*I used to have a lot of hope in crowdsourced collective intelligence, but I’ve come to realize that these networked wisdom-of-crowds entities are not very bright… they’re about as “smart” as, say, the helpful and publicly-minded Rotary Club. The WELL: State of the World 2011: Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky

But mostly my skepticism stemmed from the suspicion that the World Wide Web wasn’t, in essence, much more than a gigantic, unthinking Xerox machine (albeit with inhuman “memory”), and thus posed the same old threat to copyright and to the livelihoods of writers and publishers alike. I Won’t Hug This File — I Won’t Even…

Maggie Koerth-Baker at 4:37 PM Tuesday, Jan 18, 2011 The Atlantic turned its first profit in at least a decade, largely thanks to embracing the Internet. The owner of longtime rival magazine Harpers—who hates the Internet with burning fire of 10,000 suns and is, thus, not at all likely to be biased in his assessment…

*This is very much a science-fiction critical problem. *Here the issue is being tackled in a not-particularly-lucid translated Italian curatorese. http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=1953 How to Evaluate Science Art Projects | Beyond The Beyond