People have a harder time coming up with alternative solutions to a problem when they are part of a group, new research suggests.

Scientists exposed study participants to one brand of soft drink then asked them to think of alternative brands. Alone, they came up with significantly more products than when they were grouped with two others....

The researchers speculate that when a group of people receives information, the inclination is to discuss it. The more times one option is said aloud, the harder it is for individuals to recall other options, explained Krishnan, associate professor of marketing at Indiana University.

Large, multinational, hierarchical corporations are not designed to provide customer service. They are designed to maximize margin and profit for senior executives and major corporate shareholders, by charging the customer as much as possible and giving them as little as possible. Under their charter (and under threat of dismissal or legal charges if they defy it) they can do nothing else; they are tied to this model of operation and decision-making. Worse, they have to grow each year or die. The model is inherently unsustainable, and Fortune 500 companies all, inevitably, crash and burn.

All Natural Enterprises need to do is focus on meeting customers' evolving unmet needs effectively. Talk to anyone who is buying from a small business with no growth aspirations, instead of from a 'competing' large hierarchical corporation, and in so many words they will tell you that is why. The chart at the top of this page summarizes the 10 enormous advantages a Natural Enterprise has over a hierarchical corporation, when it ignores all the absurd conventional wisdom (about growth, external financing, advertising, huge risk, endless struggle, the need to do everything yourself etc.) and just focuses on meeting customers' evolving unmet needs effectively.

As my book explains, doing this takes a lot of work, but it is low-risk, low-stress, low-cost, joyful work. It is the antithesis of what most people do (even those who should know better) when they actually start to establish their own business.

There is no 'open market' or 'free market'. We live in the most tightly-controlled oligopolistic economy in history. These oligopolies buy politicians (and hence subsidies and favours), corner supply, buy up competitors to eliminate competition, and blanket the media with an unprecedented and relentless flood of propaganda called 'advertising'. We don't want to compete in that market, and we don't want to 'expand'. Growth is unsustainable, period. What we do instead is outmaneuver. We're better off starting businesses wherever there is a significant, researched, evolved unmet customer need that we have the competencies, knowledge and resources to fill. Every sector, every market has lots of them.

A new crowdsourcing company, called Cambrian House, launched this week. The idea is pretty straightforward – open source software development minus the free labor. It's a little hard to evaluate whether Cambrian House can develop competitive applications in an increasingly crowded market, but I'm impressed with the degree to which they've thought out the model. I also like that they intend to put the crowd to work at three separate tasks: 1) originating the ideas; 2) evaluating the ideas; and 3) developing the code itself. A lot of the discussion in the media and the blogosphere since my original article came out has focused on the last of these functions -- I suppose because it's easiest to get one's head around--when in fact the crowd's ability to distinguish between fodder and folderol is, to my way of thinking anyway, the most fascinating and perhaps useful aspect of the crowdsourcing model (as well as being one of the only areas in which crowdsourcing does in fact overlap with peer production, in that the labor can only be performed by the collective.) It's also hard not to be won over by the egalitarian spirit that seems to animate Cambrian House, even if it's a little eerily reminiscent of the It's-Good-to-be-Good-Especially-if-We-Can-Make-Gobs-of-Cash-in-the-Process zeitgeist of the late '90s. At any rate, I look forward to following Cambrian House's development, and wish them the best of luck. One question guys: Will the source code created by the crowd remain open to the crowd after it's launched, or is that contingent on the client?

Claudia Menashe needed pictures of sick people. A project director at the National Health Museum in Washington, DC, Menashe was putting together a series of interactive kiosks devoted to potential pandemics like the avian flu. An exhibition designer had created a plan for the kiosk itself, but now Menashe was looking for images to accompany the text. Rather than hire a photographer to take shots of people suffering from the flu, Menashe decided to use preexisting images – stock photography, as it’s known in the publishing industry.

In October 2004, she ran across a stock photo collection by Mark Harmel, a freelance photographer living in Manhattan Beach, California. Harmel, whose wife is a doctor, specializes in images related to the health care industry. “Claudia wanted people sneezing, getting immunized, that sort of thing,” recalls Harmel, a slight, soft-spoken 52-year-old.

The National Health Museum has grand plans to occupy a spot on the National Mall in Washington by 2012, but for now it’s a fledgling institution with little money. “They were on a tight budget, so I charged them my nonprofit rate,” says Harmel, who works out of a cozy but crowded office in the back of the house he shares with his wife and stepson. He offered the museum a generous discount: $100 to $150 per photograph. “That’s about half of what a corporate client would pay,” he says. Menashe was interested in about four shots, so for Harmel, this could be a sale worth $600.

After several weeks of back-and-forth, Menashe emailed Harmel to say that, regretfully, the deal was off. “I discovered a stock photo site called iStockphoto,” she wrote, “which has images at very affordable prices.” That was an understatement. The same day, Menashe licensed 56 pictures through iStockphoto – for about $1 each.

iStockphoto, which grew out of a free image-sharing exchange used by a group of graphic designers, had undercut Harmel by more than 99 percent. How? By creating a marketplace for the work of amateur photographers – homemakers, students, engineers, dancers. There are now about 22,000 contributors to the site, which charges between $1 and $5 per basic image. (Very large, high-resolution pictures can cost up to $40.) Unlike professionals, iStockers don’t need to clear $130,000 a year from their photos just to break even; an extra $130 does just fine. “I negotiate my rate all the time,” Harmel says. “But how can I compete with a dollar?”

· Copyright and patent protection may impose costs on consumers of between $80 and $120 billion a year, compared to a situation in which all software was available at its competitivemarket price. The pure efficiency loss to the economy could be in the neighborhood of $70 to $110 billion a year. These losses dwarf estimates of the losses from other forms of protectionism, such as tariffs or quotas on imported goods;

· A substantial portion of the resources devoted to software development are currently wasted due to IPRs. This is a result of the fact that IPR protection leads to unnecessary duplication, as developers have substantial incentive to produce software that simply replicates the function of existing software. In the absence of IPR protection, developers could better spend their time improving existing software. IPRs also provide incentives for software locks and secrecy, which impede the process of software development. It is likely that a substantial portion of software development (possibly a majority) is misdirected as a result of the market distortions created by IPRs;

· IPRs also lead to large amounts of waste by providing incentives for rent-seeking activity. This waste includes expenditures for advertising and marketing, and payments to lawyers and lobbyists. Those enjoying IPR protection have also been able to impose costs on third parties, for example by requiring Internet Service Providers to monitor activities or universities to take steps to reduce the amount of unauthorized copying of IPR protected material on their premises. IPR holders have also secured laws that restrict the development of software and hardware designed to support better searches and digital reproductions;

· There are feasible alternative mechanisms for supporting software development. One mechanism outlined in the paper would create a “Software Development Corps,” which would be a series of competing government funded software corporations. An annual appropriation of $2.1 billion (approximately 0.08 percent of federal spending) should be enough to support the work of approximately 20,000 software developers. The government should be able to recoup most, if not all, of this money through the lower price it will pay on the computers and software it purchases. The remaining benefit would be the equivalent of a tax cut to consumers in the range of $80 to $120 billion a year. This money would provide a substantial stimulus to the economy and lead to the creation of millions of jobs.

"Today I want to talk about categorization, and I want to convince you that a lot of what we think we know about categorization is wrong. In particular, I want to convince you that many of the ways we're attempting to apply categorization to the electronic world are actually a bad fit, because we've adopted habits of mind that are left over from earlier strategies.

I also want to convince you that what we're seeing when we see the Web is actually a radical break with previous categorization strategies, rather than an extension of them. The second part of the talk is more speculative, because it is often the case that old systems get broken before people know what's going to take their place. (Anyone watching the music industry can see this at work today.) That's what I think is happening with categorization.

What I think is coming instead are much more organic ways of organizing information than our current categorization schemes allow, based on two units -- the link, which can point to anything, and the tag, which is a way of attaching labels to links. The strategy of tagging -- free-form labeling, without regard to categorical constraints -- seems like a recipe for disaster, but as the Web has shown us, you can extract a surprising amount of value from big messy data sets."

1. The Internet is fundamentally about openness, participation, and freedom of expression for all -- increasing the diversity and reach of information and ideas.
2. The Internet allows people to communicate and collaborate across borders and belief systems.
3. The Internet unites families and cultures in diaspora; it connects people, helping them to form civil societies.
4. The Internet can foster economic development by connecting people to information and markets.
5. The Internet introduces new ideas and views to those who may be isolated and prone to political violence.
6. The Internet is neither above nor below the law. The same legal principles that apply in the physical world also apply to human activities conducted over the Internet.

i believe we are close to the point where people will start to be organized online into a 'peopleweb' where browsers will surf and search through people not pages. i will attempt to describe the what, how and why below.

what is the peopleweb? as more people take on 'open' identities online, that can be crawled, found and linked to with bits of semantically organized data like 'profile', 'about me' or 'my tribes or groups', there will soon be an ability for search engines to organize people into relevant groupings. the key relevance here will be based on two intersections; people's group affiliations so that i can quickly find experts in flying bonanzas in baja and people's credibility which may be estimated in a number of ways from how 'linked' you are to who you're linked to to slashdot type ratings if they evolve to work in an independent fashion.

how will the peopleweb happen? along with my vision of the revolution of the ants, the big portals will all succumb to their audience's desire for openness and transportability of online identities. people will no longer choose to invest in a profile that is locked into msn or friendster (or tribe). just like email had to be free and compuserve lost out to aol, so too will profiles. we already have this with blogs. my company, tribe.net, will soon be launching open profiles which will let people compbine elements of their blogs with social and community networks. this will occur with virtually every site, where users will decide who has access to what, whether it's by degrees of separation or group affiliation. this wont be decided by my company, friendster, linkedin, yahoo's new thing etc...

what will the peopleweb enable? well, imagine a future where the network acts as one database. you will tell the web that you are single and what your dating criteria is. your dating profile will only be shown to those people (so no more daily humiliation of your sisters and friends snickering that you describe yourself as a tall dark handsome romantic). kinda unhappy with your job. no problem. tell the network you're available for jobs paying over $150k, vp level, and maybe you want to limit to a few companies or block them. wanna organize a poltical revolution without leaving your home? just tell the network you are into 'emergent democracy' and 'legal revolution' (possibly through group tags) and you will automagically be connected with all the other archair revoultionaries.

1. There can be no ongoing discourse without some degree of moderation, if only to kill off the hardcore trolls. It takes rather more moderation than that to create a complex, nuanced, civil discourse. If you want that to happen, you have to give of yourself. Providing the space but not tending the conversation is like expecting that your front yard will automatically turn itself into a garden.

2. Once you have a well-established online conversation space, with enough regulars to explain the local mores to newcomers, they’ll do a lot of the policing themselves.

3. You own the space. You host the conversation. You don’t own the community. Respect their needs. For instance, if you’re going away for a while, don’t shut down your comment area. Give them an open thread to play with, so they’ll still be there when you get back.

4. Message persistence rewards people who write good comments.

5. Over-specific rules are an invitation to people who get off on gaming the system.

6. Civil speech and impassioned speech are not opposed and mutually exclusive sets. Being interesting trumps any amount of conventional politeness.

7. Things to cherish: Your regulars. A sense of community. Real expertise. Genuine engagement with the subject under discussion. Outstanding performances. Helping others. Cooperation in maintenance of a good conversation. Taking the time to teach newbies the ropes.

8. Grant more lenience to participants who are only part-time jerks, as long as they’re valuable the rest of the time.

9. If you judge that a post is offensive, upsetting, or just plain unpleasant, it’s important to get rid of it, or at least make it hard to read. Do it as quickly as possible. There’s no more useless advice than to tell people to just ignore such things. We can’t. We automatically read what falls under our eyes.

10. Another important rule: You can let one jeering, unpleasant jerk hang around for a while, but the minute you get two or more of them egging each other on, they both have to go, and all their recent messages with them. There are others like them prowling the net, looking for just that kind of situation. More of them will turn up, and they’ll encourage each other to behave more and more outrageously. Kill them quickly and have no regrets.

11. You can’t automate intelligence. In theory, systems like Slashdot’s ought to work better than they do. Maintaining a conversation is a task for human beings.

12. Disemvowelling works. Consider it.

13. If someone you’ve disemvowelled comes back and behaves, forgive and forget their earlier gaffes. You’re acting in the service of civility, not abstract justice.

Tensegrity is a term used in architecture.

What is tensegrity?

“The word ‘tensegrity’ is an invention: a contraction of ‘tensional integrity’. Tensegrity describes a structural-relationship principle in which structural shape is guaranteed by the finitely closed, comprehensively continuous, tensional behaviors of the system and not by the discontinuous and exclusively local compressional member behaviors. Tensegrity provides the ability to yield increasingly without ultimately breaking or coming asunder”
Richard Buckminster Fuller (excerpt from Synergetics, p. 372.)

The tension of the different parts of the structure gives the structure its strength. Separately each part is a burden on the structure. Together the parts make the structure strong.

Tensegrity structures are distinguished by the way forces are distributed within them. The members of a tensegrity structure are either always in tension or always in compression.

The United States has a similar tensegrity.

Rhizome: expanding underground root system, sending up above ground shoots to form a vast network. Difficult to uproot.

We're tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They've made us suffer too much. All of arborescent culture is founded on them, from biology to linguistics. ...

Arborescent systems are hierarchical systems with centers of significance and subjectification, central automata like organized memories. In corresponding models, an element only receives information from a higher unit, and only receives a subjective affection along preestablished paths. ...

Accepting the primacy of hierarchical structures amounts to giving arborescent structures privileged status ... In a hierarchical system, an individual has only one active neighbor, his or her hierarchical superior. ... The channels of transmission are preestablished: the arborescent system preexists the individual, who is integrated into it at an allotted place. ...

Many people have trees growing in their heads, but the brain is more like a grass than a tree.

Any point of a rhizome can be connected to any other, and must be. This is very different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order. ...

The rhizome is an anti-genealogy. ...

The rhizome is not amenable to any structural or generative model. It is a stranger to any idea of genetic axis or deep structure. ...

The rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory or central automaton, defined solely by the circulation of states.

To be rhizomorphous is to produce stems and filaments that seem to be roots, or better yet connect with them by penetrating the trunk, but put them to strange new uses. ...

Form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of flight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of consistency.

"Write to the nth power, N-1, write with slogans: Form rhizomes and not roots, never plant! Don't sow, forage! Be neither a One nor a Many, but multiplicities! Form a line, never a point! Speed transforms the point into a line. Be fast, even while standing still! Line of chance, line of hips, line of flight. Don't arouse the General in yourself! Not an exact idea, but just as idea (Godard). Have short-term ideas. Make maps, not photographs or drawings. Be the Pink Panther, and let your loves be like the wasp and the orchid, the cat and the baboon. As they sing of old man river:

He don't plant tatos
Don't plant cotton
Them that plants them is soon
forgotten
But old man river he just keeps rollin
along.

A rhizome doesn't begin and doesn't end, but is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo."

A specter is haunting the world: the specter of Peer To Peer. The existing economic system is trying to co-opt it, but it is also a harbinger of a new type of human relationship, and may in the end be incompatible with informational capitalism.

Generally, a peer-to-peer (or P2P) computer network is any network that does not have fixed clients and servers, but a number of peer nodes that function as both clients and servers to the other nodes on the network. This model of network arrangement is contrasted with the client-server model. Any node is able to initiate or complete any supported transaction. Peer nodes may differ in local configuration, processing speed, network bandwidth, and storage quantity. One of the first uses of the phrase "peer to peer" is in 1984, with the development of the "Advanced Peer to Peer Networking" architecture at IBM.

P2P is not just the form of technology itself, but increasingly, it is a "process of production", a way of organising the way that immaterial products are produced (and distributed and "consumed"). The first expression of this was the Free Software movement launched by Richard Stallman. Expressed in the production of software such as GNU and its kernel Linux, tens of thousands of programmers are cooperative producing the most valuable knowledge capital of the day, i.e. software. They are doing this in small groups that are seamlessly coordinated in the greater worldwide project, in true peer groups that have no traditional hierarchy. Eric Raymond's seminal essay/book "The Cathedral and The Bazaar", has explained in detail why such a mode of production is superior to its commercial variants.

Please also remember that peer to peer is in fact the extension of the methodology of the sciences, which have been based since 300 years on "peer review". Scientific progress is indeed beholden to the fact that scientists are accountable, in terms of the scientific validity of their work, to their peers, and not to their funders or bureaucratic managers. And the early founders of the Free Software movement where scientists from MIT, who exported their methodology from knowledge exchange to the production of software. In fact, MIT has published data showing that since a lot of research has been privatised in the U.S., the pace of innovation has in fact slowed down. Or simply compare the fact of how Netscape evolved when it was using Open Source methods and was supported by the whole internet community, as compared to the almost static evolution of Internet Explorer, now that it is the property of Microsoft.

One has of course to ask oneself, why is this emergence happening, and I believe that the answer is clear. The complexity of the post-industrial age makes centralised command and control approaches, based on the centralised control, inoperable. Today, intelligence is indeed "everywhere" and the organisation of technology and work has to acknowledge that.

And more and more, we are indeed forced to conclude that peer to peer is indeed a more productive technology and way of organising production than its hierarchical, commodity-based predecessors. This is of course most clear in the music industry, where the fluidity of music distribution via P2P is an order of magnitude greater, and at marginal cost, than the commodity-based physical distribution of CDs.

This situation leads to a interesting and first historical analogy: when capitalist methods of production emerged, the feudal system, the guilds and the craftsmen at first tried to oppose and stop them (up to the physical liquidation of machines by the Luddites in the UK), but they largely failed. It is not difficult to see a comparison with the struggle of the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) against Napster: they may have won legally, but the phenomenon is continuing to spread. In general, we can interpret many of the current conflicts as pitting against each other the old way of production, commodity-based production and its legal infrastructure of copyright, and the new technological and social practices undermining these existing processes. In the short term, the forces of the old try to increase their hold and faced with subverting influences, strengthen the legal and the repressive apparatus. But in the long term the question is: can they hold back these more productive processes?

Evolution's Arrow also argues that evolution itself has evolved. Evolution has progressively improved the ability of evolutionary mechanisms to discover the best adaptations. And it has discovered new and better mechanisms. The book looks at the evolution of pre-genetic, genetic, cultural, and supra-individual evolutionary mechanisms. And it shows that the genetic mechanism is not entirely blind and random.

Evolution's Arrow goes on to use an understanding of the direction of evolution and of the mechanisms that drive it to identify the next great steps in the evolution of life on earth - the steps that humanity must take if we are to continue to be successful in evolutionary terms. It shows how we must change our societies to increase their scale and evolvability, and how we must change ourselves psychologically to become self-evolving organisms - organisms that are able to adapt in whatever ways are necessary for future evolutionary success, unfettered by their biological or social past. Two critical steps will be the emergence of a highly evolvable, unified and cooperative planetary organisation that is able to adapt as a coherent whole, and the emergence of evolutionary warriors - individuals who are conscious of the direction of evolution, and who use their evolutionary consciousness to promote and enhance the evolutionary success of humanity.

The central problem is that most of the existing peer to peer emergence is based on the surplus created by the present economic system, and that many forms of peer to peer live from the wealth created by this system, being unable to sustain themselves independently. I am personally not convinced yet that peer to peer can sustain itself economically, and so are many of its proponents. Which is the reason why many peer to peer oriented theorists point to the need of a "generalised citizen wage", which would replace all existing transfers (unemployment, etc..) and allow for a generalisation of peer to peer activities, based on the surplus generated by the money economy.

These far-flung developments have all been driven by Pro-Ams -- committed, networked amateurs working to professional standards. Pro-Am workers, their networks and movements, will help reshape society in the next two decades. ..

In the developing world, Pro-Ams are solving a historical scarcity of professional resources. The Grameen Bank, founded by Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi economics professor, trains barefoot bankers to deliver loans to people earning less than a dollar a day. This Pro-Am workforce makes it possible to cost-effectively administer 2.8 million loans worth more than $4 billion. Had Grameen relied on professionals, it would have reached a tiny proportion of the population. ..

Astronomy used to be done in national "big science" research institutes. Now it is also done in global, Pro-Am, open-source collaboratives. There is still a huge gulf between amateur astronomers and theoretical astrophysicists. But the line between professional and Pro-Am astronomers has become fatally blurred. Much the same will happen in other fields.

Some professionals will find that unsettling; they will seek to defend their monopolies. The more enlightened will understand that the landscape is changing. Knowledge is widely distributed, not controlled in a few ivory towers. The most powerful organizations will enable professionals and amateurs to combine distributed know-how to solve complex problems.

Pro-Am activity will continue to expand. Longer healthy life spans will allow people in their forties and fifties to start taking up Pro-Am activities as second careers. Rising participation in education will give people skills to pursue those activities. New media and technology enable Pro-Ams to organize.

Marxism argues in favor of collective production and against monetary rewards out of political belief that capitalism is inherently exploitative. The way to ensure a just society is collective production where production is organized and rewards are distributed fairly through central planning. But centrally planned collective production proved inefficient and corrupt.

The first puzzle about open source peer production isn't whether or not developers have marxist political beliefs, but why it works, especially since the Marxist collective model failed miserably.

This is what Benkler explains elegantly. Coase's Penguin builds on the theory of Ronald Coase, who explained in the 30s that firms exist when the cost of separate transactions with many independent parties is greater than the price-efficiency of a competitive market. The problem Coase was trying to solve at the time was to explain the persistance and dramatic growth of centrally managed corporations, if a market is an ideal way to allocate economic resources.

Benkler solves today's version of the same problem. If money is the ideal way to incent and co-ordinate production, why are we seeing the persistence and dramatic growth of production methods that don't use money?

Benkler explains that commons-based peer production is more efficient than either firms or markets for information goods, where the costs of communication and distribution are low, and the difficult problem is allocating human creativity. When there are masses of potential contributors, and it's easy to participate in little chunks like an open source plugin or a wikipedia article, the best way match skills and work is a million little decisions by independent contributors.

Mandatory, Marxist-style collective farming doesn't benefit from these resource allocation efficiencies. Workers on collective farms have pre-defined work and can't leave. Collective farms don't gain the benefit of unique, voluntary contributions by thousands of distributed workers.

Another attribute of political marxism is an belief in mandatory equality. Peer production projects often have a meritocratic culture with dramatic inequality, where founding leaders and high-value contributors have greater prestige, influence, and sometimes financial reward. It's not considered inherently unjust that leaders of open source projects like Perl and Python have received grant, foundation, and corporate funding to do their work (although visible leaders of peer projects can also become lightning rods for criticism).

Another marxist value is opposition to a money economy. Cash is seen as a symptom of the alienation of workers from the products that result from their labors.

Clearly, the motivation of many thousands of open source, wikipedia, livejournal, and other peer content producers is non-monetary. But is it anti-monetary?

Benkler deals with the incentive question in the excellent third section of Coases Penguin. Benkler makes an astute distinction between activities where money is commonly thought to be an inverse motivation (sex), and where it is seen as complementary (sports, music). Many people who like basketball would love to be NBA stars. By contrast, most people who like sex would not like to be prostitutes.

"Hypertasking is excessiveness," says Patricia Arredondo, associate professor in Arizona State University's graduate counseling program. "It's overload in the sense of having your brain trying to respond to a number of stimuli at the same time, and that can really start to cost you."

Researchers argue that the brain isn't wired to do more than one thing at a time without loss of efficiency and quality.

In a recent study at Harvard University, psychologist Yuhong Jiang studied the brains of students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as they performed "extremely easy tasks." When the students were asked to identify a letter and a color simultaneously, it took twice as long as when they did each task separately. In addition, brain activity diminished.

"When the brain tries to do two tasks (at once), instead of increasing activity it has decreased activity," Jiang says. "It's not as efficient."

Jiang's research, published in the June issue of Psychological Science, adds to a growing body of science that shows the downside of doing too much at once.

"How much can we push one part of the brain to do two things (at once)?" he asks. "Mother Nature didn't think we'd be sitting at a computer with four windows opened and the phone ringing. It's a cultural invention."

But then, so was reading, he notes. "And now we all read."