One of the best comments on software patents was Freedom of Speech in Software by Phil Salin.
They had a little trouble with the proof-reading in Shape Shifter. Just make these substitutions:
The Electric Community=Electric Communities
Reno=WorldsAway
Doug Crawford=Douglas Crockford
muses=MOOs
And, yes, we really are the Eisensteins of this medium. They couldn't print it if it wasn't true.
You can find very sensible stuff on computer mediated markets at Project 2000.
The Cyberporn Debate was concerned with critical issues of disinformation, manipulation, and distortion, and the response of a Net community in identifying, exposing, and correcting the situation. What remains is an important hyper-document, a prototype for an emerging form of community journalism. The state of the Net is still pretty primitive, but this gives us reasons to be optimistic about the future of citizen news gathering and analysis. Can an informal community get and report a complex story more accurately than, say, Time Magazine? Yes. Absolutely yes.
Vannevar Bush was Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development. In the July 1945 edition of the Atlantic Monthly, he published a popular science article entitled "As We May Think." Bush described a device called a "memex", a sort of workstation with vast optical storage and mechanical information retrieval using associative indexing and "trails". The article is of interest today not only because he happened to get pretty close to how the future finally turned out, but also for the fresh perspective from a time before interactivity itself had been invented. It is also curious to see what he got wrong. Unlike present day Visionaries, he completely failed to anticipate the dominance of Microsoft Windows on the PC.
The Hyper HitchHikers have an unexpected encounter with Neal Stephenson and me on 07/13/95. (You can login as electric. The password is password.)
Douglas Engelbart was working in the field of social computing long before the field existed. We still have a long way yet to go. There is still much to be learned from Engelbart.
More links:
Douglas Crockford's Wrrrld Wide Web