Cory Doctorow discusses Clay Shirky's new book "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations". See the presentation. given at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

The appropriate time, that is, for him. Having turned over his mental life to a computerized system, he refuses to be pushed around by random inputs and requests. Naturally, this can be annoying to people whose messages tend to sift to the bottom. "After four months," Biedalak says sadly, "you sometimes get a reply to some sentence in an email that has been scrambled in his incremental reading process." Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm

I'm listening to a Churchill Club event Silicon Valley Fights Back Against the (Information) Monster it Created. 22:15 "I can decide if certain people send me too many messages that they declare important but I'm completely uninterested and I can stop listening to them. I can leave them in my pocket. I can leave them on my computer and walk away." "And your pocket fills up. The problem is we don't know how to contain ourselves and that makes it harder for us to filter given the present state of technology... Lotus Notes gives me a big blue (hehe) dot if the message is addressed to me." 23:41 "Is there an etiquette that gives us permission to say no?" "I have friends that IM me all times of the day and night and if I ignore them that's fine." "You have an expectation that someone will respond in a timely fashion ... dilutes the value of the network." 28:53 "I think there is an implicit social contract in that if I ask you a question and you don't answer that rude. I think generationally that's changing in that the younger you the less that might be the case." "Couple of Harvard Psychiatrists who have using the phrase Acquired Attention Deficit Disorder" 31:02 "Today we generated 60 billion emails five years ago we generated not even 60 billion emails in year ... half the estimated it has cost 1 billion dollars a year in throttled due to information overload"

I've spent some time developing software to analyse an email discussion list. Now Google has come out with their own version.

There was no need to do any housework at all. After four years the dirt doesn't get any worse. - Quentin Crisp 1968 The Naked Civil Servant. I seemed to remember that he also said in an interview that the more important or useful objects in his living area didn't get dust on them. I also remember an office tip about dealing with papers in your in-tray. Put a dot on each one you consider in your in-tray each time you process it. After awhile items you really should do something about will have lots of dots. You should probably archive them.

An interesting product that relies on e-mail identity is Spam Arrest. It filters based on identity and keeps disallowed messages in a mailbox for seven days. Today I got a heap of bounces from all over the place. A spammer has been using my address. Filtering on identity isn't enough.

Sarah Perez Where to Find Open Data on the Web. There is a fair bit of agitation about access to data produced by governments. The Australian Bureau of Statistics used to have a policy of user pays but now makes much of its data freely available via the internet.

In a blog entry by Steve Steinberg Group think he discuss lots of interesting terms like "human terrain mapping", "crowd theory" and "social simulation". He notes Isaac Asimov wrote stories about psychohistory which allowed the prediction of the future of large groups of people in a similar way that the action mass of atoms can be predicted. The co-incident was I watched the Einstien Factor tonight where one of the contestant's special subject was Asimov's Foundation Series. I remember reading a short story along these lines. I've found the Wikipedia article about the story.