If you work through all the examples of “wikinomics in action” in the book and on this blog, some of them are about harnessing the wisdom of crowds, and others are about attracting uniquely qualified minds. As one would expect, the strategies required for success on one side are very different from the strategies required for success on the other.

Enter, Reference Extract. Currently in development, the project is designed to shake up internet searching by creating a “credibility engine.” The difference between a credibility engine and your granddaddy’s search engine? Unlike Google which is based on, among other things, total number of links to a given page (a more detailed explanation can be found here), Reference Extract will favour pages recommended from a pool of volunteer librarians from 1400 libraries worldwide. Their argument is that a lot of the search results found on mainstream search engines are poor because the results aren’t subjected to any sort of scrutiny. By using a team of experienced and qualified experts, the search results, it’s hoped, will be more accurate and more useful.

It will be interesting to see the long term implications of this project. Will the trusted-expert concept be enough to steer people away from Google (or Yahoo and MSN for that matter)? Or is “googling it” so ingrained in our internet experience that there isn’t room for one more search engine? Perhaps we’ll see Reference Extract become a specialty search engine that caters to clientele who require an added degree of certainty in their searching – journalists, I’m looking in your direction.

The idea of searching smarter is destined to become increasingly important as the amount of information out there continues to expand at breakneck speed. We’re already surrounded by more data than we know what to do with which raises the question: in future, will it make more sense to trust experts to sort out what information is truly relevant? Or are we more than happy to continue to trust Google to be our search engine steady date?

Given that the status quo is largely still in effect, we’re left looking for other indications that change is coming in The Middle Kingdom. In my original post, I argued that business could be such an agent for openness in China. I wrote:

Business is a powerful force and its influence can’t be denied but criticisms that companies (search engines, I’m looking in your direction) have been complicit in Chinese censorship efforts leave me somewhat skeptical. Business is a powerful force and its influence can’t be denied but criticisms that companies (search engines, I’m looking in your direction) have been complicit in Chinese censorship efforts leave me somewhat skeptical.

Well it looks like Google has finally decided to do something about it. On their official blog this week, Andrew McLaughlin, Director of Public Policy and Government Affairs, posted the following:

In a world where governments all too often censor what their citizens can see and do on the Internet, Google has from the start promoted global free expression and taken the lead in being transparent with our users. We’ve pressed governments around the world to stop limiting free speech and made it possible for dissidents, bloggers and others to have their voices heard.

Being that Google’s mantra is “Don’t Be Evil”, it’s nice to see them address an area where they’ve been suspect in the past and use their Internet dominance to shine a light on an issue they formerly whitewashed. The internet has the power to put unjust and restrictive practices under real scrutiny but it won’t happen on its own. To that end, in the post, Google announced their partnership in the Global Network Initiative. The GNI is a global cooperative effort of non-profit groups, companies and educational institutions with a mandate to, “protect and advance freedom of expression and privacy in the ICT sector.”

It’s a small step, but it’s one in the right direction. It makes me wonder: Is this a tipping point for freedom or will we continue to see business as usual?

Enter the Social Media Classroom. The project, created by Howard Rheingold, describes itself as, “an invitation to grow a public resource of knowledge and relationships among all who are interested in the use of social media in learning.” The site is a series of Web 2.0 tools (it offers forums, wikis, blogs, chat, social bookmarking, microblogging, social video, curricular materials, resource repositories and an online community of practitioners – available as an install or SaaS) that help to facilitate collaborative, student-led learning across a distance. The value of this project is not simply the ability to slap a 2.0 paintjob on an existing system but rather as a means to enhance the learning process. Perhaps the website puts it best:

The greatest value that the SMC can add to a learning community is its ability to support a movement away from education as delivery of knowledge toward education as critical, collaborative inquiry—a student-centric pedagogy that engages students in actively constructing knowledge together, rather than passively absorbing it from texts, lectures, and discussions.

In an earlier post, Ian advocated the benefit of meeting the Net Generation where they live (and learn) by designing educational policies that allow for generational differences. Personally, I’m a big fan of whatever works to get kids learning. If social networking, blogs and other Web 2.0 tools form an effective component (yes, component – I happen to think there’s even a place for the old fashioned lecture), then let’s use these tools to make sure kids are learning the knowledge and the skills they need to be successful in the workplace of the future.

In education, there is a focus (and rightly so) on developing life-long learners. For me, this process is about developing a citizenry who are engaged and able enough to use the tools at their disposal to get the information the need to be a contributing member of society.

Readwriteweb, one of the social communities currently beta testing on Blogrize, adds,

The way BlogRize works is by allowing members to join the community of their favorite blog or blogs. Within that community, the popular news stories are the ones recommended by the other readers of that blog. These stories will be a mix of not only that particular blog’s articles, but any articles the community thinks are interesting.

The idea is that, unlike websites like Digg which aggregate the opinion of the entire web, you can get a much more accurate picture of sites that interest me from a community of users who share my interests and who are, in essence, more like me. According the 2008 Edelman Trust Barometer, “people like me” – those who have similar interests and share a similar political outlook – have supplanted corporate CEO’s, government officials and doctors as the most trusted source of information.

In a early post, I wondered,

Does the emergence and growth of these integrated online services make it less likely that I’ll spend time wandering the halls of internet miscellany stopping on anything that catches my eye? My second question is how Yahoo!, Google or anyone else for that matter, know what I want from the internet if I don’t know myself?

Maybe the answer is that I don’t know what I want but people like me do. Instead of trying to wade through the collective opinions of thousands on Digg, maybe I’ll develop my own personal community of the like minded and they can tell me what to read.

This idea certainly has merit. There’s something to be said from having people track down things I know I would like but a website that only sources people with the same interests has the tendency to isolate a multitude of interesting, foolish and downright bizarre articles that are floating around the internet. Having only similar people decide what I should read is sort of like a popularity contest among clones. Sure we like what we see and sure we all get a nice pat on the back but we’re definitely missing out.

A very thorough wiki-based definition of the Web 2.0.

A piece by Thomas Hoffman, on whether or not corporate inertia prevents mass collaboration.

Nicola Morelli’s thoughts on design policy – contains some interesting thoughts on the impact of peer production in this space.

An interview with Don and some thoughts on Government 2.0

That one small message was enough to alert Buck’s friends in the U.S. to his plight and start the process of getting him released. Very quickly, both Berkeley and the U.S. Department got involved which resulted in the release of Buck from the hospitality of Egyptian penal system.

Twitter, which allows users to “communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?”  is a series of short messages (less than 140 characters) that act as a very basic status update or miniature blog.

The emergence and spread of technology has created a new era for government transparency. Youtube, cell phones and camera technology mean the borders of countries are now more open to the speculation of the world community. Earlier, Dan wrote a post on the role of citizen journalism in transforming government. In it, he wrote,

So whether it’s the use of YouTube (while under house arrest) or the blogosphere to help bring light to the situation in Pakistan, or the use of mobiles and the Net to help local councils literally fix themselves up, the public is increasingly able to enact greater scrutiny on the activities of government.

Will international scrutiny bring pressure on governments to change their ways? No one can answer for certain but what is certain is that more than ever, the world is watching.

Here’s a link to Don’s keynote address to the Horizon Foundation and some discussion they had following it.

An interesting post on the future of corporations and interactivity. I particularly the interactivity matrix.

Some thoughts on motivation through peer production.

Parts 1 and 2 of a post on how wikinomics can impact the future of public media.

Selling the value of blogs and wikis to organizations.

According to Koblin and Kawashima, “The project explores the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labor markets, “crowdsourcing,” “virtual economies,” and digital reproduction.”

You can purchase prints of the project directly from the website for, of course, $100. The proceeds of each print will be donated to the One Laptop per Child project which, as they point out on the project’s website, was formerly known as the $100 laptop.

As this project rightly points out, we’re just beginning to see the implications (and potential benefits) of breaking the mold and using non-traditional means of doing business. What I’d love to see is more companies and organizations that operate under an older and more rigid model explore projects like these. There are enough industries (music industry, I’m looking in your direction) who are struggling to maintain failing business models that the justifications not to try creative solutions are shrinking. This begs the questions, what would it take to push more companies in the direction of a project like this?

]]> http://www.wikinomics.com/blog/index.php/2008/04/18/100-worth-of-collaboration/feed/ 0 http://www.wikinomics.com/blog/index.php/2008/04/14/life-imitating-art-imitating-life/ http://www.wikinomics.com/blog/index.php/2008/04/14/life-imitating-art-imitating-life/#comments Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:44:33 +0000 Danny Williamson http://www.wikinomics.com/blog/index.php/2008/04/14/life-imitating-art-imitating-life/ I’m not a second life guy, per se, but I can see the appeal.  This however, struck me as down right strange. Marc Owens, a design student from London developed a system whereby users can don a costume called the “Avatar Machine” which comes complete with virtual reality goggles and a head-mounted camera that allows them to view themselves as the move around. In essence, they are becoming a third-person character in their own life. According to Owens, “The system potentially allows for a diminished sense of social responsibility, and could lead the user to demonstrate behaviors normally reserved for the gaming environment.”

It’s certainly an interesting experiment. There’s a lot that’s been written on the subject of how the anonymity of the internet has made it easier for people throw caution, good sense and manners to the wind. One needs only to scroll through the comments on any popular website to see the cutting remarks that often follow a post.

Conversely, while the internet makes it easier to be anonymous it also makes it easier to become an instant celebrity. A dark component of this growing celebrity is the growing trend of  people capturing violent acts in out in the real world and posting them online in an effort to achieve some level of fame.I’m curious to see if this project adds a component of academic study. It would be interesting to see if this “diminished sense of social responsibility” actually translates back into the non-digital world.  It would be interesting to see how the growing possibility of living the majority of your time online affects your interaction back in the “real world”.

The argument about whether or not the internet promotes violence is certainly a slippery slope and not one I where I profess to be an expert. One point I will concede however, is that the internet most definitely provides a venue for violence like never before. Do we do things in our second life that we would do in our “first” life?

Does the emergence and growth of these integrated online services make it less likely that I’ll spend time wandering the halls of internet miscellany stopping on anything that catches my eye? My second question is how Yahoo!, Google or anyone else for that matter, know what I want from the internet if I don’t know myself? Is my integrated online service portal only as smart as I am?

Well, this week, in further online consolidation news, Xoopit, a San Francisco-based company, has announced this week that they’ve developed software that turns your Gmail into a social environment.

GIGAOM has a great article on  the launch and what it means for social networking. The article’s author argues that,

 If you take two of the more popular social networks — Linked In (professional) and Facebook (personal) –- as examples, the amount of email generated by these systems (if you don’t want to spend your entire day logged into them, that is) is astounding.

So it stands to reason that if you could develop hooks to various social services from within your email inbox, your entire experience would be much easier to manage. This is Xoopit’s approach. It’s launching a Firefox plug-in that basically looks through your GMail and automatically imports information from major photo and video services such as YouTube, Flickr, Kodak, Shutterfly and Picasa Web.

In other words, if you receive a URL link from one of your friends via an email, the photos appear in what’s essentially a gallery view. Similarly, you can share your photo and video galleries with your address book contacts without making your friends go to different sites; simply clicking on a photo rearranges the layout of GMail to offer you the option to share. (Check out the gallery of screenshots.)

I’ve been doing some more thinking on this idea of consolidation online information. I use an rss feeder every day. I find it extremely convenient to track the ten or twenty sites I would normally visit most often and I enjoy not having to keep track of when my favorite podcasts get updated. There’s real value in being able to get all this information in one space.

But, and this goes back to go back to my post on Yahoo, I feel like consolidating everything into one  spot means I’m somehow missing something. It seems somehow that the more I become accustomed to having of my information brought to my digital doorstep, the more I feel information is slipping through my grasp. Then again, maybe I’m just paranoid; maybe I never would have found the information to begin with.

[Y]ou can increase your videos’ view counts and improve your popularity on the site. For instance, you might learn that your videos are most popular on Wednesdays, that you have a huge following in Spain, or that new videos that play off previous content become more popular more quickly. With this information, you can concentrate on creating compelling new content that appeals to your target audiences, and post these videos on days you know these viewers are on the site. (Maybe even post your next video in Spanish?)

I’m of two minds on this announcement. On the one hand, if I regularly posted videos to Youtube – I don’t – its easy to see how this could be beneficial. It allows you to do some very interesting research on who’s watching your video and tailor your videos to your audience. I also think it presents an interesting model for advertising. More sophisticated methods of tracking who watches a given video which can generate geographic and demographic information makes advertising much more attractive through Youtube.

However, on the other hand, it raises questions of privacy for me. It’s possible that I’m becoming privacy paranoid (see my post of a couple of weeks ago) but the amount of information about us and what we do online grows every day and is increasingly accessible. As John M. noted in a on my last privacy post, “Privacy, on the internet, is an illusion. Everything you do online is recorded somewhere, sometimes in multiple places.”

One thing that continues to amaze me is how little we value the privacy of our personal information online. The amount of information we are willing to provide to use services online is immense and our concern over divulging it seems to be almost non-existant.

An optimist could argue that we’re in the early days of something unprecedented—thanks to the web 2.0 the entire world is beginning to collaborate around a single idea for the first time ever: changing the weather. Climate change is quickly becoming a nonpartisan issue and all citizens obviously have a stake in the outcome. So for the first time we have one global, multi-media, affordable, many-to-many communications system, and one issue on which there is growing consensus. Around the world there are hundreds, probably thousands of collaborations occurring where everyone from scientists to school children are mobilizing to do something about carbon emissions.

In the end, he reluctantly assumes a more pessimistic perspective on collaborative climate change efforts for the time being. I myself, tend to agree with the idea that climate change has to many detractors and too many avenues to achieve a result to truly galvanize people in the same way as the Human Genome Project. However, and I’m changing my early opinion on this somewhat. Maybe the best way to approach combating climate change isn’t a worldwide collective project. The solution may lie, in fact, in the sum of many efforts across a variety of disciplines.

Today, the X Prize Foundation will announce the Progressive Automotive X Prize with the goal of producing a car capable of a minimum 100 miles per gallon – CNN’s website has a succinct description of how cars will be judged and the components required in each category. According to the foundation, the reasons for creating such a contest are as follows:

• Because today’s oil consumption is not sustainable – our current use of oil endangers our health, our economy, and the political and social stability of the world.
• Because 40% of world oil output fuels the automotive industry – and, in the U.S., 65% of oil consumption is in the transportation sector.
• Because automotive emissions contribute significantly to global climate change.
• Because there are few mainstream consumer choices for clean, super-efficient vehicles that meet market needs for price, size, capability, image, safety and performance.
• Because efforts by both the automotive industry and governments to increase fuel economy have not achieved the significant course change necessary to make a substantial difference.
• Because increases in engine efficiency have been “spent” on increased vehicle power, acceleration, and weight, rather than on increased fuel economy.
• Because we believe there is great opportunity for technological change.

What I like about their rationale, is that they don’t just appeal to climate change advocates. By addressing the geopolitical and economic implications of our dependency on oil, the project looks to appeal to those who otherwise might not support an “environmental” project of this kind.

Whether or not you believe climate change is an issue, you have to admire the ambition of the X Prizes. There’s something inherently good about trying to inspire people to think big and put some serious human intelligence towards solving complex problems.  Our history is littered with bright people who have made major discoveries with a little know and a little luck – it’s sort of like trying a round peg in a square hole only to find that round pegs happen to be twice as good as square ones. Ten million reasons to answer a question doesn’t hurt either.

Now that I’ve had time to think more on it, I think the way to address climate change may be to create incentive in a wide range of disciplines to inspire people to achieve creative solutions. Maybe this won’t create a project of the same scope as the genome project but maybe – and I stress maybe – a thousand small achievements in climate change will add up to something big. I could be wrong of course but given the serious nature of the challenges facing us, the more ideas out there, the better.

Let me start in Kentucky. Last week, Tim Couch, a state representative in Kentucky filed state legislation that would make anonymous comments made online illegal. Admittedly, his goal here is to crack down on online bullying in the State of Kentucky – a reasonable and admirable goal.  Having said that, there are a couple of things here that bother me. First, I’m not a lawyer but I’m fairly certain that violates some part of the United States Constitution -say the First Amendment. Second, I suspect that this would be prohibitively difficult if not impossible to enforce.

From Kentucky, follow me on over to India. Today RIM executives, service providers and governmental officials are meeting today to try and come to some agreement over the Indian government’s demands that RIM allow the government to intercept messages sent by Blackberry in matters of national security. I can’t help but feel that blanket assertions that governments need to restrict everyone’s privacy based on some vague idea of security is asking us to give up more than we gain.

Here’s my basic problem. Free speech is vital to democracy.  The internet has the potential to be arguably the greatest tool for free speech we’ve ever seen but that potential is always subject to the will of people who use it. If we fail to be vigilant the internet has a much opportunity to become an orwellian tool of oppression as a tool for free expression.

At first, it’s easy to dismiss the idea of a former celebrity (preacher, IRS person of interest, reality television star,…) jumping on the bandwagon of what’s “cool” and “next” to claw their way back into our collective consciousness after seeing net-based music efforts achieve massive success. But in an interview with Wired Magazine, it seems that Hammer is serious about creating a space for a community around one of his passions. In a Q and A with The Washington Post, he describes the difference between creating a social network and not simply using Youtube,

YouTube doesn’t have a community around it. You can watch a video and make comments about it, but dancing is about a whole culture. We want to be a repository for all things dance, a place where you can learn about the dance, watch it, put it in slow motion, rewind it, compete in competitions. 

This idea of an online community makes me wonder: at some point in the future, might we see the break up (or at least decline) of the massive networks (facebook, myspace, etc.) in favour of a series of smaller communities of interest? Perhaps we’ll see a social network aggregator that let’s you manage a number of different social networks in a single window allowing you to access multiple social networks at the same time. This would certainly help to address the problem of how to manage which users have access to which parts of your overall profile. In essence, from a central hub, you could invite users to any number of your networks. With the growing dataportability movement (read more here and here), this might not be as hard or as far away as you might think.

What surprises me, is that it needs to be said at all. Is there anyone anywhere who doesn’t understand what kind of trouble the old music industry model is experiencing. There’s more print and and bandwith devoted to the topic of its slow death every day than Gutenberg could have imagined in his wildest dreams  and yes, I can see the irony in writing that in a piece on the same topic.

Here’s just one example of the what I’m getting at. Last year 48% of U.S. teenagers did not buy a single cd – a ten per cent increase over 2006.  One estimate puts the ratio of illegal to legal downloading at 20 to 1. Clearly, it’s time to re-think things.

Cohen suggests a solution. He says that instead of wallowing in their desperation, the industry needs to be to be “wildly creative” and look a new models of doing business. I have a wildly creative suggestion. Instead of trying to swim up stream, all the time, the music industry could try getting with the program. Do I have a concrete solution? No. But there are success stories that the industry can look to for starters.

The success of Radiohead’s pay-what-you-want album is just one example of the music industry trying to drag itself into the 21st century. The digital market is only going to grow as legal downloads occupy an increasingly important and sizable component of revenue. It’s time the music industry took these fringe ideas and ran with them instead of trying to prop up a failing business model.

The music industry has got energy to spare. One needs only to look as far as the RIAA’s “energetic” pursuit of filesharers to see that. Maybe it’s time that the industry took a little bit of that energy and put it to use doing a better job of how to figure out how to do a better job.

The article says China will open up very limited parts of the “Great Firewall” in order to give visiting foreigners unrestricted access to the internet for the duration of the games. They’re able to do this because the Chinese Internet censorship system is precise enough that it can filter (or not) searches from specific IP addresses as well parts or all of any webpage – the Chinese are hoping to medal in this discipline in 2008.

The article goes on to quote Atlantic Magazine correspondent, James Fallows,

“What Olympic-era visitors will be discovering is not the absence of China’s electronic control, but its new refinement — and a special Potemkin-style unfettered access that will be set up just for them, and just for the length of their stay.”

Like its brick and mortar predecessor, The Great Firewall can’t keep what’s in in and what’s out out forever. This week, Bill Gates argued that the Chinese firewall can’t possibly withstand the forces of business. The argument goes that censorship is bad for business and if censorship is bad for business then business will breakthrough censorship barriers. Business is a powerful force and its influence can’t be denied but criticisms that companies (search engines, I’m looking in your direction) have been complicit in Chinese censorship efforts leave me somewhat skeptical.

What gives me cause for more hope is another New York Times article that looks at the internal pressure for change. The article details the story of Zhu Nan and Pan Liang, two Chinese internet users who are questioning the need for and extent of internet censorship in China. Mr. Zhu even used his blog to give tips on how to cirmcumnavigate the censorship system. Even more interesting is Du Dongjing who’s suing China Telecom for failing to acknowledge that it is blocking content.

With over 200 million people on the internet and growing global attention on China will the government be able to maintain a tight grip over information flow? Can the sophistication of the digital gatekeepers stop the information seekers from going over, under or through the wall? In the long run, my bet is on the people poking at the cracks in the wall.

“Will you be the brain behind the next great Web innovation? Do you have the drive to take your Firefox Add-on idea to the masses? Are you ready to affect everyday life for millions of people around the world?”

The three grand prize winners were:

The Minimap Sidebar Extension – This program, “gives you a suite of in-built maps and mapping tools for your web browser. Create and save a sidebar map using the addresses or address links you find on web pages (highlight then drag and drop), or by manually adding locations. View traffic Info, drag and drop kml files, local search, Google, Yahoo and Live Local directions, view in google earth, tagzania, platial, geourl and many more. Address/Location points are stored locally for later use.”

Sameplace Instant Messenger – An open source solution designed, “to manage all of your instant messenger conversations? Why not look to the browser? SamePlace is an extensible, multi-network instant messenger. It allows you to keep all of your conversations in one place – much of our time online is spent in the browser, so what better place to keep an eye on our contacts than the sidebar?”

Shareaholic – “Found something awesome online and can’t wait to pass it on? Tired of copying and pasting endless URLs? Shareaholic allows you to share, bookmark and e-mail web pages quickly without leaving your browser.”

The point here is not that these add-ons are cool – they are. The real takeaway is the way in which Firefox harnesses the talent within its community of users.  Granted, we’re not talking about a traditional business here but there are lessons to be learned from this model. In many instances, companies are stifling and punishing users who adapt their IP. Instead, if companies loosened their hold and allowed users to co-opt their products – and moreover, praised them for doing so – they stand to reap tremendous rewards. Instead of locking this talent out, companies could leverage it .

The web has the potential to be a great equalizer of opportunity. It’s a chance for people who have traditionally not had equal access information customarily reserved for those with the fortune or the fortunes to access it. ReadWriteWeb has posted an article on just such an enabler of equal information, MoveSmart.org.

The website argues that “[u]ntil now, information on neighborhoods has been buried in the back of academic reports, pinned to community center bulletin boards, and locked in data sets only available to planners, inaccessible to those who would benefit from it the most: housing seekers looking for a better neighborhood.” Focusing on the Chicago area, the site seeks to use social networks, mashups, forums and other tools to allow home seekers with limited resources to access better housing resources with the goal of economic and racial integration.

Community is a big deal. It brings people together, gives them something in common and gives them a reason to be concerned for each others’ wellbeing. Hopefully, this project is a success and prompts an expansion or similar programs in other cities. Hopefully, municipalities will embrace this type of solution as a means to revitalize parts of their cities that have fallen by the wayside and utilize them to build more vibrant, integrated communities.

You can watch a video of the organization’s vision for the project below:

The new search feature adds three new tabs to the traditional search: Info, Timeline and Map. This allows users to search for data, then stipulate specific measurements or information they’re looking for. After that, they can find data from a given month in a given year or go to a google map of key locations related to their search.

With the pool of human knowledge growing at expanding rates and the internet ballooning with knowledge, it becomes increasingly important for us to be able to find the information we want and to be able to interpret and express that data in meaningful ways. Will this be enough to help us better search through the mass of information out there or is it just a better mousetrap? Are you as curious as I am for the answer to those questions? Well, unless you’re interested in bioinformatics conferences, Thomas Jefferson or Koalas, you’ll have to wait until whenever Google gets around to launching this new feature.

This has the potential to be something really cool because I, for one, hate having to re-populate my lists of every account I create online. Here’s a question though, do we sacrifice anything through all this connectivity? I’m not sure. I do like that Google has specifically said that their API returns only public connections from public pages. But, that might not necessarily be the case in the future.

• The Cinequest Film Festival: a discovery festival of films and technology forums that was recently named the Top 10 festival in the world by the Ultimate Film Festival Survival Guide.
• Cinequest Distribution: delivering films to fans worldwide through cutting-edge Internet technologies plus DVD—while creating new marketing and business models for the Independent.
• Mentoring and Education: groundbreaking education and mentoring programs including Camp Cinequest.

As opposed to traditional film festivals that choose their films by way of a panel of experts, Cinequest asks filmmakers to post their films to a social media site where users vote on the submissions. The most popular films are then screened at the festival. You can see a selection of clips and films from the festival on Youtube.

Not everyone is wild about the new model of distribution. An article by the AP notes that, “the software they chose also enables illegal sharing of movies, music, software and other content. And that raises the ironic prospect of an up-and-coming filmmaker getting a legitimate distribution deal after succeeding at Cinequest, only to see his future work traded illegally using the same software that gave him his break. ”

I, for one, think this is a fairly shortsighted view of things. By and large, we’re not talking about films that are going to go on to become major blockbusters. The films shown here, and their filmmakers, are ones who would be unlikely to crack the public perception without the efforts of Cineplex and other like minded entities. I’m all for giving talented people a chance to show their craft and likewise letting moviegoers decide which movies are worthy of their time.

How Do has posted a note on the city council website for Manchester, England being voted the BT Online Excellence Awards best local government website.

Sponsored by BT, online respondents were asked, “We’re all increasingly using the internet as a way to find out what’s happening and interact with our local councils. Which is the best website to get information about what is happening in your area or about services available from your local authority?” The article goes on to quote Matt Walton, head of online channel development at BT, on the criteria behind the selections. He said, “[W]e weren’t interested in the technical aspects of the sites – just why users like them. As we suspected, the range of products or information available was the most important factor, followed by how easy it was to use.”

The council’s website does a number of things well. It makes use of a bevy of features that make government more accessible to citizens. It contains a consolidation of all of its local government services in one area, a Google mashup of important city locations, an RSS feed, blogs and social bookmarking capabilities. This is a great start. The real challenge now, is to begin to open up the content on the website and allow users to begin to define their own relationship with their government.

The council has taken steps towards government 2.0 but still has a way to go before it gets there. This brings me to my point: implementing Web 2.o within government is tough. There are barriers that simply don’t exist for companies trying to implement the same ideas. There is a political component to these projects that makes it difficult to initiate and sustain these projects. While I’m always slightly pessimistic about the eagerness of governments to adopt real change, I’m a huge fan of those who take the plunge and try. Here’s my question – often we say that the citizenry are a major driver of government developing web 2.o capabilities but aren’t they one of the biggest drawbacks as well? Isn’t the fact governments spend a great deal of their time figuring out how to keep electorate happy a major reason we don’t see nearly the amount of projects that might take a long time to complete, fail or both attempted? Are we willing to wait to get the services we really want?

They also have a number of interesting comparative tools on the report’s website. The Graph It feature allows you to compare up to five countries against a specific region while the Country Profile section lets you drill down and do some specific examination of an individual country. These tools have been invaluable in my eGovernment Fantasy League – any one interesting in trading for Burkina Faso?

There are a number of key takeaways in this report, from my perspective. First, the report emphasizes the central importance of the customer in the process of developing eGovernment services – always a good thing. The report also highlights the need for a number of key components in order to achieve results. Namely, country’s require adequate infrastructure, the ability of users to access government services on mobile platforms, basic literacy and internet abilities and a sufficient level of trust in the government as a service provider. It also focuses on the need to bring citizens into the policy development process.

According to the above criteria, the following countries scored in the top 10 on the Readiness Index:

A follow-up point from the survey:

It is worth noting that in this year’s Survey, there were no countries in the top 35 from the African, Caribbean, Central American, Central Asian, South American, and Southern Asian regions.

I’m certainly not suggesting that countries in these regions haven’t made significant gains. Barbados, Angola and El Salvador (to name just a few) are all examples of countries that are embracing the principles of eGovernment with great success. However, in looking from top to bottom on this list, there is significant disparity. The countries at the top have a plethora of resources to focus on eGovernment while others on the list have to contend with the basic needs of safety and security.

For me, the most important takeaway is this: Government 2.0 can fundamentally change the way citizens interact with their government – for the better. It allows for true citizen involvement in the creation of policy and responsive government services tailored to individual citizens. My question then is, how do we take the next step? How can the results of this survey be used to focus assistance and resources for further gains?

DataPortability – Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.

Dan Farber at ZDNET has commented on the announcement by Yahoo!, at the 2008 Consumer Electronic Show, that they were jumping into the competition to become your integrated web services provider in response to the efforts of Google, among others, to become customizable one stop shopping source for all of their users’ internet needs.

The aim of the project is to integrate Yahoo!’s existing services into a broader Web 2.0 offering with Yahoo! Mail acting as a hub while allowing for the integration of a wide variety of internal and third party applications in what Jerry Yang (co-founder and CEO of Yahoo!) calls, “life with an explanation point.”

Over on Wired.com’s blog, they’ve noted that Yahoo! seems poised to integrate OpenID as a means of integrating their applications using a single internet ID. Code was discovered on Yahoo!’s Flickr site that indicates that there’s already action behind the scenes towards making this a reality.

This leads me to a couple of questions. Does the emergence and growth of these integrated online services make it less likely that I’ll spend time wandering the halls of internet miscellany stopping on anything that catches my eye? My second question is how Yahoo!, Google or anyone else for that matter, know what I want from the internet if I don’t know myself? Is my integrated online service portal only as smart as I am?