Integral Visioning - Michel Bauwens: Foundation For Peer To Peer Alternatives Newsletter Issue 156

"General Intellect.

Indeed, the main productive advance of capitalism, for Marx, and for Adam Smith before him, was that it makes possible new forms of productive cooperation. In the Grundrisse and later in Capital it is clear that the concentration of capital in machinery and large factory systems makes possible new more complex forms of social organization in which the productive energies of the multitude are organized in new and more efficient ways. The contribution of machinery is thus both material and immaterial. Indeed, in the Grundrisse it seems that this reorganization of social cooperation constitutes the main productive contribution of machinery and hence the chief source of what Marx called relative surplus-value. [.....] This immaterial productive contribution of machinery is what Marx calls General Intellect. General Intellect consists in a number of competences that are inscribed in the social environment organized by capitalist machinery, and hence available freely to its participants, by virtue of their existence as `social individuals'. These competences can be cognitive, as in technical or scientific knowledge, but they are also social and affective, as in knowledge about how to organize the production process or how to interact and function in the factory. The point to stress at this point is that General Intellect is the outcome of the re-mediation of social interaction performed by capitalist machinery in the factory. But it is by no means controlled by capital. On the contrary, the free availability of General Intellect in the social environment of the factory means that capital cannot exercise a monopoly over this productive resource. It can be employed for autonomous or even subversive purposes. General Intellect thus contains the potential for an overcoming of the forms of discipline from which this phenomenon originally emerged.

Many have argued that it was this potential autonomy at the heart of the system of advanced capitalism that drove the intensification of capitalist discipline, which marked the Fordist regime. The aim of Fordist social engineering was to reduce the potential for autonomous appropriation of general intellect and to collapse this resource coincide with the medium by which it had been made possible. The aim of Taylorist scientific management was to render productive cooperation on the shop-floor entirely directed by the machine-system by means of which it had been organized. The aim of Fordist marketing was to ensure that consumer needs and habits were predictably dictated by advertising and, latter, television. Within this order value-producing labour was defined as those practices that repeated the tasks set forth by this over-coding of General Intellect: the repetition of an isolated number of tasks in the factory, with no spontaneous interaction or communication permitted; the enactment of the structure of needs transmitted by television advertisements (as in Dallas Smythe's ultra-Fordist theory of the `audience commodity'); the meticulous execution of bureaucratic tasks that saved Eichmann from any ethical responsibility for the crimes he helped to perpetrate.

Turn Social Networks into Your Recruiter -- Facebook -- LinkedIn -- Plaxo

"If corporate recruiters can mine Facebook and LinkedIn for job candidates, small businesses can too. Social networks can level the playing field, and can be used to try lots of different recruiting initiatives.

Jason Averbook flies around the country advising major corporations how to weave social networks and Web 2.0 tools into recruiting and other human-resources practices. So when Averbook needed to add staff to his 50-person HR industry consulting firm recently, he knew he had to practice what he preached."

Wired > Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm

"The winter sun sets in mid-afternoon in Kolobrzeg, Poland, but the early twilight does not deter people from taking their regular outdoor promenade. Bundled up in parkas with fur-trimmed hoods, strolling hand in mittened hand along the edge of the Baltic Sea, off-season tourists from Germany stop openmouthed when they see a tall, well-built, nearly naked man running up and down the sand.

'Kalt? Kalt?' one of them calls out. The man gives a polite but vague answer, then turns and dives into the waves. After swimming back and forth in the 40-degree water for a few minutes, he emerges from the surf and jogs briefly along the shore. The wind is strong, but the man makes no move to get dressed. Passersby continue to comment and stare. 'This is one of the reasons I prefer anonymity,' he tells me in English. 'You do something even slightly out of the ordinary and it causes a sensation.'"

systematicHR - Human Resources Strategy and Technology » Diagramming Web 2.0 versus Enterprise 2.0

"I like pictures. CIPD published a paper that was honestly quite annoying, but contained a couple of little gems. I was annoyed because the paper was entitled Web 2.0 and HR, but it never got past defining what Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 are and getting to the point of how all this is pertinent to the HR function. However, it schematically does one of the best jobs illustrating what Enterprise 2.0 is in the context of Web 2.0. In addition, it shows various examples of implementations and why certain implementations might be e2.0 while others are not. Take a look and let me know what you think."

Semantic Search: The Myth and Reality - ReadWriteWeb

"For a few years now people have been talking about semantic search. Any technology that stands a chance to dethrone Google is of great interest to all of us, particularly one that takes advantage of long-awaited and much-hyped semantic technologies. But no matter how much progress has been made, most of us are still underwhelmed by the results. In head-to-head comparisons with Google, the results have not come out much different. What are we doing wrong?

For example, when asked, What is the capital of France? both approaches come back with the correct answer - Paris. Also, a lot of queries that we are used to typing into Google in abbreviated form, come back with similar results if we type them using natural language. Clearly something is off. We all know that semantic technologies are powerful, but how and why? In this post we will show that the problem is that we are asking wrong questions."

The Indypendent » Brain Drain – The Quiet Killer

"It is devastatingly ironic that the world’s poorest countries are, to some degree, subsidizing the healthcare of the wealthiest nations. For years, rich nations encouraged African countries to invest in infrastructure (education, hospitals, medicine); much aid was given to strengthen these very systems. Although it was unintentional, the donations proved to be quite self-serving. As wealthy countries give aid to struggling nations to improve healthcare outcomes with one hand, they siphon off graduates of medical schools with the other. The developed world benefits from the skills and knowledge of newly arrived doctors and nurses while the countries that produced these professionals suffer from staffing shortages.

The reasons behind the migration of health care workers are fairly obvious. Most hospitals in Sub-Saharan Africa are dismal places: over-crowded, grossly understaffed and under-equipped. Medical personnel are often frustrated. Salaries are very low and rarely enough to entice doctors, nurses, and clinical officers to stay in rural areas or even capital cities. Although they are trained to treat patients, they are unable to provide these services due to a lack of essential equipment and supplies. It may be difficult to imagine a hospital wanting in stethoscopes, hospital beds, gloves, and syringes yet these areissues countless providers face every day."

Dear Corporate America, stop creating your own social networks! | RSS Marketing Blog | RSS Applied

"Every so often a new technology comes along and fascinates and excites businesses and consumers alike. Previously, e-commerce won our hearts. Then we all fell for search engines, and the world wide web was redefined. Now, that new technology is social networking and it’s an exciting place to be. New technology sprouts each week, creating interesting niche networking opportunities for anything you can think of. The world is becoming connected, and businesses are catching on this time a little earlier than they did with e-commerce and search engines.

So what’s the problem? These people are not built to be early adopters. Corporate America, listen up - stop creating your own social networks. You are missing the point entirely, and it’s going to create a backlash that could harm the real potential of social networking. Sears, just because you partnered with MTV, you are not suddenly cool and creating a stand alone social network around back-to-school shopping just isn’t the right thing to do. Let me explain what you are doing wrong, and why."

Big Contrarian → Tacky.

"Talking about your blog is the social equivalent of talking about your dog. It’s a dull conversation for everyone but you.

Yet, an entire industry exists built around nothing more than bloggers, talking about blogging to other bloggers via their blogs. It’s a trade show for people who run trade shows. A instructional video on making instructional videos. Cyclical and cheap, yet undoubtably useful to the right type of consumer...

But it seems that the best of them would never deign follow the advice espoused by articles such as “How to stop being invisible” or sites such as Problogger. These are the web equivalent of informercials. Lowest-common-denominator thinking. One guy getting rich off telling you how to get rich. And fuck me sideways, they have more readers than I’ll likely ever have.

Write top ten lists and whore yourself on as many other sites as you possibly can. Don’t be thoughtful, long-winded or interesting. Don’t write about what you love, unless what you love is popular on Digg. And for god’s sake don’t even think about writing about more than one topic.

Whether their strategies work or not is slightly beside the point. It’s cheap. It’s marketing driven, instead of content driven. It’s the type of thinking that leads to a sequel to the movie Garfield.

There are only three requirements I’ve ever sussed out from reading excellent sites. Write well, write often, and write with passion. It seems if you can manage that, you’ll find an audience."

50 Steps to Establishing a Consistent Social Media Practice | chrisbrogan.com

"You’ve told the boss that you’re going to implement social media stuff for your organization, and in your mind, you’ve decided that means an account on Twitter and a blog. Maybe there’s a bit more to it than that. For instance, what are your goals? Are you there to show customers and prospective new customers that you care? Are you there to solve customer issues? Are you building awareness and attempting new forms of digital marketing? Knowing this up front makes a world of difference."

The Ultimate RSS Toolset: 100+ Online Apps and Resources | OEDb

"RSS, or Rich Site Summary, is an easy way to stay informed of the latest updates to your favorite sites without having to actually visit them each individually. For those who have sites, it can be a great way to increase readership and get information out about your blog, website or business. Either way, RSS enables users to navigate the Web in an easy, fast format and to access information at the click of a button. This collection of tools will give you everything you need to get started or improve how you're working with RSS."

Circumference of a Moose: Hallucinogenic Spirograph, The Architecture of Social Media

"I am active on more than 30 Social Media sites, and this grows on a weekly basis - as interest in the subject is outweighed by my attempts to rein in the density of my social media footprint. As I write this I am simultaneously scrobbling and checking Twitter, so if feel like I am living in and contributing to the 'Hallucinogenic Spirograph'."

25 Internet Startups That Bombed Miserably | Business Pundit

"If the Internet could speak with one voice, it would probably groan “oh, not again!” That’s because every raving success story about Internet startups is tempered by dozens more that crashed and burned in a sea of wasted money, bad ideas, or unfulfilled hype. As venture capitalist Paul Graham writes, most of these failures are never written about. No one knew about them, so they were never really expected to go anywhere. But a select few had very public flame-outs - what Graham calls “the elite of failures.”

The list below celebrates not the failure of these companies, but presents us with a conservative reminder of a not so distant past and the lessons we can learn from it."

That was the week that was...Week ending July 25, 2008 - RecruitingBlogs.com

"A round-up from the recruiting industry’s group blogs, portals and individual archives...

Winding down another month. Dag, time flies..."

Action Management Associates - Ambiguity: The Fertile Ground of Problem Solving

"Face it. Corporate life isn't very tidy. Relationships get complicated. Delayed decisions turn into dilemmas. Even the most carefully orchestrated plans get detoured or derailed by the unexpected. Executives regularly struggle to get enough information to (they hope) protect themselves from the inherent risks woven into every choice. Welcome to the world of ambiguity - the fertile ground of problem solving.

Circuit Board A tolerance for ambiguity involves accepting and developing a level of comfort with situations where variables, alternatives, and outcomes are unclear or poorly defined. Leaders with a low tolerance for ambiguity feel threatened by the unknown and often choose courses of action that avoid risk and uncertainty—two frequent companions of opportunity. Neil Postman was right when he said, 'People in distress will sometimes prefer a problem that is familiar to a solution that is not.' Combine the possibility of failure with a distaste for uncertainty, add the fear of losing a job because of a bad decision, and you create the potential for an immobilized leader."

YOUmoz | Tiers of Transparency: The Ethical Brand Ambassador

"In the physical world we meet people every day who share their personal motivations (or not) on multiple levels. Some of them could be artists or even work for companies with a vested interest in our particular demographic segment. In the traditional publishing realm, authors release great works under pseudonyms and even have teams of associate writers compose large chunks or whole books. In many cases there is no disclosure.

Nobody calls Stephen King fake because he once penned works as Richard Bachman and John Swithen. Those alter egos are common knowledge, now but years ago it was a reuse. In human culture, anonymity and private motivations only rankle selectively.

Social media participation is a hot button for many and random hypocrisy is sometimes palpable. Lonely Girl became a YouTube rock star before and after she was discovered to be an avatar. After the truth was revealed, the case study was embraced by news organizations and popular culture and she became a media darling."

Association for Downloadable Media » While the economy tanks, social media reaches new heights

"While the summer offers up more market jitters and deepening concern over the mortgage debacle, one might assume that a downturned economy could cut the legs out from the heady growth of social media industries. Not necessarily so. Venture capital might tighten, but social media consumption continues to skyrocket. Subscribed media consumption / podcasting continues its mass popular ascent along with its social media cohorts.

This spring year, Universal McCann conducted its third wave of data collection using its Social Media Tracker survey system. Entitled Wave.3, concurrent with its Next Thing Now solutions strategy, the global survey shows nothing but massive adoption of social media. In fact, we might have arrived at the point where daily participation on the internet essentially is the use of social media.

thePuckWrites >Ten Steps to Being Everywhere in Social Media

"So you want to be everywhere?

I think that to succeed in the social media world, a key concept is social density. I work towards this by constantly looking for new sites and services to maintain a presence on and being active in many different microblogging communities. I also manage to at times have a life and do the writing that pays the bills. I do this by using a few different techniques to streamline my interactions with the virtual world.

Recently I got a comment on this post and realized that it would be helpful to some of my readers to learn how I do this until something better comes along (any venture capitalists reading?)"

Gumption: Do YouJustGetMe? Do I Even Get Myself?

"David Evans presented a paper at the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM 2008) this week on the science of interpersonal perception, or more specifically: how well people are able to understand (or 'get') others based on others' online profiles, and what elements of those profiles are most important to that understanding.

The results presented in the paper, 'What Elements of an Online Social Networking Profile Predict Target-Rater Agreement in Personality Impressions?', are based on data collected through an online site, YouJustGetMe, that invites users to answer a set of 40 questions designed to enable assessment of their personality - based on the 'big five' personality traits, which, according to Wikipedia, include the following:"

Absurdism, nonsense, bullshit « Radical Mutual-Improvement

"Confabulation is what happens when your imagination works with your memory to generate a story, in particular it is the confusion of imagined details with true events. The interesting thing about confabulation is that you cannot avoid it. Imagination and memory are two heads of the same coin. Every time you access a memory, your brain will load it up into the imagination, fill in any missing details, and re-write it back into memory. As a result, stories will change and crystalize over time. In addition to this imagination/memory link, there are a couple other interesting processes at work here..."

Social Power and Self Deception -- Mario F. Heilmann. University of California at Los Angeles

"This paper endeavors to point out that the selfish interests of individuals caused deception and countermeasures against deception to become driving forces behind social influence strategies."

On social networks and shared culture « Think Macro

"Digital media technologies tend to individualize us, to make us feel more separate; digital culture (i.e. the kinds of content those technologies give us access to and the cultural meanings that content regularly offers) tend to connect us, to make us feel more a part of something."

Whose Space? Differences Among Users and Non-Users of Social Network Sites | Eszter Hargittai

"Are there systematic differences between people who use social network sites and those who stay away, despite a familiarity with them? Based on data from a survey administered to a diverse group of young adults, this article looks at the predictors of SNS usage, with particular focus on Facebook, MySpace, Xanga, and Friendster. Findings suggest that use of such sites is not randomly distributed across a group of highly wired users. A person's gender, race and ethnicity, and parental educational background are all associated with use, but in most cases only when the aggregate concept of social network sites is disaggregated by service. Additionally, people with more experience and autonomy of use are more likely to be users of such sites. Unequal participation based on user background suggests that differential adoption of such services may be contributing to digital inequality."

Shirky - The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview

"The W3C's Semantic Web project has been described in many ways over the last few years: an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, a place where machines can analyze all the data on the Web, even a Web in which machine reasoning will be ubiquitous and devastatingly powerful. The problem with descriptions this general, however, is that they don't answer the obvious question: What is the Semantic Web good for?

The simple ansjavascript:void(0)wer is this: The Semantic Web is a machine for creating syllogisms. A syllogism is a form of logic, first described by Aristotle, where '...certain things being stated, something other than what is stated follows of necessity from their being so.' [Organon]"

Give me your B-players and I’ll give you mine | South Florida Metro Recruiters

"Buying into the old “more cost-efficient way to recruit people for jobs” codswallop it seems the employers you’d expect to be the most savvy can still leave one scratching their head wondering, “What the hell are they thinking?” Of course, I could be missing something but the AllianceQ sales-gotcha that drawing from a pool of other employers’ rejects somehow delivers better quality candidates is hard to understand."

BusinessWeek > Numenta Is Imitating Your Brain

"A startup's approach to advanced pattern recognition could trump rivals' in the hunt to capitalize on finding trends in large streams of data."

Ming the Mechanic: Core Group Theory

"Jon Husband talks about Art Kleiner who just wrote a book 'Who Really Matters - The Core Group Theory of Power, Privilege and Success'. Essentially about how most organizations exist to satisfy not all stakeholders, but a particular, much smaller, core group."

The Naked Brain > Restak on FORA.tv

Rules of the Semantic Web

Designing for Civil Society: Internet tribes examined ... sociably

"Internet users contributing content can appear to be rather different tribes. There are the independent bloggers who are single voices loosely linked, and the hoards gathering together in forums and chat rooms. Then there are the social networkers using platforms that provide blogs and other facilities in one place - for example, ecademy for business and myspace for younger networkers.

It can be very confusing, particularly if you are trying to work out which way to go to help people talk or work together online.

Fortunate the professionals who work on these different models have generally resisted the sort of techie wars that can so easily develop, and this was very evident at tonight's meeting of emint, originally set up by online community managers. We had news that emint is formalising its constitution and making some close links with an organisation representing social networks. There may be funding in prospect. I think I got that right ... but this was maximum sociability in a Covent Garden pub, so we may have to wait for a more formal communique."

Artificial intelligence and digital media

Access : Benefits of 'magic mushroom' therapy long lasting : Nature News

"The benefits for people who have had positive or even mystical experiences induced by the psychedelic drug psilocybin — the psychoactive ingredient in ‘magic mushrooms’ — linger for as much as a year, according to the latest follow-up study of such patients.

The study offers more support to those who argue that, when used responsibly, some drugs more commonly taken for leisure can safely be used to relieve the stress associated with severe chronic diseases such as cancer."

An Ultimate Guide to Social Media Simplification | Andy DeSoto

"Face it: in the digital age, your time is one of your most precious commodities. Never in the known history of the world has a culture needed to perceive, process, and act on information to the extent each and every one of us must today.

Unfortunately for us, though, the same tools that bring human beings together over generations, cultures, and continents—social networking and social media sites—can devour hours and hours of our limited spare time. As our involvement in different services and sites gets more involved and complex, it’s easy to spend exponentially more energy online if our habits go unchecked.

How do we simplify our social network existences and ably manage our valuable time? I’ve compiled a list of some great practical, philosophical, and experimental resources on how to be more efficient, smarter, and effective when working with social media and social networking:"

Better than the Telly: Enemies of Reason | Amitai Givertz's Blogversity Blog

"I guess these days I am easily distracted as evidenced by this post, one thing leading to another…

On researching cognitive bias I came across Enemies of Reason by Professor Richard Dawkins. The program originally aired on Channel 4."

Mashable > FriendFeed Launches Rooms. Moving Towards Semantic Web?

"Everybody loves FriendFeed, right? That includes me. You can debate all day whether or not FriendFeed will be able to go mainstream or just add to the noise, but my biggest hope for FriendFeed has always been an improved way in which to utilize feed content for personalized purposes, through filtering and recommendations."

Intergrative Solutions | The Synchronicity of Strange Coincidence...how you can use it in life

"Are coincidences based on random hap-hazard chance, or is there more to the story. On the surface it would appear, according to what "Mum and Dad" taught us, that there is nothing special about these 'flukes' of chance. On the other hand, in the light of quantum science and the fundamental Law of unity, it appears that synchronicity is a plausable concept. In fact some say that's all there really is to the "mechanism" of life.

Posting on Recruiting.com: Over My Dead Body | Amitai Givertz's Recruitomatic Blog

"I believe Recruiting.com has fulfilled its purpose for me and is about to give up the ghost. The so-called recruiting community portal serves no strategic purpose and drives all but no traffic. There is no interesting content that I couldn’t get somewhere else. There are no pictures of Filipino hot babes after all and, quite frankly, the site has turned into a useless waste of blogroll, more irritation than anything else."

Maximize Possibility Blog: McKinsey's Four Biases as Found in Talent Management

"Dan McCarthy of the Great Leadership Blog (a great read - put it on your reading list!) has a post up referencing a recent McKinsey Quarterly study about the four biases that lead to failure. Dan provides some great examples of these biases leading to well known business failures.

What really struck me most about the McKinsey study was how universal the biases were to businesses of all shapes and sizes. Naturally I felt inclined to look for ways in which these biases lead to hiring and talent management blunders. The following are McKinsey's four biases and how they manifest themselves in field of talent management..."

Your Social Media Brand - What Leads to Burnout? » The Buzz Bin

"There’s been a lot of buzz lately on the effects of social media burnout.

Shel Holtz posted a great read on his predictions and how social media will eventually integrate.

“Today, the fear seems to be the sheer number of social media channels and how they will occupy all of our time, keep us from seeing the sun, shield us from face-to-face contact.

What will happen. Same as before: We’ll get used to it and figure out how to use it.”

Valeria Maltoni of Conversation Agent mentions, “What about the work it takes to update all these networks? I have a hard enough time updating my LinkedIn! Has anyone thought about integrating?”

And C.C. Chapman over at Managing the Gray (TM) posted a podcast on the debate and how he manages his social media tools. He believes it’s important “to be on every social network out there to make it impossible for people to miss you.”"

Owning my online identity--really, for real from JasonKolb.com - The life of a technology entrepreneur.

"What does it mean to own your online identity?

Does it mean that you're free to take your data from a walled garden and move it elsewhere, a la Data Portability?

Or does it mean that you have complete control over it and you're free to mold it into whatever form you need it to take, delete it, share it, and otherwise do whatever you like with it?"

Data Pilgrim > Free Online Reputation Management Beginner’s Guide

"Every single day, someone, somewhere is discussing something important to your business; your brand, your executives, your competitors, your industry. Are they hyping-up your company, building buzz for your products? Or, are they criticizing your service, complaining to others about your new product launch?

A great brand can take months, if not years, and millions of dollars to build. It should be the thing you hold most precious...It can be destroyed in hours by a blogger upset with your company."

Jeremiah Owyang > Social Media Early Adopters: Pioneers, Settlers, and Colonists

I’ve seen the social media community run from tool to technology quicker than you can say “shiny object”. I’ve seen us run from blogs > Facebook > Twitter > Pownce > Jaiku > Justin TV > Ustream > Digg > Delicious > Upcoming > Flickr > YouTube > SecondLife > Widgets > Utterz > Zooomr > Friendfeed > Plurk > and who knows what’s next.

Go to Techcrunch to see lists and lists of more products, in our industry, the barriers to entry require just a few thousand (ask Guy Kawasaki) to build and launch an application. Sadly, only some of these tools we end up adopting for the long run, in most cases, we end up wasting our time.

The key to adopting the right social media tools is to first figure out which persona you are. Next, you need to identify which persona your friends are, lastly understand how you can best observe, and learn from others.

Kingsley Idehen's Blog Data Space | Data Spaces, Internet Reinvention, and Semantic Web

"In the last week I've dispatch some thoughts about a number of issues (Data Spaces and Web 2.0's Open Data Access Paradox) that basically equate to the identification of the Web 2.0 to Semantic Web (Data Web, Web of Databases, Web.next etc..) inflection.

One of the great things about the moderate “open data access” that we have today (courtesy of the blogosphere) is the fact that you can observe the crystallization of new thinking, and/or new appreciation of emerging ideas, in near real-time. Of course, when we really hit the tracks with the Semantic Web this will be in “conditional real-time” (i.e. you choose and control your scope and sensitivity to data changes etc..).

For instance, by way of feed subscriptions, I stumbled upon a series of posts by Jason Kolb that basically articulate what I (and others who believe in the Semantic Web vision) have been attempting to convey in a myriad of ways via posts and commentary etc.."

Rebirthing Eden » Blog Archive » Blessed are they who mourn: the alchemy of metamorphosis

"Whenever I attend to the public narrative about the state of the world, its troubles and ‘what is needed’ to correct them, I am struck by the almost complete absence of voices asserting the paramount role and place of the inner life of individuals in these matters. The oversight is surreal in its immensity. It is as though the dance of experience and influence between us and the world, the essential locus of what it is to be alive, is simply invisible or, at best, discounted as irrelevant to the ecology of being."

Our Time Is Up

BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » When Google’s the library, who’s the librarian?

"PaidContent says it’s a false alarm that Viacom will get personally identifiable information on our video viewing from YouTube and Google as part of its self-destructive lawsuit. Nonetheless, the episode has sparked the question I pose in the headline: When Google becomes our library, who acts as the librarian to protect our privacy as a matter of principle?

And what is the principle? Any site with content — Google, Amazon, a newspaper, a blog, an ISP — is now the moral equivalent of a library or bookstore, two institutions that try hard not to hand over information on what content we seek and consume arguing that that would violate our First Amendment rights. The controversy in the telco immunity legislation is that those searches were made without warrants. In this case, there is a warrant. When I ran sites, we got subpoenas all the time and handed over IP addresses when ordered; that was company policy. I always found it troubling and as a result ordered that we would change our data retention policy and get rid of IP addresses as soon as possible. Should Google and other sites erase IPs and rely only on cookies without personally identifiable information?"

TED Talks: Michael Shermer: Why people believe strange things

AWC Gateway, Critical Thinking section

creativity & thinking skills | Ancora imparo -- Michelangelo Buonarroti

Chris Brogan > Strip Malls for Personal Brands

Steve Rubel has a thoughtful post about the recent state of Internet social sites. In it, he suggests that users are acting as tenants in a rental property situation, and that it seems we’re all a bit flustered when our properties, like Twitter, have damage. I like the perspective, and I think the conversation should definitely be had. But immediately, I had another analogy come to mind for a slightly different reason. Steve mentioned the difference between “renting” on other people’s services versus “owning” our blogs. For whatever reason, I thought about the way we “shiny object” types are showing up on all these various social platforms, and I thought about strip malls.

Center for the Study of Intelligence Central Intelligence Agency: Psychology of Intelligence Analysis

Whatever the complexities of the puzzles we strive to solve and whatever the sophisticated techniques we may use to collect the pieces and store them, there can never be a time when the thoughtful man can be supplanted as the intelligence device supreme.