Neil Macintosh in the Guardian takes a similar view to yesterday's piece, but raises something that a couple of other commentators have mentioned.

This could create friction. Some net users already suggest Google is becoming too powerful, too much a gatekeeper to the net's riches. This news is hardly likely to allay their fears: will the dominant search engine start discriminating against Weblogs run on Moveable Type systems, or those hosted at UserLand?

You might think that:

• After the hiding that Trent Lott and a compliant, unquestioning media took from the Blogosphere
• After the embarrassment dished out to the same media by the Blogosphere over the "Astroturf" Letters (At least the Boston Globe had the good grace to admit it
• After the fiasco over Tony Blair's "dossier" on Iraq that was lifted, errors and all from Internet documents and not even credited Downing St admits blunder on Iraq dossier
• After the old guard of information control stepped on all these rakes between December 7 2002 and February 7 2003

The SATN site contains a host of really useful thinking from a bunch of very clued up, and deeply experienced people when it comes to the Internet, what it is and how it works. One of the Bloggers, Bob Frankston, is having trouble, both technical and contractual, but above all, conceptual, with his service provider.

One of my many news sources is ZNet which occasionally talks about stuff like books that its commentators have published. This note from their email list today is very instructive.

Yesterday I sent a message about the new Parecon book from Verso. Your response caused the book to go from number 2,423,754 on the Amazon sales
list to number 38 and still climbing on that list in less than twenty four hours.

And for those who haven't yet visited the book page for Parecon: Life
after Capitalism, please do give it some of your time

Emergence, great idea, although I prefer the old Charles H Fort formulation of it. When It's Steam Engine Time, It Steamengines. Looks like its about time for a whole new burst of inventiveness and innovation to bubble to the surface.

Today alone I have come across these stories in the Blogosphere that all seem to be lurking around the same set of ideas:

• How Warchalking Died by John S. Rhodes

  The purpose of this article is to explain how Warchalking has become obsolete. It is being replaced by Wi-Fi Zones that are being fueled by home networks, corporate networks, and even pay phones. The Internet will be all around you in all places but you won't ever need to care about Warchalking. Let's bury the idea and move along.

  Warchalking always seemed a bit anachronistic, sort of like your favourite Telco, but I couldn't explain why precisely; this does. Done, lets move on.
• Dave Winer reminds us that he predicted Blogging in !995, any takers for an earlier prediction? Billions of Websites
  

  Every new website begets more websites. If I have one, I want my friend to have one, so I can point to it. And so they can point to my site. Someday I'll be able to walk a network of friendships, automatically knowing that each of us has mutual friends. It'll be cool.

  Yup, give the man the money.
• Hal Macomber laying out the specs for a sort of tool that I want my Newsreader to become (Did I mention Awasu is excellent? Oh, OK) Proposal for a P-Log Specification A Project Team Tool for Lean/Agile Project Methodologies

  The idea of a free-form rich-text team-based project collaboration environment has been around for quite some time. The solutions for a persistent collected place for asynchronous communication are now viewed as an obvious tools for teams. However, we've been recreating the same environment with different programming tool sets. The project Weblogs is envisioned as a team-based circumstance-driven, even idiosyncratic, environment for supporting history-making. Yes, project teams make history. Out of nothing they create something. Successful teams innovate, learn, and evolve along the way. However, success is not the usual outcome for teams. All too often teams get discouraged, drift from their purpose, are disengaged or detached from one another and their customer, and oh...then go on to something else before finishing. The p-log can be the instrument the team uses to keep their focus during the game.

  And a whole lot of ideas for releasing information from documents and enabling it to be recombined in any number of ways and presented through whatever medium I require, the data format adapting to the transmission mode. (Remember "Being Digital"? Might happen yet, I live in hope.)
• The brilliant Jon Udell weighs in with a little tribute to Groove founder Ray Ozzie

  ...his teams have always pretended to build application software. But what they have actually delivered are the operating systems of the future -- years ahead of schedule. The XML business Web is only now achieving the architecture that Lotus Notes laid down 15 years ago: message-oriented exchange of semi-structured documents. As today's operating systems catch up with that paradigm, Ozzie is tackling the next set of challenges in Groove: drop-dead simple secure collaboration, presence management, coordination of user and device identities, and ad-hoc group formation.

• Ross Mayfield does a nice, concise summary of the discussion invigorated by Clay Shirky a couple of weeks ago about the application of Power Laws to the Blogosphere. (Nope, got to find an abbreviation for that, maybe "BS")
  Amplifying New Signals.

  Steven Johnson, author of Emergence, and other things, asks the right question: ...So the question that I'm wrestling with is this: let's say we decided that the existing power-law distribution isn't quite fair enough, or that there's some other justification for encouraging a more egalitarian spread (equality of results, and not just opportunity.) If we decided that this was our goal, how would we go about doing it? What architectural changes would fight against the power law trend, without doing it in a command-and-control kind of way?
  Clay's piece suggests that perhaps the distribution is inevitable, but I doubt it. Clearly, to get a more even spread, there has to be a mechanism that amplifies the signal of new arrivals, since the 80/20 split is usually the result of early arrivals getting a disproportionate share of subsequent links... Amplifying new signals, Dave Sifry's approach, is invaluable. But lets also recognize that helps the medium's health for publishing (Political Networks), while communication (Social Networks) and collaboration (Creative Networks) remain. And the real question is when social and creative network activity generate phase transitions into the political network.

• Ross also has a key headline to his story on the Gooblogger merger, he calls it The annotated Web
  This is crucial, it shifts the idea of metadata away from the author and starts to focus it on the user/ reader/ publiciser. The publisher can, at best, tell me what this document is about, but their evaluation of its worth, which is its main attraction, is not trustworthy, its interest is conflicted. We need better tools for enabling the "annotation" of resources.
• Which, as it happens, is exactly what Fleming Funch is talking about in Give me personalized collaborative ranking.
  He wants what I want;

  The Google PageRanking mechanism is the most successful collaborative ranking mechanism there is, but what I want is to do a personalized version of that kind of thing, based on choices I've made about other people, other websites, or about anything else, like books or movies or brands of shampoo. I want not just to get the aggregate 'best' choices, chosen by all websites in the world. I want the best choices by people I know, like, respect or trust, or by the people that they again know, like, respect or trust. And I want a similar, complicated huge matrix calculation that adds all of that up, just for me. And for you.

  Yes, exactly that.
• Which feeds right into something I first encountered years ago when I read Awakening Earth: Exploring the Evolution of Human Culture and Consciousness by Duane Elgin. ISBN:0688116213
  I'll leave you to check it out but what he proposed was a concept that when systems reach certain levels of complexity, higher order effects begin to arise. The question that has haunted me since then is "what happens when the Internet reaches that level of complexity?". Will we have the perceptual tools to even register effects on a planetary scale? The along comes the Peace march phenomenon and...
• Joi Ito on Emergent Democracy, also by Ming. Nice synopsis including this passage; "

  ...[T]he tools and protocols of the Internet have not yet developed the necessary features to allow emergence to create a higher-level order. These tools are being developed and we are on the verge of an awakening of the Internet. This awakening will facilitate the anticipated political model enabled by technology to support some of the basic attributes of democracy, which have eroded as power has become concentrated within corporations and governments. It is possible that new technologies may enable a higher-level order through emergent properties, which will enable a form of emergent direct democracy capable of managing complex issues more effectively than the current form of representative democracy."

  yes, again.
• Peter Kaminski has his 2c worth on the topic as well. With an interesting rundown of the tools.

  Simultaneously, we were using freeconference.com for voice, Greg's ARSC for chat, and Socialtext's new access-controlled public Workspace wiki (hi! socialtext.com is live!) for note-taking and collaboration persistence. We identified the need for a mailing list, and of course, there will be blog entries, a TopicExchange pingpoint, etc. Jerry M., David I., the red/green virtual cards in ARSC worked beautifully -- thanks for that tool/process. and the process. Joi Ito moderated, and pushed towards a convergence of interest on tools for emergent democracy rather than any particular political viewpoint, while still trying to let the group's sense of itself self-organize.

• Then as if to sum it all up, David Weinberger dropped in with the fascinating The Internet is not a thing, Its an Agreement which is summed up, but by no means summarised by the axiom "Webhead Good. Greedhead bad." Huge YES