By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. An Important Lesson About Grassroots Media
Steve Outing pens an interesting column about the failure of his most recent venture, a company that produced grassroots sites for sports enthusiasts. The idea was that they would seed the site with professional content - contributions from a pro rock climber, for instance - and depend on user-submitted content for the rest. The problem, he writes, was that the result wasn't attractive enough to draw in enough traffic to make it viable. The quality was uneven and people had to search through the bad content to get to the good. He would hire more professionals and would have editors select and highlight only the best of the reader content. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Archive of EHR / EMR Posts
Since last September I have been reading as Wendy Wickham and her colleagues have braved management, clients, and everyone else in a major upgrade project. She summarizes, "I hope I NEVER have to do a project of this sort again.... Rushing major upgrades of mission critical systems may look glamorous but you can cause serious long-term damage. To the morale of the IT team, to the goodwill of the end user. And to the system itself if you have a partially finished product. It has taken months and they still have not recovered. No one's fault, but very preventable." The series of posts linked here constitute a detailed description of the project, an object lesson everyone should learn from. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Are You On the Bully Watch?
Dave Snowden responds to Terry Anderson's criticism of the cvoncept of 'crew' as a type of community, launching into an attack on the concept of the 'collective'. "All of this," he writes, "requires a more open attitude, an avoidance of three fold classification systems and a tolerance of mess." Related to this, I have posted the transcript of my original talk on groups and networks. This is one of my favorite talks; I hope you enjoy it. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. When E-Mail Is Outsourced
I think we should think of hosted email as the thin edge of the wedge. It allows Google and Microsoft to get their foot in the door, ready to offer other hosted services (known today as 'web 2.0') that will, as this article notes, change the way students learn in the classroom. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Permalink Shorteners
I read some (apparently unfounded) rumour about the death of TinyURL over the weekend, raising the question of how to reduce our dependence on a single source for short URLs (for those keeping score, this is a bit problem for any resource registry). So I think there should be a distributed approach. Basically, what you need to do to make URL's like http://seesmic.com/QZ1Y7R6h9Q/ work is to (a) write a redirect into your httpd.conf file (for Apache; other servers will vary) and then (b) write a small redirect engine to be located wherever your httpd.conf redirect pointed. You would also need (c) a script that allowed you to create redirect instances. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Time to Write Our Own Rules
In response to the Facebook fracas (see below) Doc Searles, in this post and a follow-up, argues that we should "stop petitioning Facebook and Google to solve our problems for us." and that it's "ime to come up with some new rules of engagement - ones that work for us as well as them." Well sure. But there is a lot of money out there being spent to make sure that this does not happen. Money being spent to get us to buy proprietary e-book readers. Money being spent to prevent open source from being used to educate children. Money being spend to convince us that the values we hold - like giving and sharing - are in fact immoral and amount to stealing. More...