Wikitravel.

Wikitravel.org is a new collaboratively developed world-wide-travel-guide.  A wonderful use of wiki technology, inspired by Wikipedia.

Check out Itineraries such as One Month in Southeast Asia which is a great example of the strength of a wiki structure.  Will be interesting to see if pages that start as copies of the CIA World Factbooks, such as the Gaza Strip, will evolve to include on-the-ground travel alerts.

Its content is available under a Creative Commons license, who blogged it.  Its just getting started, so give them (you) a hand.

[tip 'o the hat to Adina]

[Corante: Social Software]

this is a great use for a tool like a wiki.

New wiki location, and a cry for help…. I’ve been playing at reestablishing wikis using our spankin’ new server we bought for our instance of CAREO, and set up a new location with the beginnings of a stylesheet. Still very much a work in progress, though I’m hopeful… [Object Learning]

from the comments:

Hey Brian, this looks great. I couldn't help myself – when presented with a wiki page the temptation to hit the edit button is too great – and added a new page

wiki addiction: a new page is a horrible thing to waste!

wiki addiction: inability to leave pages unmolested

wiki addiction: the cruel joke of the wiki pushers upon the world

you know who you are:)

April 15 16, 2004
University of Surrey, England

The rapid adoption and diffusion of mobile devices over the past decade has
transformed the way information is generated, organized and communicated
about individuals and their lives. The construction of new mobile data
profiles and of mobile, informatic selves, hold the potential to transform
what is organizationally and interpersonally meant by privacy,
individuality, community, risk, trust, and reciprocity in a mobilizing, and
globalizing world.

In order to examine these transformations, the RIS:OME project at the
University of Surrey is hosting an international, interdisciplinary
conference to address emerging social and cultural relations of mobility,
privacy, identity, information and communication. This conference will
bring together academic, industry and policy researchers and practitioners
to critically address how mobile information and communications
technologies structure relations of privacy, security, trust, power,
identity and difference.

There are a number of questions that inform the themes of the conference.
In what ways, for example, do mobiles reconfigure the relations of trust,
risk, privacy and reciprocity embedded in organizational and interpersonal
data sharing? In what ways do mobiles contribute to the construction of
identity and of the 'information self'? What is the relationship between
mobile data and the individual? Who owns and controls the emerging,
individualized mobile data image? What roles do consumption and consumerism
play in the social relations of privacy, trust and security? Is the
development of mobile technologies associated with emerging relations of
risk, uncertainty and privatisation?

What social, cultural and regulatory factors have influenced the generation
of mobile data in different countries? How do these factors influence
culturally specific understandings and practices of globalized and
transnational privacy, risk and trust? Are regimes of information sharing
and data protection patterned along axes of development and
underdevelopment? What roles do national differences and political
economies play in the construction of emerging mobile data relations? How
are politics reconfigured within and between countries via mobile data
technologies and changing mobilities?

What critical approaches can be brought to bear on our understanding of
diversity, difference and resistance in the generation of mobile data? How
can we account for the rapid uptake of mobile devices, and the development
of mobile data sharing, both now and in the future?

We seek to bring critical perspectives to bear on the development and
widespread uptake of mobile technologies and developments in information
sharing and data profiling over the last decade. The conference organizers
thus invite papers presenting empirically grounded and theoretically
informed analyses of the social changes that mobile technologies and their
data relations have brought about. Suggested themes could include, but are
by no means limited to:

- risk, trust and power in mobile information ownership, control, access
and management

- culturally specific patterns of informational trust and privacy

- organizational structuring of mobile information paradigms

- data subjectivity and the construction of identity through mobile
technologies

- mobile communications and emerging regulatory environments

- privacy enhancing technologies, their problems, paradoxes and
possibilities

- privacy advocacy in the mobile environment

- organizational and interpersonal information sharing

- the lifecycle of mobile personal data: its generation, integration,
profiling and mining

- mobile surveillance, security and globalization

- mobile data protection, data subjectivity and knowledge

- information gathering and social memory

Papers and panels are invited that address the conference themes.
Submission of Abstracts: 500 to 700 words, 31st Oct 2003
Notification of acceptance of papers: 15th Dec 2003
Registration Deadline: 30th Jan 2004

With the support of Intel Corporation, and the Department of Sociology at
the University of Surrey.
Paper length: 20 minutes. Panel presentations encouraged.

The Distributed Library Project lists the personal …. The Distributed Library Project lists the personal book, movie, and music collections of participating users. You log on, find somebody near you with something you want, make contact, and borrow it from them. Apparently it launched in April, in the San Francisco bay area, and now has 160 users. (Thanks to LIS News.) [Open Access News]

this is what ben franklin did, its a great idea to take into the digital age..

Great Mammon's Organisms. Is the GM Food Business trying to nobble independent scientific inquiry? Scientists on the UK Government's GM Science Review Panel, say they have been threatened and bullied to provide pro-GM opinions.
(Meanwhile Tony Blair is reigning in his zeal for GMO's, it seems for entirely political reasons.) [MetaFilter]

this is the sort of thing that should make people rant and rave, but i doubt you'll hear much of it at all. i mean i like shrimp dna in my tomatos, and so should you….. and we demonstrate that because market subidies will eventually make them much cheaper than 'organic' tomatos and thus we'll buy them cause they are cheaper. mmmm, mmmmmm gooood.

Future of Software.

Always On has a three-part interview with Sun's Jonathan Schwartz (Parts 2 3). I like his interview because he elucidates his points very well. Some of his comments on the future of software:

I think [the software industry of the future] will look more like Hollywood than like Microsoft. Because the single biggest content driver is games. Across the planet, Java-enabled data services are, for consumers, primarily an entertainment outlet. So you should expect Electronic Arts and Lucas Films and Disney to be major players in the consumer network outlets. Sony as well.

[A mining company] CEO figured he could have his seepage application, which is a very simple forms-based application, show up on a mobile device. He could use Nextel's network or Verizon's network and reduce the number of devices his people carry down to one. That was an opportunity for him to gain efficiency. He was using Linux on his handset to do it, and he was running Java and our infrastructure on the back end to manage the analytical capability. That to me is representative of the enterprise side of this, which is improving the business infrastructure within the next two to three years.

[E M E R G I C . o r g]

this is another interesting tidbit that might make its way into my work so I'm saving it, yes I am, don't try to stop me….

Michael Simkin posted this to the Cultstud-l list the other day and i just took it. as an acknolwedged critic of Sokal and Bricmont, having 'allegedly' laughed so hard milk came out my nose when a colleague told me in a very serious tone that they certainly grasped the issues at the heart of the critique of science….. This is not to say they are not brilliant, but I put them arena of brilliance as the postmodern generator..

In any case, this essay compares their essay to Lenin's “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism”, i scored a 58% prolly in part because i've never read the Lenin, but it is all good fun and also provides those who think that the science wars are a 'new thing' some context to past critiques.