I was just emailing someone and used the term blog years meaning the "new internet time" when I realised that blogging isn't speeding things up - it's slowing them down.

Reading blog postings means that suddenly I get things at the speed of minutes, hours, days.  Real, human, quantities that I understand.

Etienne Wenger is publishing in Shareware form a report on community supporting technologies.

One downside is that it doesn't seem to have been republished since March 2001 so glosses over Wiki (although noting it is an interesting technology) and misses blogging altogether.

Nevertheless it makes for interesting reading.

This looks like an interesting collaborative content management system for creating a blogging community "out of the box", especially suitable for HE and corporations perhaps?

A couple of sample sites

• ia/
• drop.org
• alted.co.uk

Worth checking out.

Dan Gillmor reports on David. P. Reed's ideas about opening up the Radio spectrum.  These idea's are interesting enough to warrant reading both the article and Reed directly.

What caught my eye though was the paragraph describing Reed:

"He's been involved in Internet technical details for several decades, and even has a ``law'' named after him. ``Reed's Law'' isn't as famous as Moore's Law, but it's a big one. The importance of the Internet, under Reed's Law, is at least as much about the formation of groups that communicate and collaborate as about person-to-person contact."

You can relate this to a previous article written by Reed which discusses among other things where the value is in a network, showing a transition from Sarnoff's Law (the value of a network is proportional to the number of viewers -- formulated for TV) through Metcalfe's Law (the value of a network is proportional to the number of people on the network) to the Group-Forming Law.

The Group-Forming law predicts that the value of a network is proportional to the number of 2-person grouping, 3-person groups, ..., n-person groupings which, when added up, means proportional to 2^n.  To quote from that article:

"The value in a Group-Forming network is constructed jointly, whether through discussion groups, through joint plans to buy something in bulk at low prices, or through some other means. "

Hossein Derakhshan: "There are about 1000 Persian weblogs."  [Scripting News]

Wow!

Keith Teare received a letter from Microsoft, which he published on his weblog, which among other things, demands that he stop publishing his weblog.   [Scripting News]

Yet another reason why we should all hope that alternatives to IE can be found and made popular.