Summer Reading List

Updated 5/31/08 - Like The Wealth of Networks, Two of these books are also available online: Two Bits and The Future of the Internet - and How to Stop It.

Here’s my summer reading list. Tell me what I’m missing.

• The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It, by Jonathan Zittrain
• Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, by Clay Shirky
• Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World, by Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu
• Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software, by Chris Kelty
• Designing For the Social Web: Voices That Matter, by Joshua Porter

It’s a bit heavy, I know, but this is the kind of stuff I find interesting.

What are you reading this summer? What key new text have I left out?

BarCamp Boston 3

Shimon Rura’s email today reminded me that BarCamp Boston is fast approaching again. Third week in May we should easily avoid the snowstorm which put something of a crimp in BarCamp Boston 2.

In case you’ve been somehow able to escape the increasing presence of *camps, BarCamp is one of the earliest and one of the best. It was on the occasion of BarCamp Boston (the original) that I started blogging, though to be fair you shouldn’t hold them responsible for that.

Here’s an hCalendar microformat of the event info:

Read more about BarCamp, view schedules, and learn how you can participate, by visiting the wiki at http://2008.barcampboston.org/.

Open Social is not Social Network Portability

I’ve been struggling since OpenSocial was announced last week to figure out how to put into words what exactly I felt was missing. I feel like I’m seeing lots of people reacting to the announcement describing what they want OpenSocial to be, not what it actually is.

(People I’m reading on this include my colleague Sebastian Wohlrapp, Marc Andreessen, Josh Catone, and Jeremiah Owyang - of course there are a gazillion others as well).

Did I miss something somewhere in the API documentation or the Campfire Video? (It has been a busy few weeks, and I would be happy to be wrong).

As I see it, in short: Open Social is not Social Network Portability. It’s social network widget portability.
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Social Network Just for Two

Best thing I’ve seen this week: Ze Frank’s Social Network song (mp3 format direct link) set to animation: Social Network Just for Two by Shaun Moriarty

No embed code, so you’ll have to go there to see it.