Dreadlocks not withstanding, Jaron Lanier would be on, if there were such a thing, my short list of the smartest people on the planet. He's just written what will surely be a provocative essay for Edge.org (a favorite escape of mine from tech reading) against the "hive mind" that he finds in ascendancy on the Web. He uses Wikipedia as exempli gratia, but his real targets are the anonymity of wikis and the trend towards meta- and even meta-meta- sites. Although a bit beyond the focus of this weblog, I'd certainly recommend this provocation to anyone interested in how the Web is developing. Link: Edge.org.
Also see Ed Batista's Attribution Matters. Link: AttentionTrust.org.
Updated 6/5/2006:
Umair Haque takes issue with Lanier's thesis in 2½ posts. Don't leave this topic without reading this. See Research Note: The New Bourgeoisie (link: Bubblegeneration), Cold War (link: Bubblegeneration), and (More) Cold War (link: Bubblegeneration). --Dennis
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