Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
re: Wikipedia, have you seen this article?

The Faith-Based Encyclopedia
http://www.techcentralstation.com/111504A.html

I think he has a point - one can assume that eventually wikipedia
articles will reach an equilibrium, but it's open question whether the
quality at that equilibrium will be as high as we hope.
  

    
Some comments:

"The grassroots part of the Dean campaign tried to get ideas moving from
the fringes into the center, but with little success, imho."

It was actually more a matter of grassroots Dean supporters trying to get 
the campaign to accept policy input from a well-organized, well-staffed 
and moderated issues forum. We found that the Dean campaign, as open as 
it seemed to be, didn't want input on policy... and they were focusing 
more on the campaign than policy definition.
 
"perhaps there are analogies in the world of politics in which
hub-managed command-and-control pyramids may prove vulnerable to the many
eyes of an open movement. We'll see."

Krista Bradford, Aldon Hynes et al. are forming a group around a concept 
they originally referred to as 'investigative blogging.' Not sure at this 
point what the group will be called or how it will be structured, but the 
intent is to bring bloggers and investigative journalists together in a 
symbiotic relationship.

"We may have to get used to the idea of being suspicious of all
information that we can't check directly ourselves."

Which is probably a good way to be, regardless.

Moving away from politics, finally... you talk a bit about how artists,
designers, and other creative people use networks. Can you talk about
that a bit?
  

    
What interests me most in that area is the ways people can now
collaborate on creative projects in time-shifted or geography-shifted
ways. We are getting close to the point where you can "jam" live over
the Internet. (Right now, there's generally still a lag - although I
was jamming with my brother despite the delay over our iSight/iChat
videophone link the other day.)

I love the idea of people preparing part of a work, such as laying
down basic tracks or doing an initial visual draft, and then sending
their work-in-progress across the net to allow a collaborator to layer
changes on top of the base.

Another way that people are using networks around creative arts,
music, and performance is in organizing and publicizing events. Burning
Man has used its mailing lists and online presence for years as an
organizational tool. Most bands post their tour information and
sometimes ticket info online and if they're smart they provide a place
for their fans to interact as well.

Sites like Upcoming.org and Dodgeball.com also enable people to make
calendar / event plans in public, and see what their online friends are
also planning to do or where they're planning to be.