We Are Smarter Than Me

This is a wiki-based collaboration/experiment to write a business book. From the site:

"Be an author of the first networked book on business. Together we will write the book on how the emergence of community and social networks will change the future rules of business. Collaborate with authors from MIT, Wharton, and thousands of professionals from around the world. See your name in print when the book is published next fall by Pearson Publishing. Meet your co-authors in March, 2007 in Las Vegas at the Community 2.0 event."

-Miguel

Healia

Here's a search engine (in beta) devoted to health. From the site:

"Healia is the premier consumer health search engine for finding high quality and personalized health information on the Web. It serves as an independent, unbiased gateway to the highest quality health information resources. We engineered Healia primarily with consumers and patients in mind but health professionals and researchers will also find it useful."

-Miguel

psiphon

From the site:

"psiphon is a human rights software project developed by the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies that allows citizens in uncensored countries to provide unfettered access to the Net through their home computers to friends and family members who live behind firewalls of states that censor"

-Miguel

Collarity

This community based search engine ties results into a user's and community's interests. If you have an account you can sign in and have the results tailored to your personal preferences and history. Interesting way to get relevance into the results.

-Miguel

Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism

Here's an article by Jaron Lanier, who always has an interesting perspective. I've been thinking about collectivism a bit lately, having had my first experience of it with a homeschool collective, but I'm still not sure what a collective is. I think there are probably many varieties of collectivism. It's something I want to study a bit more.

Here's the intro to the article:

"The hive mind is for the most part stupid and boring. Why pay attention to it?

The problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous."

-Miguel