I just had a meeting with Tom Smith of Other Media has been working with Ultralab to facilitate online collaboration between folks in NZ and in the UK using blogs.
Other Media are website builders who get involved in a variety of projects such as Hyper Island School of New Media Design in Sweden.
Tom has worked on think.com and spinalot and an online living newspaper project.
Jakob Neilson, in his typically accurate style, lists the ways in which the Internet is Undoing the Industrial Revolution.
He admits that the reversal is not yet complete but only hints at what may be beyond it. That’s what interests me because to me, what is occurring is not so much a reversal of the mass-centralisation of the last few hundred years but an energising of the complex diversity of the last few thousand.
Era one: small groups and communities network locally around more-or-less shared and relatively finite (physical) resources.
Era two: people become isolated as indivuduals and glommed into homogenous masses as technological resources become concentrated among an elite.
Era three: groups and communities of all sizes flourish, evolve, decline and regenerate around limitless knowledge-based resources in a global context.
New “web 2.0″ NZ TV listing site http://throng.co.nz works like I’d want a TV listing site to work, if I wanted a TV listing site. It shows what’s on now, soon and tonight, with weightings for popularity. That’s three out of four, but Throng also tells me “Members may personalise their listings to highlight their favourite shows and hide ones they’re not interested in.” Thing is tho, most of what’s on TV, I am not interested in. What I want is to see the odd rare thing that I might actually be interested in watching. So, rather than just hide all of it, I think I’ll ignore Throng. If there’s something on that you think I’ll really like, would you please let me know.