By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Technologies of Cooperation
Howard Jaqrche points to this useful paper by Andrea Saveri, Howard Rheingold, and Kathi Vian. The bulk of the paper is a survey of emerging technologies of cooperation, for example, self-organizing mesh networks, peer-to-peer networks, or knowledge collectives. This well-written (and well designed) paper illustrates each in detail, offering examples and 'strategic principles' to guide their development. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. ConnectViaBooks
Peter West thought I might find this interesting and he was right. Associated with Amazon.com, ConnectViaBooks combines book lists with social networking, the idea being to put people together based on what they like to read. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. RSS Contacts
This is a step in the right direction, but only a step. It recognizes (like FOAF and XFN) that social networking data ought to be distributed, in the form of personal RSS files, and not centralized and bound to a particular environment, as in Friendster and Orkut. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Structure and Function of Complex Networks
I'm pretty sure I linked to this in a presentation somewhere (I know I've read it) but never here in OLDaily. But George Siemens makes up for that lapse with a reference to this excellent and authoritative paper that examines in detail the formal properties of networks. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Building a Proper Shared Syndication Feed Foundation
Orchard could be describing word for word my own need: "Once I’ve acquired feed data, I need to store it in some form usable by my other programs and by some method as agnostic as possible toward the actual contents of the feed." The rest of the post analyzes four approaches: fine-grained relational DB tables, triples in an RDF store, XML database storage and coarse-grained persistence. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Our Welcome From (and to) the Community
The RSS list amendments proposed by Microsoft are in a state of flux right now as the proponents react to changes sugegested by the community. It is welcome news that the specifications are proving to be fluid, not just because the result will be something that meets wider needs, but because it demonstrates a willingness by Microsoft to engage in the (very fluid and mostly chaotic) RSS development community. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Has CC Lost the Plot?
I too was left scratching my head at the recent "birthday present" offered by Creative Commons: the right to download and play (but not share) a recording of 'Happy Birthday' sung (badly) by some CC luminaries at a cost (to donors) of 8.5 cents a download. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A Learning Object Repository in Motion (Feeling a Little Bit aggRSSive)
Looks like this could be interesting. "Imagine that each of the tags in the image above (biology, bioinformatics, etc...) was linked to a set of RSS feeds drawn from learning resource collections, weblogs, journals, library collections, news sources, or whatever else users might find useful in an educational context." More...