| Saturday, November 9, 2002 |  |
| Meetup |
 I just discovered Meetup.com. Great idea, which actually seems to be working. It is simply a system that facilitates that people meet likeminded folks in their local area. You can choose from many different topics, and meeting dates have already been set, and you can vote on what location you prefer. I signed up for futurists and webloggers to see what will happen. It seems that part of what makes this work is the team behind it. I.e. there are real people behind it, who pay attention to how to build up these various areas. The trick is in how to hit the ground running. Many people will not show up for something unless they're pretty confident that a bunch of other people will, and that it will be successful.[ Culture | 2002-11-09 23:59 | 6 comments | PermaLink ] More > |
| Collaborative Proofreading |
 Project Gutenberg is a non-profit organization that maintains an online archive of a large number of freely available books. For example, the many classics that now are in the public domain. Distributed Proofreaders is a project that supports Project Gutenberg by spreading out the work of proofreading the texts that are on their way into the archive. The work gets farmed out to many online volunteers who will receive pages that have been scanned, and send them back with corrections. Charles Franks, the originator of the effort, asks for as many people as possible to commit to doing a page a day. Look at the graph on the page. He put out his request for more people on SlashDot two days ago, and now the number of volunteers are skyrocketing. [ Culture | 2002-11-09 23:59 | 2 comments | PermaLink ] More > |
| Tidal Energy |
 The small far north town of Hammerfest in Norway is the first to put a sub-sea tidal energy plant into production. It is a relatively tiny 300kW plant, but it is a start. Underwater tidal forces is a huge untapped resource, in part because of the difficulties in installing turbines in those exact areas that have the most tidal current.[ Energy | 2002-11-09 23:59 | 3 comments | PermaLink ] More > |