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1. For whom is all this free work being done? Bill Thompson wrote a fairly compelling argument recently against the whole google books project. Why is one company getting the benefit of everyone's work? Presumably this is one way in which we pay for free service, but in doing so we're cementing the monopoly on knowledge that one organisation is close to achieving. The internet as a brutal free market is one issue, the internet as a winner-takes-all market is another.

2. Whatever happened to Project Gutenberg? I know they still exist, but why does Google get all the press coverage? Total dominance of the market for journalist's attention?

Also, the moon shots involved a lot of people spread all across the USA. Communications made this possible, but The Great Wall of China was built over similar distances without such technological assistance. While the internet undoubtably makes things easier, I think it's misleading to ignore the achievments of the past.

Consider the city of ancient Rome, for instance. Materials and goods were brought thousands of kilometres and assembled to create a city and a culture.

Is now a good time to look into the issue of self-organising systems? The tendency of apparently chaotic situations, in some circumstances, to result in the creation of a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts? This happens at all levels, from the sub-atomic, through the cellular (resulting in us) to the world around us.

There is a theory that cities are living entities and we all function as specialised cells within that entity, unaware of it's existence. Is the same thing happening online?

Here's the link I was looking for;

Dan, I have no idea what I'm talking about. But your description makes sense.

Do you know anything about memetics? The idea of information or ideas having 'lives of their own' is really startling but well worth considering. Try

And here's a lady talking about anthills being alive in a sense.

Is a city any different? How about the internet?

How many connections, how many exchanges of information on the internet? How does that compare to a brain?

You're presumably aware of the SETI project? What would happen if all that processor power was doing something else when we weren't looking?

Something else prompted by the reference to the Pyramids:

What percentage of the population of ancient Egypt does 50,000 people represent? How about the 400,000 people working on the moonshots?

Another ancient mega-project I dug up is the Grand Canal in China.
"Between 1411 and 1415, a total of 165,000 laborers dredged the canal bed in Shandong"
"By the year 735 it was recorded that about 149,685,400 kg of grain was shipped annually along the canal."
"Ming Dynasty had to employ 47,004 full-time laborers recruited by the lijia corvée system in order to maintain the entire canal system. It is known that 121,500 soldiers and officers were needed simply to operate the 11,775 government grain barges in the mid 15th century."


In theory, the internet enables us to undertake much bigger projects. But how many people using the internet are actually producers of anything? What population would be required to provide the equivalent of a workforce able to build a canal 1800km long without heavy machinery?

I read somewhere recently that 90% of internet users are consumers, 9% are minor producers, and the bulk of everything out there is produced by less than 1% of the population. And I'll guess that most of it is replicated, so you have most of your 1% reinventing the wheel.

On the other hand, maybe that tiny percentage has a disproportionate effect? As long as someone invents the wheel, or facebook, the benefit to everyone is greater than the combined efforts of everyone else.

Still, I can't help wondering what could be achieved if there was a leader with a vision instead of an emphasis on bottom-up. What would happen if someone with the appropriate stature came forward and set a challenge that would keep our surplus energies and unrealised potentials put to good use for years to come?

I'm talking mega-mega projects that everyone to contribute to, although I don't know what they would be.

I'm talking mega-mega projects that everyone to contribute to, although I don't know what they would be.

D'oh! Brain is fried after class. Of course I know what would be a good project. I already suggested it:

The interesting thing for me about this blog post is that I was totally unaware that this is what recaptcha is used for. I've seen it on a fair number of websites, but never took any notice. It leads me to wonder how many other useful and relevant 'things' to my job have passed right under my nose in the sea of internet info? And, alternatively, what useful nuggets have I missed on page 327 of the search engine results list because the other previous 1500 results have pinged the search engines more frequently and shoved themselves up to the top of the lists, even though they aren't relevant to my search queries at all?

@GaryGSCC it is true that usefulness tends to stick around and slowly rise up. So if you miss it and it is truly useful changes are if you need something similar you may encounter it later.

A while ago I said that Google should use reCaptcha as kudos were kudos is due. Actually everyone should use reCaptcha, however that would mean perhaps slightly less innovation would occur in spam prevention. Competition is good as it drives innovation. However, reCaptcha is a great project and tool, possibly one of the best captcha services around today.

The point here is that usefulness tends to float up :)

@earthgecko I don't disagree with your comment about useful things rising to the top, but I suppose what I want is for them to magically make themselves known and appear at the top of the list straight away. Sometimes I search for something specifically and can't find it... then some time later I'll find the info I wanted ages ago, totally by fluke even though I wasn't looking for it. I know we have the wisdom of crowds on various bookmarking & social network sites that help achieve the immediacy, just by saying 'Hey! Look what I found.', but you need to make sure you're following the right crowd.