Facebook court hearing is delayed

reposted from BBC

Facebook is the world's second biggest social networking site

A hearing into the case against the founder of the social networking website Facebook has been postponed by the judge until 8 August.

Three founders of a rival site, ConnectU, say Facebook's creator Mark Zuckerberg stole their idea for the site while they were all at Harvard.

The judge has given ConnectU's founders extra time to flesh out their case.

Facebook's lawyers denied the allegations and urged Judge Douglas Woodlock to dismiss the case.

The Federal case accuses Mr Zuckerberg of fraud and misappropriation of trade secrets, and asks for ConnectU to be given ownership of Facebook.

Facebook has become a global phenomenon with about 31 million users, compared with ConnectU's 70,000.

Copying claim

The ConnectU founders claim that while at college Mr Zuckerberg agreed to write computer code for them, but that he stalled and eventually created Facebook using their ideas.

Judge Woodlock told ConnectU's lawyer to file a fresh plea specifying the facts to support the claims.

"Dorm room chit-chat does not make a contract," he said.

The case was originally filed in September 2004 but was dismissed on a technicality in March this year and immediately refiled.

Stop taking sides - The term 'with us or against us' should only be used by fringe lunatics.

March 14, 2007 6:40 am

QUESTION: What is the one thing you would most like to see happen by this time next year?

On the internet everyone's a victim. Or to be precise, almost every tribe or grouping has found an outlet and the necessary commentator or statistics to paint themselves as a victim of oppression. Couple that with another trend, that people on the internet seem to gravitate towards those of similar views, and we have a problem.

The problem is that whatever dialogue is necessary to resolve issues of cohesion, tolerance, respect or oppression is becoming increasingly drowned out by those who scream the loudest on either side.

Over the next year I'd like to see more progressive liberals on "one side" building alliances and bridges with progressive liberals on "the other side". I'd like to see people stop thinking about their own tribe alone and consider where "the enemy" is coming from; to consider their fears and insecurity before re-asserting one's own. To have more empathy for everyone, not just their own.

I'd like to see a more progressive discussion on race, faith and gender politics tackling inequality for everyone. A bit vague, I know, but Tony Blair and George Bush will be gone soon. After that I hope most people will realise that the term "with us or against us" should only be used by or apply to fringe lunatics.

For other blogs in Cif's first anniversary series click here.

reposted from: cif - Guardian
my: highlights / emphasis / key points / comments

Clipmarks - share clips of websites with everyone

With Clipmarks.com - share clips of websites with everyone!

Your clips can be rated by anyone who 'pops' your clip. The more 'pops' the higher the clip will appear in the rankings by subject.

Emergent Democracy and Global Voices

Reposted from: http://edge.org/q2007/q07_14.html
my highlights in blue

JOICHI ITO
Founder and CEO, Neoteny

Emergent Democracy and Global Voices

I am optimistic that open networks will continue to grow and become available to more and more people. I am optimistic that computers will continue to become cheaper and more available. I am optimistic that the hardware and software will become more open, transparent and free. I am optimistic that the ability to for people to create, share and remix their works will provide a voice to the vast majority of people.

I believe that the Internet, open source and a global culture of discourse and sharing will become the pillar of democracy for the 21st Century. Whereas those in power, as well as terrorists who are not, have used broadcast technology and the mass media of the 20th century against the free world, I am optimistic that Internet will enable the collective voice of the people and that voice will be a voice of reason and good will.

Communications empower mankind

Reposted from: http://edge.org/q2007/q07_13.html
my highlights in blue

ALEX (SANDY) PENTLAND
Computer Scientist, MIT Media Laboratory

The Human Nervous System Has Come Alive

Ten years ago, half of humanity had never made a phone call and only 20% of humanity had regular access to communications. Today 70% of humanity can place a telephone call or, more likely, send an SMS message… to the Secretary General of the United Nations, or to most anyone else. For the first time the majority of humanity is connected and has a voice.

Adults in Western culture fail to appreciate the momentous nature of this change because our mindsets are tied to lumbering legacy technologies like PCs and laptops. But in most countries, and for virtually all youth, the way to maintain your social network and run your business is by cell phone.

Digital connections allow public services to be transformed. In much of Africa, health workers survey the spread of disease, advise expectant mothers, and coordinate health services by digital messaging over cell phones. In tests, the digital system is both ten times faster than the old paper system—allowing health workers to nip epidemics in the bud—and ten times cheaper, despite the fact that phones cost more than paper.

Governance is also being transformed. Not only have the heads of governments been brought down by SMS-organized protests, but multilateral organizations such as the WTO have been brought to account as well. More subtle, but perhaps even more important, the traceable nature of digital transactions means that banking and government services offered by cell phone are more transparent and accountable than the older systems. An example of this capability in action is that governments such as India claim that the vast majority of captured terrorists have been identified through cell phone transactions.

Perhaps most importantly connection means improved efficiency and greater wealth. In some parts of Africa and south Asia, banking is done by moving around the money in cell phone accounts and people pay for vegetables and taxi rides by SMS. Because remanufactured cell phones cost $10 in the developing world and incoming messages are free, every stratum of society is connected. Day laborers, for instance, no longer hang around a street corner waiting to be picked for work. Instead, job offers arrive by SMS from a computerized clearing house. The International Telecommunications Union estimates that in the poorest countries each additional cell phone installed adds $3000 to the GDP, primarily due to the increased efficiency of business processes.

My conclusion is that is that the human race finally has a working nervous system, and that the poor and disenfranchised are for the first time beginning to make themselves heard and felt. To accelerate this process, we have established the Program for Developmental Entrepreneurship at MIT (web.mit.edu/de), which helps form, fund, and scale in-country efforts that leverage these new capabilities. The possibilities opened up by humanity's new nervous system are unprecedented, and reason for great optimism.

Metcalfe's Law of Minds

Reposted from: http://edge.org/q2007/q07_11.html my highlights in blue

CHRIS ANDERSON
Editor in Chief, Wired Magazine; Author, The Long Tail

Metcalfe's Law of Minds
Our species is unique in its ability to use communications to spread learning across populations, allowing us to get smarter and more capable far more quickly than evolution alone would allow. What makes me continually hopeful is that those tools of communications continue to get so much better, so much faster. Anyone who can explore Wikipedia and not be both humbled and filled with confidence in the collective potential in the people all around us is a cynic indeed. And we've only just scratched the surface of such networked intelligence.

Metcalfe's Law says that value of a networks grows with the square of the number of nodes. Today's Web, which is as much about contributing as it is consuming — two-way links, as opposed to the old one-way networks of broadcast and traditional media — allows the same to apply to people. Connecting minds allows our collective intelligence to grow with each person who joins the global conversation. This information propagation process, which was once found in just a few cultures of shared knowledge, such as academic science, is now seen online in everything from hobbies to history. The result, I think, will be the fastest increasing in human knowledge in history.

This morning I was explaining to a nine-year-old about Moore's Law and the magical power of the continuous learning curve. "Will it ever end?" he asked. "I don't see why it should," I answered. That's optimism for you.

a reality that moves beyond "my country" and instead embraces "our planet."

reposted from: http://edge.org/q2007/q07_4.html
My highlights in bold

LINDA STONE
Former VP, Microsoft & Co-Founder & Director, Microsoft's Virtual Worlds Group/Social Computing Group

People Are Using Technology Effectively To Mediate Toward a Healthier Global Community

Ten years ago, the novelist Andrei Codrescu came to visit me at Microsoft, where, at the time, I was Director of the Virtual Worlds (now Social Computing) Group. As he watched me engage in conversation in V-Chat and Comic Chat, he mused skeptically about these virtual communities—until a soldier entered the conversation.

"Ask him where he is?!" Codrescu demanded. The soldier’s reply, "Stationed in Germany, fighting in Bosnia." Andrei grabbed the keyboard from me, full attention now on the soldier, as he was sucked into the virtual world. When he finally disengaged, he seemed fascinated by the possibilities.

Technology has advanced so significantly in the last decade, and many in the generation of kids, high school age and younger, are so fluent in every aspect of the technology that they have moved beyond being participants stimulated by the technology to being creators, creating both technology and content, collaborating and sharing every aspect of their lives, their opinions and their causes across borders that, to them, are increasingly invisible.

Everything can change when we change the way we look at it, and the generation coming of age sees a more global world and experiences a range of resources for creation and collaboration on a scale previous generations could only imagine. Through Podcasts, Youtube, blogs, MySpace, and emerging technologies, every issue we face today, from successful alternative energy solutions to avian flu outbreak areas to disaster recovery is part of the global conversation and there are many pathways to participate and co-create solutions.

Attention is the most powerful tool of the human spirit. The opportunity this generation can and appears to be seizing, is to move collective attention away from the type of anxiety and despair fueled by campaigns like the War on Terror and Climate Crisis and toward the most positive future we can create together, as highlighted by blogs like Worldchanging.com.

Through shared experiences, the generation growing up today has a broader sense of global issues and possibilities and a reality that moves beyond "my country," and, instead, embraces "our planet."

A Knowledge Driven Economy Allows Individuals to Lead Millions Out of Poverty In a Single Generation

reposted from Edge.org. Chris Street highlights/edits in bold.

JUAN ENRIQUEZ
CEO, Biotechonomy; Founding Director, Harvard Business School's Life Sciences Project; Author, The Untied States of America

A Knowledge Driven Economy Allows Individuals to Lead Millions Out of Poverty In a Single Generation

Freedom to create, to work, to fundamentally alter is unprecedented. For better and worse, science and technology provide ever greater power. Individuals and small groups can leverage this power to set their own rules, make their own lives, establish their own boundaries. Paradoxically, this is leading to massive global networks and ever smaller countries.

Don't like your country or your neighbors? Had enough of the religious, nationalist, or ethnic fanatics nearby? Groups that like to speak obscure languages, that want to revise the heroes in the grammar school textbooks, or who advocate a different set of morals are increasingly able to do so. Borders and boundaries in both rich and poor countries are breeding like rabbits. In Europe there are demands for autonomy or outright separation in the former United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Austria, Germany, Italy...

It used to be the bright had to leave India, Pakistan, China, and Mexico to make a living, to lead and have a global impact. No more. There are ever more powerful enclaves and zip codes within countries where there is a concentration of smarts and entrepreneurship. If their neighbors let them, these groups and networks flourish. If not they separate or they leave.

As long as you can become and remain a part of the network, the power of place matters ever less. Who your parents were, where you were born, is irrelevant as long as you have access to and interest in education, technology, science, and networks. Every time you open a science magazine, research a new material or gene, map a brain, ocean, or piece of the universe there is a smorgasbord of opportunities to learn and build something new, to create, to accumulate enough prestige, wealth, or power to fundamentally change many lives.

A knowledge driven economy allows individuals to lead millions out of poverty in a single generation. Many within the biggest, China and India, as well as the smallest Singapore and Luxembourg can thrive. One no longer needs to take what the neighbor has to survive. One can thrive by building something complementary, by thinking up something better. Knowledge unlike land, oil wells, gold mines, is ever expanding. Someone's success depends ever less on taking what the other had. You can build and make your own.

Sometimes the real and cyber merge and cross over. Second lifers, inhabitants of a virtual world, are free to become whatever they wish, wherever they wish. Their creations and wealth are increasingly crossing boundaries into the real world of corporate planning, art, and dollars. This is just a foreshadowing of real world governance going forward as the digital becomes the dominant language and means of generating wealth on the planet.

Throughout the world, likely your grandpa's favorite sports team moved, his flag changed, and his job merged, moved, and morphed. All of this implies an accelerating set of shifts in allegiance and identity. Politicians and citizens who wish to preserve and protect the current country are well advised to pay attention to these trends as more have a choice and as ever more debate whether to become a more compact few. For the illegitimate or the slow, it will be harder to maintain boundaries and borders. There is little margin for error; each government and temporarily dominant party can screw up the whole. And the whole can be split very fast. But you have many options. You can fight to preserve that you love or you can choose to build or inhabit an alternative space. Your choice.

A film is worth a thousands words

reposted from Edge.org. Chris Street highlights/edits in bold.

JEAN PIGOZZI
Collector, Contemporary African Art; High-Tech Ecological Researcher & Director, Liquid Jungle Lab, Panama

Breaking Down the Barriers Between Artists and the Public

For me, the most interesting development in the art world is what Charles Saatchi is doing with The Saatchi Gallery (www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk), his new online gallery which opens Summer 2007. It is a tool that is immensely powerful as it is open on both sides to the artists and to the public without interference of curators, editors, dealers, critics, etc. This is exactly the way Contemporary Art should be presented. The artists can show whatever they want and the public can see whatever they choose to look at, there is no more the barrier of the museum or the gallery or the art magazine between the artists and the public. I find this immensely refreshing and interesting.

The recent creation of YouTube is another very interesting and important development which provides Internet users with a cheap and easy way to make and post short videos. I think we have just begun to touch the surface of this huge iceberg. It means that anyone who sees a policeman beating someone up, or someone kicking their dog, or Paris Hilton kissing a young man in a car, or someone being mistreated in a hospital, etc. can post it on YouTube and have the entire world see it in less than ten minutes. People can write great editorials and post great blogs, but the power of a short film is a thousand times stronger than any well written anything anywhere. I am excited and also terrified by this new opportunity.

The tools for cultural production and distribution ... may lead to Religions decline

reposted from Edge.org. Chris Street highlights/edits in bold.

This reminds me of Daniel Dennetts' idea The Evaporation of the Powerful Mystique of Religion by Daniel C. Dennett

"Why am I confident that this will happen? Mainly because of the asymmetry in the information explosion. With the worldwide spread of information technology (not just the internet, but cell phones and portable radios and television), it is no longer feasible for guardians of religious traditions to protect their young from exposure to the kinds of facts (and, yes, of course, misinformation and junk of every genre) that gently, irresistibly undermine the mindsets requisite for religious fanaticism and intolerance."

HOWARD RHEINGOLD
Communications Expert; Author, Smart Mobs

The tools for cultural production and distribution are in the pockets of 14 year olds

The tools for cultural production and distribution are in the pockets of 14 year olds. This does not guarantee that they will do the hard work of democratic self-governance: the tools that enable the free circulation of information and communication of opinion are necessary but not sufficient for the formation of public opinion. Ask yourself this question: Which kind of population seems more likely to become actively engaged in civic affairs — a population of passive consumers, sitting slackjawed in their darkened rooms, soaking in mass-manufactured culture that is broadcast by a few to an audience of many, or a world of creators who might be misinformed or ill-intentioned, but in any case are actively engaged in producing as well as consuming cultural products? Recent polls indicate that a majority of today's youth — the "digital natives" for whom laptops and wireless Internet connections are part of the environment, like electricity and running water — have created as well as consumed online content. I think this bodes well for the possibility that they will take the repair of the world into their own hands, instead of turning away from civic issues, or turning to nihilistic destruction.

The eager adoption of web publishing, digital video production and online video distribution, social networking services, instant messaging, multiplayer role-playing games, online communities, virtual worlds, and other Internet-based media by millions of young people around the world demonstrates the strength of their desire — unprompted by adults — to learn digital production and communication skills. Whatever else might be said of teenage bloggers, dorm-room video producers, or the millions who maintain pages on social network services like MySpace and Facebook, it cannot be said that they are passive media consumers. They seek, adopt, appropriate, and invent ways to participate in cultural production. While moral panics concentrate the attention of oldsters on lurid fantasies of sexual predation, young people are creating and mobilizing politically active publics online when circumstances arouse them to action. 25,000 Los Angeles high school students used MySpace to organize a walk-out from classes to join street demonstrations protesting proposed immigration legislation. Other young people have learned how to use the sophisticated graphic rendering engines of video games as tools for creating their own narratives; in France, disaffected youth, the ones whose riots are televised around the world, but whose voices are rarely heard, used this emerging "machinima" medium to create their own version of the events that triggered their anger (search for "The French Democracy" on video hosting sites). Not every popular YouTube video is a teenage girl in her room (or a bogus teenage girl in her room); increasingly, do-it-yourself video has been used to capture and broadcast police misconduct or express political opinions. Many of the activists who use Indymedia — ad-hoc alternative media organized around political demonstrations — are young.

My optimism about the potential of the generation of digital natives is neither technological determinism nor naive utopianism. Many-to-many communication enables but does not compel or guarantee widespread civic engagement by populations who never before had a chance to express their public voices. And while the grimmest lesson of the twentieth century is to mistrust absolutist utopians, I perceive the problem to be in the absolutism more than the utopia. Those who argued for the abolition of the age-old practice of human slavery were utopians.

Social Networking

Read the 17th September New Scientist magazine article on Social Networking.

I am experimenting with some of the sites mentioned in this article:

http://christophergovanstreet.spaces.live.com/PersonalSpace.aspx?_c02_owner=1 - Windows Live Spaces (Microsoft)

http://www.myspace.com/christophergstreet - MySpace.com - the leading Social Networking site with 100 million members.
http://www.eons.com/ - designed specifically for folks 50 plus
http://en.facebox.com/ - blogs, music
http://www.friendster.com/ - mostly USA networking it seems
http://www.genesreunited.com/ - explore your relations - i've logged over 600 of my relations since February.
http://www.meetup.com/topics/ - arrange face to face local meetings with people interested in whatever topics interest you.
http://www.siphs.com/regsuccess.jsp - Life Sciences Community