crashroots

“Increasingly I think the digital divide is less about access to technology and more about the difference between those who know how and those who don’t know how,” says author Howard Rheingold, speaking in front of King’s College at Cambridge University. “The ability to know has suddenly become the ability to search and the ability to sift” and discern.

Earlier in the week Howard gave the keynote address at Reboot Britain, and he recounts some of them here. Among the Essential Literacies he cites are:

• Attention
• Participation
• Collaboration
• Critical consumption (which includes “crap detection” — we live in an age when you can get the answer to anything out of the air, but how do you know what to trust?)

Here is the 40 minute version of the talk about 21st century literacies. Found this via Smart Mobs

The technical conditions of communication and information processing are enabling the emergence of new social and economic practices of information and knowledge production.

You may have read Yochai Benkler’s book, The Wealth of Networks, where he discusses Wikipedia as an example of commons-based peer-production. Did you know that you can see this relatively new model of knowledge and economic production live, in real-time? The video below is just one minute of Wikipedia edits recorded from the live changes on the irc.wikimedia.org #en.wikipedia channel. Using the IRC channel, you can watch Wikipedia being created as it happens, which means you can see the incremental production of collective knowledge as it happens. Read more at ../learninglab/joss

Great Australian advertising campaign against Internet Censorship. Just say NO to any kind of censorship!

Buzzsonic has a fantastic post about the digital music distribution “jungle” featuring a fantastic video interview with Denzyl Feigelson. Read the full post.

There’s some fantastic resources out there and some inspirational writers like Seth Godin, Andrew Dubber, Gerd Leonhard, Derek Sivers and even digital distributors Tunecore all offer some brilliant insight and the best news is its all out there for you to grab free as a bird. And legal too! Read the full post at Buzzsonic.com

It’s time to add “music video production” to the list of industries the iPhone threatens to disrupt. Read the full blog post at wired.com

MAMA Group, the AIM-listed artist management firm, and Radiohead’s manager Brian Message are taking on the music majors by launching a record label through which artists retain their copyright and digital delivery of music is key. 

Founded with an initial financial commitment of more than $20m (£12.2m) for its first year of operation, new label Polyphonic will partner artists and their managers to provide them with capital to operate their businesses without going to a traditional music label. Read more…

Download Chris Anderson’s new book “”The Future of a Radical Price as PDF or Audiobook for free via Wired.com. Great read, good audio book and informative videos: check it out now!

Jay Rosen of NYU and PressThink describes the ethic of the link in blogging and news media. This is an excerpt from a Carnegie Council panel on April 3, 2008.  Read this good read over at MediaFuturist to: A new economy of Links & APIs, and the Interdependent Content Ecoysystem

Here are two great blog post about the ever evolving landscape of new music business models. I can not tell you how much i LOVE the vibrance and creativity the internet is injecting into the music biz. “TOTAL MADE THIS MONTH USING TWITTER = $19,000 / TOTAL MADE FROM 30,000 RECORD SALES = ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.“ Read more… and How Musician can make $19,000 in 10 hours using Twitter. Read more…

Howard Rheingold talks about the coming world of collaboration, participatory media and collective action — and how Wikipedia is really an outgrowth of our natural human instinct to work as a group. As he points out, humans have been banding together to work collectively since our days of hunting mastodons. via Gerd Leonhard

Here is a a great speech by Cris Anderson (Wired mag founder and author of “the long tail) on the new emerging market of free goods. In this speech he is outlining the ideas he puts forward in his new book. (via mediafuturist)

Clay Shirky discussing the implications and impact of wikipedia.

Don Tapscott is the author of “Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything,” and “Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation.”