"Silicon Valley entrepreneurs glom on to one idea en masse, often resulting in a run of overlapping, if not entirely duplicative, incarnations of one core concept. It happened with location-based platforms, group messaging apps, group buying services, and daily deals. The latest such insta-trend is in the apparent reinvention of social bookmarking sites, as a slew of new players have flooded the interwebs, each with its own take on improving what Digg, Reddit, and Del.icio.us set out to do several years ago (and still do, to some degree)."
@1 month ago with 1 note
#social media #innovation #online networks
"With the rise of popular fiction appearing on ereaders, I think the paperback will be the first to go and all that will be left is the “curio” hardback. Then I look forward to a half decade of the publishing industry scrambling to stem piracy and flail wildly at consumers, then hardware manufacturers, then finally settle into the long-fall doldrums the music industry is now facing."
@4 months ago with 1 note
"He and Ms. Landemore suggest that reasoned discussion works best in smaller, cooperative environments rather than in America’s high-decibel adversarial system, in which partisans seek to score political advantage rather than arrive at consensus. Because “individual reasoning mechanisms work best when used to produce and evaluate arguments during a public deliberation,” Mr. Mercier and Ms. Landemore, as a practical matter, endorse the theory of deliberative democracy, an approach that arose in the 1980s, which envisions cooperative town-hall-style deliberations. Championed by the philosophers John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas, this sort of collaborative forum can overcome the tendency of groups to polarize at the extremes and deadlock, Ms. Landemore and Mr. Mercier said."
@7 months ago
