Comments on: Social News

By: P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » Towards open social news (and social networking) sites

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 00:31:54 +0000

[...] Read the whole article here. [...]

By: autonomo.us · Social Networking

autonomo.us · Social Networking — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 21:32:11 +0000

[...] few weeks ago, I wrote a post here about the state of Free Network Services for social news. I think we’re moving forward in that area. I’ve got a very initial implementation of [...]

By: evan

evan — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 18:30:29 +0000

I don’t do mathematical modeling, touch up photos, or run a PBX, but I’m very glad that there’s Free Software for people who do want to do these things. When people are using proprietary network services, AND those network services are immensely influential on the Web, we need to sit up and take notice — not turn our noses up.

As a side note, I’ve started a new site, http://criti.ca/ , which is a Pligg implementation. I’d love to have some participation from people who care about Free Network Services. This is definitely in the “alpha” stage, and needs a lot of work. I need to figure out how to add a CC-by-3.0 license to the data, but after that, I think it’s an OSSD-compliant site. It still needs a federation component, of course, for a more distributed model. But this is a first step.

By: Criti.ca

Criti.ca — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 18:26:51 +0000

autonomo.us · Social News...

Social news Web sites have become a staple of many people’s Web experience. Examples include Reddit, Digg, Mixx, Yahoo! Buzz and Propeller. In my opinion, a flagship free network service for social news could be an important part of an open software ...

By: mako

mako — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 19:58:30 +0000

Yeah, I have to agree with Luis on this one.

By: aindilis

aindilis — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 18:38:20 +0000

I’m definitely interested in helping, though I have many projects so I can’t be uber dedicated. Can you start a mailinglist or something, and offer us a hosted server?

By: luis

luis — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 16:15:06 +0000

I’m not dismissing it as trivial, I’m dismissing it as unhealthy for society. I mean, yes, all things considered, if it is going to be popular, I’d be happier if it were open, but I’d also be happier if cigarettes had fewer additives, since they are going to be popular too despite their overwhelmingly negative impact on individual health, collective healthcare burden, and my personal airspace. That doesn’t mean I’d recommend anyone I know go work for the cigarette industry.

By: evan

evan — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 15:37:29 +0000

I just checked — user-contributed mixx.com data is also in the public domain. That makes two great sources of data (along with Digg) for a Free service.

By: evan

evan — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 15:13:24 +0000

@luis I think it's probably a bad idea to dismiss important and popular network services as trivial just because we don't like the idea personally. For years, in FLOSS, we made this mistake with WYSIWYG document editors, GUIs in general, threaded software, and the Web. When we turn up our noses at some parts of the network services world, we concede control over those services to proprietary forces, and leave kajillions of users without autonomy.

I'm going to work on a post about Free Network Services for pornography, by the way.

By: luis

luis — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 15:11:02 +0000

Tools for more efficient groupthink! Yay!

(I mean, I’m glad they are autonomous services, but all of these sites that I’ve seen so far are just brutally lacking from a deliberative perspective- they’re shouting contests and/or groupthink tools.)