2008-02-03 Flickr and Del.icio.us

Is it time to free up some web 2.0 platforms ? If Yahoo! is really acquired by MSFT, we really need a good free platform replacing del.icio.us and flickr. I don't like to complain in my diary but maybe this bloody potential acquisition could shake up the social web to be more free and open ? Free alternative is always good but in the current stage large-scale web social platform (read : with a large user base) invest a lot in their hosting infrastructure. Is it sustainable for free social platform ? Where could they get the money to run their platform without turning the system to be proprietary ? That's still an open question. 10 years ago we had the same question for free software, we found solutions regarding the investment in free software. Maybe it's a new challenge for the free software/free information community ? finding new ways for investment in free social platform.

Update 10 Feb 2008 : Yahoo Board to Reject Microsoft bid If this is confirmed, that's already a good news. On the other hand, the issue of free information community still remains by their non existence. I just hope more free software around social networks including free infrastructure will pop-up in the future.

Tags: innovation freedom del.icio.us freesoftware yahoo microsoft

2008-02-10 Creativity Metrics Are Needed

Our world is ruled by metrics (not only in the patent system) and of course mainly in the financial world. When turning the radio on, the first sentence in the morning news is often :

"...a recession is possible as the index of [replace it with your favourite financial index] is going down of [replace with a float or an integer] percent..."

A simple lookup of recession and index in Google news give also "some" results. Everyday, we are in a continuous flow of data (please note, I'm not using the term information in this case) where percentages, index values and numbers are the keywords. Are those data useful or does it give any insightful information ? Maybe but that's not my point. My point is about the negative effect of this flow information every morning… Is that motivating us for doing a better work ? being creative at work ? Not really. Often those numbers are detached from reality because they just depend of the perception held by the people making those numbers. Those numbers are often just influenced by the volume of buyer-seller of a stock. We don't really have a large influence on those numbers (except when you have large volume of stocks to sell or buy but that's not really common).

But, wait a minute, why not creating other indexes where people (you and me) have more influence to make it tangible ? Indexes are just made out of convention and used by convention. Working on a simple rsscount in the RssAny project to make creativity index from anything that generate a RSS feed is still in my to-do list. But that could be starting point to have more human indexes and metrics…

Tags: innovation patent metrics creativity positivism

2008-02-17 Protecting Biodiversity Is Illegal

Protecting biodiversity is illegal, at least in France, following the last court decision made by the state against a small non-governmental association called kokopelli. Kokopelli is a small association selling seeds to gardeners like us, we are using their seeds because they sell old type of plants/vegetables difficult to find somewhere else (e.g. like a climbing variety of tomato plant). All the seeds sell by them are also non-hybrid that means you are free to make your own seeds from their seeds (the basic idea behind preservation and conservation of the biodiversity). Of course, large seller of seeds prefer to sell F1 hybrid to keep the gardener dependent.

In that context, Baumaux (a large seller of seeds) attacked kokopelli for unfair competition and at the end (as the court case was in multiple rounds) the large seller won. They won due to the stupid regulation that forces to sell only seeds being listed in an "official" directory.

It's a bad news for the preservation of biodiversity… what can we do ? Share and preserve your seeds. and don't buy seeds that you cannot duplicate for free.

biodiversity gardening kokopelli seeds

photo made by Stefan Jansson and CC licensed.