

Thanks to Open Business for the link: The clever folks at MIT organised a conference about the “Economics of Open Content” – ie how to earn money from user generated, free and/or open content. Watch the whole thing on video or download to ipod (I’ve just started) and understand such concepts as “anti-rivalry” and “near-zero-cost”. A must for anybody planning to make money off the internet in the next couple of years.

Did you ever want to be one of those people who manages to read everything interesting everywhere? If you’re an ordinary person, you’ll never succeed without a Feed Reader. Pick one, load it up, and start reading. I’ve been using Bloglines for about a year, but I overloaded it and now I get e-guilt just looking at it.

If you have a blog, you should spend some time on Feed Burner. They help you do neat things like make it possible for people to sign up for email updates to your blog (see upper right hand corner of mine) plus a bunch of ‘ping’ tricks. If you’re using standard blog software you already have a run of the mill RSS feed. Feed Burner claims theirs is better…

Logins can be so tedious. For those who wish they could dip into online newspaper subscription and premium content without paying or registering there are a few ways:

Bug Me Not was the original pioneer, letting people share usernames and passwords for more than 100,000 sites. But they no longer enable access to paid content.

The NY Times Link Generator creates blog-safe links that bypass registration barriers and sometimes payment barriers, but only on the most popular articles.

Finally, a snazzy legal option: Congoo.com offers introductory free access to more than 300 premium sites through a toolbar that lives in your browser.

Sometimes you look something up online – like how to cook a turkey or install a hard drive on your powerbook – and you think, gee what a nice person put that up for me to read it. Once you have enough of those moments, I believe you should give something useful back to the internet. Anything. Don’t laugh, but I actually feel a pang of “e-guilt” when I don’t leave a review for a good book on Amazon.

I’ve helped put loads of interesting stuff online, so I probably won’t end up in e-hell. But there are other forms of e-guilt. One guy on the internet defines it as:

e-guilt: (e gilt) (also: electronic guilt) the nagging shame of leaving emails, instant messages (IMs), Voice over IP (VOIP) calls, text messages, blogs or podcasts unanswered or unupdated.

Ya, I definitely get that. Luckily there are friendly people on the internet who make it easier to apologize. Some of them call it an “e-pology”. Others are a little pathological about it. Of course if you want to get all Catholic about it, you can make an online confession. This is what the less puritanical would call an “e-admission”. Then again, some people – maybe you – are not sorry.

A new buzz word. On openDemocracy, Becky Hogge explains what “Web 2.0″ is all about. It’s basically all the neat new and old collaborative tools I like to rave about in this blog. It’s when content is created and managed by users and the owners still make a buck; like on Flickr, del.icio.us, and MySpace. Here’s a world map of of Web 2.0 innovation. Christian Alhert from Creative Commons in the UK is behind a new project called open business which is working to create best practices for this new model of operation. You give things away free in order to make money. No wonder people have a hard time understanding it. So do your research before you start charging people money to do simple things on the internet. It’s not hip anymore. Some would say it never was. In 2003 oD published a nice article on the “gift economy” of the net (scroll down to last two sections of article) by Richard Barbrook.

Wifi should be free. Or at least nearly free, says the founder of the project Fon that encourages people to share their broadband internet connections with strangers for a fee of $2. This project has gotten a lot of good press, but so far the number of access points on the world map look pretty slim. And it’s still beta. Andy Carvin (Digital Divide Network) has interviewed the Spanish founder, Martin Varsavsky about Fon’s plans to bring wifi to the people. I would sign up, but I don’t think my rusty old wifi router is compatible. Fon users, “Foneros”, can either be a “Linus”: offers free wifi; a “Bill”: charges $2; or an “Alien”: just wants to use the internet. Watch the six minute video.

People always used to say the internet can’t be censored. Governments all over the world have done their best to dissprove that, but at least there is still some degree of truth to it for the technologically savvy. Even in places like China you can still access mostly anything if you use a proxy server that masks where in the world you are browsing from. Here is another little technical tip: The BBC Persian site has been off limits in Iran for a while. Ian Forrester, who works for the BBC has been thinking up ways to beat government censors. Email has always been one way. But the RSS feeds also sneak around. So the simple, but not necessarily obvious solution, was to include as much of the full text in both email and RSS feeds as possible. Something for openDemocracy consider on future projects.

Sometimes you want to make sure you want to get updates on something as soon as it happens. Google Alerts has been delivering emails to me daily about “opendemocracy”, “world social forum” and “solana larsen” for the past two years. Now the blog search engine Technorati has a little mini search engine that stays open on your screen and checks all blogs for the any search phrase, live, every 60 seconds, while you watch. Great for things like elections, or wars, or summits, where new things are being said constantly. Or any other obsessive interests.

OK, so I know I’m just playing with my gadgets, but you know you like it. Today I made a video with my phone of a very weird theaterish multimedia performance. The Psychasthenia Society in “The Nanolove Report” featuring Jon Brunelle, Daniel Vatsky, and Mad EP. These are New York artists whose instruments are laptop computers. Worth checking out, top scores for weirdness.