Google meets Wikipedia-style crowd-sourced comments. Is this a good thing?

An amusing look at how Wikipedia is always improving. Or not.

Paul Wehage looks at Kurzweil’s idea of the Singularity in the context of two articles discussing current trends in crowdsourcing and wonders whether the Singularity will really change human nature that much…

Judd Bagley reviews the efforts of the North Korea Uncovered (NKU) project to document a totalitarian regime from eyewitnesses on the ground and in Earth orbit.

Group collaboration is not always a bad thing, especially when individuals perform specialized activities to produce a group advancement. The use of Twitter and Facebook during the recent Iranian electoral uprising also implies that a clearly defined common intent makes more effective use of these tools. Paul Wehage explores how these ideas might be more relevant to our own individual lives than we might suspect.

Akahele doesn’t just talk about Wikipedia Art. Akahele creates Wikipedia Art. Wehage and Kohs create works for the Wikipedia Art Remixed project for the Venice Biennale.

The speed with which Web 2.0 came into full-blown existence is in large part the reason this latest consumer-focused media revolution has come into being free of the expected restraining forces – normally offered by order-injecting referee institutions. Hence, not only must Web 2.0 content be largely user-generated, so too the means of protecting truth and reputations.

While the Internet is amazing, mediocrity is its great disappointment. This article posits that history’s great software projects are the product of single individuals or partners, not crowds.