I seem to have collected a rather lot of links that I think and hope you'll find as interesting as I have. (Some of these are old, but still relevant):
In the vein of my economic/political posts of late, I came across the blog of Alexandre Enkerli, a nifty anthropologist and ethnographer that I found via identi.ca. Who says microblogging doesn't have value? In anycase I have a couple of links, first a complaint against journalism, as a field, to which I'm incredibly sympathetic. I should probably write some more about journalism, both with regards to its social impact, but also about ongoing collapse of the journalism business. More importantly, however, Enkerli wrote an interesting piece about "a global network of city states" about government and institutional organization, which I rather liked. I've been thinking recently about institutions and governance as a part of the series on co-ops, and I think I'm going to make a foray into something more governmental here, soon.
Moving on from the economy, a couple of posts from futurismic which is one of my favorite blogs that I don't read enough. It's in the boing-boing vein, but Paul Raven is made of awesome, and I enjoy the niche. In anycase, this is a bit older, and it's a post announcing another post where Douglas Rushkoff suggests that the economy isn't worth saving. And then another from a few days later about the fantastic nature of the us economy.
I'm not sure how I feel about Rushkoff's theories, and I certainly don't think he's the theoretical oracle of the networked age, but his thinking inspires pretty interesting thoughts, even if it's semi-orthogonal. Can things be semi-orthogonal?
Finally new territory. I've been reading ultrasparky since, gosh, 2000 or there abouts, I think. Dan (sparky) wrote a post where he contemplated the recent history of blogging and in doing so expressed pretty much exactly how I feel about the current state of blogging. Read it, it's good stuff.
And, oh look here, it's a yet another Drupal-based, niche social networking site targeted at 20 and 30 something technologist-types. You're probably uninterested, but it's my niche, damnit. Also speaking of my niche, there's a new social networking site for gay/queer geeks/nerds, calld doorq.com. For those of you who care, I suspect it's running on DotNetNuke.
And now for some miscellanea: mongodb, a database engine that doesn't have schemeas. like couchdb, only, less erlang. It all depends on how it gets used, of course, but I think Erlang is a good thing for couch, but who knows. Also: a bibliography of academic resources related to teaching and learning in second life. And an academic journal about information technology, policy, and culture (with an Australian focus), called fibre culture. I was particularly interested in this article about Schizoanalysis as Metamodeling, because I still have a lot of affection for Deleuze and Guatteri and their theories.
Finally an article, by O'Reily Editor Andy Oram, called From Open Source Software to Open Culture: Three Misunderstandings. And then a debate about the emacswiki. For background, EmacsWiki is really a working document and a discussion of different approaches--emacs already has a good manual, so the wiki fills a different niche. The wiki, as a result is very rough, coverage isn't consistent across areas, some pages are basically discussions while others are more formal documentation, and the software is simple while the design is straight from the late 90s. I think it's brilliant, but not everyone agrees.
That's all I have right now. Enjoy!