Author Cory Doctorow posted his new SF novel, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" for free download. The results: "24 hours after launching the site from which you can download my novel for free, the book has been downloaded over 20,000 times. It's been Slashdotted, blogged to hell and back, and I've done a number of press interviews about it. What's more, the title is currently sitting at #304 in the Amazon Sales Rank. Let's call this one a success. I could not be more stoked. Damn." I can confirm his experience. I posted the entitre content of my textbook, "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited" online in April 1997. The Web sites has had more than 2 million page views hitherto. My publisher is selling c. 3000 print copies and 400 e-books a year. The book is ranked 1000-2000 at the Barnesandnoble.com. Not bad. [FOS News]

Well, here's one more link for you, Cory.

I have been using PersonalBrain everyday and for extended periods of time each day for several months now. This morning one of the PersonalBrain Forum guys stated:

 This spurred me into action to analyze the way I have been using PersonalBrain. After completing this analysis, not only do I think there are personal ways of using PersonalBrain, but there are also different patterns of use according to what one is doing.

I have identified at least seven different ways that I have used PersonalBrain over the past several months. Here is my list of seven different ways of thinking with PersonalBrain. I am sure there are possibly more. Why I consider there are seven different ways of thinking is that there are very distinct patterns of thought organization that lead one back to consider what process caused those different patterns to occur.

1. Associating
This pattern of PB thinking is rather much like connecting dots to make a picture. I think of a word or phrase, then another and set a relationship between those two thoughts. Then, I think of something else and it has a relationship to these two ideas and so on. After awhile, the pattern becomes very complex and everything becomes intertwined. A good example of this is in the Text Chunk Library Brain as shown in the diagram below:

2. Categorizing
Another way I think with PB is to think in Categories. This item an now seeing or thinking about belongs into this category, or that category. For example in researching Google for my Googlology Site, I set up several different categories to place my information as can be seen in the following diagram:

The difference between Categorizing and Associating is that with each thought I add in this Plex, I jump from one "Topic" thought to the other to put thoughts in their "correct" category. This type of thinking produces a far less complex Brain when all thoughts are simply left as belonging to a category. However, when I begin doing some associating after all the links are in under their respective categories, then the plex becomes far more complex. So, in reviewing my practice, even though I may start categorizing, in the manner shown in this diagram, I then can revert to associating to get more inter-relationships going.

3. Ordering
Another way I think with PB is ordering a set of thoughts. I do this particularly when planning a set of chapters in my Rapid Text Construction technique. This I consciously number each thought so that they fall into some sort of order. This particular Plex is from my current Google Tutorial I am preparing to work some ideas with people who are new to Google. I have a logical order in which I wish to show them the different Internet pages about Google.

4. Synthesizing
Synthesizing is usually an activity I do once I have a number of thoughts in place through any of the other methods. I tend to work my way from the main thought upwards and try to link many thoughts into the one thought. You can see the results of this activity in the Plex on the Board of Directors of Google:

5. Detailing
Detailing is where I start from a thought and try to get every little detail of a subject listed under the thought. This can lead to either a Plex full of thoughts below the main idea, or it can lead to many different levels of thoughts under the main ideas. There is nothing really to show in terms of a Plex that is anything different to what you have seen, but rather it leads to many more different levels deep down away from the main thought.

6. Contextualizing
This is where I specifically use a jump thought to change contexts. Here in my main thought is the context of "Brainstorming" where everything is associated loosely in some manner. Now I am going to jump to the context of planning a Tutorial, as can be seen in the picture two above from here, where there is the tutorial and then all the ideas off to the left in the other context. I can have loads of different contexts from the main thought, all indicated by that jump away from the main thought. Here in this Plex you can see two jumps that are two new contexts -- one is where I pull together an example book using chunks from the text chunk library and the other is a jump where you could create your own book from text chunks.

7. Summarizing
This is the kind of activity I do starting from a jump thought. In its own section I start pulling some of the ideas together from the research done to date. These all tend to be main ideas from which many other thoughts are detailed that come from throughout the whole body of research. This is another way of looking at the information. What tends to arrive here are highly complex plexes that arrive at some stage to a central idea from which all others tend to be connected.

Maybe there are other ways of working with PersonalBrain. I hope this starts lots of discussions about using PersonalBrain.
 

Phillip Pearson is in the process of creating the Internet Topic Exchange (http://topicexchange.com). This is a service that enables anyone to easily create blog channels like Lazyweb.org, Blogpopuli, and KMPings. Once a channel is set up, people can send links to their weblog posts to it using TrackBack or using a simple form. The resulting feeds can be read on the web and they are also available as RSS. To see what it looks like, have a look at the new "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" channel.

Matt Mower: "What Phil has done is to implement a very simple, elegant, solution along the path of the BlogPlex idea I've been working towards.  With the Topic Exchange, it will be simple for users to cluster around topics simply by using them."

This is indeed, I believe, a good way to facilitate group-forming among bloggers. Hopefully, people will set up channels corresponding to interests close to their heart and will subscribe to them. As I have pointed out earlier, this is a sociality-driven way of building what has been called "shared categories", "shared topics", or "distributed metadata".

One way to see it is that this extends the notion of RSS feeds. An ordinary RSS feed is easy to listen to, but "hard" to speak into. Blogchannels correct the asymmetry by making it easy both ways. Phillip has also put up what he calls a vague history of the concept.

Whose Opinion Counts?
In Google Village .info Site today:

Maybe, Google has a competitor who will locate a competing principle of structure that goes beyond the simple link. Perhaps Teoma has something with subject-specific popularity. Maybe Seb's Internet Topic Exchange concept has an importance in building subject-specific nodes that then can be used to rate the importance of sites to one another?

Use PersonalBrain 3.0 for Presentations!
In PersonalBrain.info we look at making presentations with PersonalBrain 3.0:

PersonalBrain is a tool with which to think. And it is the location where I organize my files, store links from across the Internet and is the center of my research and text production. Awhile ago I wrote an ebook on my text production strategies organized with PersonalBrain [Build eTexts Faster and Better Using Rapid Text Construction Techniques.] Now, in this article, I wish to explain to you how I organize PersonalBrain to use this very flexible tool to make presentations.

The Supreme Court has ruled 7-2 against the petitioners in Eldred v. Ashcroft. (See Lessig's blog and the Eldred site for official news and responses.)

What now? Creative Commons marches on as before, but with a pronounced sensitivity to the need to offer copyright holders who want to forgo long or broad copyright protections a simple way of doing so -- whether by dedicating works to the public domain, or allowing the creative re-use of copyrighted works with our licenses.

Press Release: FAST and Espotting Media Strike European Search Distribution Agreement

FAST, a leading developer of search and real-time alert technologies, and Espotting Media, Europe's largest pay-per-click advertising network, today announced a two-part European agreement where Espotting will offer FAST web search results with its paid listings, as well as provide paid listings on AlltheWeb™, FAST's showcase site.

Read on for the release in full.

Forget the Global Village, we live in the Google Village [The Technacy Log]

Since Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase in the 1960s, we have been aware of individuals how see themselves as living in a “global village” and where we see signs of people now culturally moving towards being a member of a ‘global village’ (see Rogers, 2002). One of the hopes for the internet was that at last here is a medium whereby this “global village” would be realized. On following Marshall McLuhan’s analysis of media the internet with its decentralized manner of organization could be a candidate for promoting this concept of a ‘global village’.