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There's a huge debate going on at Digg right now about limiting the influence of the top users. I support that effort 100%. Many sensible suggestions were offered, such as limiting number of diggs per day, taking away the shout system, or completely discount votes from close friends.

Annotating is a pervasive element of scholarly practice for both the humanist and the scientist. It is a method by which scholars organize existing knowledge and facilitate the creation and sharing of new knowledge. It is used by individual scholars when reading as an aid to memory, to add commentary, and to classify. It can facilitate shared editing, scholarly collaboration, and pedagogy. Over time annotations can have scholarly value in their own right. Yet scholars remain dissatisfied with the options available for annotating digital resources. Scholars wanting to annotate have to learn different annotation clients for different content repositories, have no easy way to integrate annotations made on different systems or created by colleagues using other tools, and are often limited to simplistic and constrained models of annotation. The importance of annotating as a scholarly practice coupled with the real-world limitations of existing practices and tools supporting annotation of digital content has had a retarding effect on the growth of digital scholarship and the level of digital resource use by scholars.

WikiGenes is the first wiki system to combine the collaborative and largely altruistic possibilities of wikis with explicit authorship. In view of the extraordinary success of Wikipedia there remains no doubt about the potential of collaborative publishing, yet its adoption in science has been limited. Here I discuss a dynamic collaborative knowledge base for the life sciences that provides authors with due credit and that can evolve via continual revision and traditional peer review into a rigorous scientific tool.

Launched in 1999, the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes are the first global indexes tracking the financial performance of the leading sustainability-driven companies worldwide. Based on the cooperation of Dow Jones Indexes, STOXX Limited and SAM they provide asset managers with reliable and objective benchmarks to manage sustainability portfolios.

The past six months have brought scenes from a hungry apocalypse, as at least 14 countries have been wracked by food-related violence. By mid-April UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon acknowledged that "the steeply rising price of food has developed into a real global crisis." It's the product, economists say, of multiple factors: high oil prices, prolonged drought, biofuel production, and burgeoning meat consumption. In the short term, food aid will help. In the medium term, market-distorting trade tariffs and farm subsidies must end. But the long-term task is monumentally harder: transcending the limits of today's global food production.

XFML lets you exchange hierarchical faceted metadata. It also lets you indicate topics in different published XFML documents are equal, thus allowing you to reuse indexing efforts. XFML borrows many ideas from Topicmaps, a format you should check out if you like the ideas behind XFML but are frustrated with its limitations (see http://topicmaps.org).

Auto-scaling is the ability (with certain cloud infrastructure management tools like enStratus-in a limited beta through the end of the year) to add and remove capacity into a cloud infrastructure based on actual usage. No human intervention is necessary. It sounds amazing-no more overloaded web sites. Just stick your site into the cloud and come what may! You just pay for what you use. But I don't like auto-scaling.

The COMMUNIA Thematic Network aims at becoming a European point of reference for theoretical analysis and strategic policy discussion of existing and emerging issues concerning the public domain in the digital environment - as well as related topics, including, but not limited to, alternative forms of licensing for creative material; open access to scientific publications and research results; management of works whose authors are unknown (i.e. orphan works).

Statistical and applied probabilistic knowledge is the core of knowledge; statistics is what tells you if something is true, false, or merely anecdotal; it is the "logic of science"; it is the instrument of risk-taking; it is the applied tools of epistemology; you can't be a modern intellectual and not think probabilistically-but... let's not be suckers. The problem is much more complicated than it seems to the casual, mechanistic user who picked it up in graduate school. Statistics can fool you. In fact it is fooling your government right now. It can even bankrupt the system (let's face it: use of probabilistic methods for the estimation of risks did just blow up the banking system).

Computational Collective Intelligence (CCI) is most often understood as an AI sub-field dealing with soft computing methods which enable making group decisions or processing knowledge among autonomous units acting in distributed environments. Web-based systems, social networks and multi-agent systems very often need these tools for working out consistent knowledge states, resolving conflicts and making decisions. The aim of this conference is to provide an internationally respected forum for scientific research in the computer-based methods of collective intelligence and their applications in (but not limited to) such fields as semantic web, social networks and multi-agent systems.

This is a sub-project of the BioMoby project. It aims to develop tools in Java in order: * to access BioMoby registries, allowing all features provided by such registries, including but not limited to registering and deregistering of the BioMoby services and their parts, discovering them, and understanding their data in various formats (such as RDF), * to create Java implementations of BioMoby services, especially to help service providers with creating BioMoby data containers (input and output data) without exposing providers to the complexity of the XML required and produced by BioMoby services, and finally

ASMALLWORLD is the world's leading private online community that captures an existing international network of people who are connected by three degrees of separation. Members share similar backgrounds, interests and perspectives. ASMALLWORLD's unique platform offers powerful tools and user generated content to help members manage their private, social and business lives. Membership to ASMALLWORLD is by invitation only, which is part of what makes this network unique, and the connections, authentic. Trusted and loyal ASW members who meet certain criteria have the privilege of inviting a limited number of their friends to the network.

Natural languages are easy to learn by infants, they can express any thought that any adult might ever conceive, and they accommodate the limitations of human breathing rates and short-term memory. The first property implies a finite vocabulary, the second implies infinite extensibility, and the third implies a small upper bound on the length of phrases. Together, they imply that most words in a natural language will have an open-ended number of senses - ambiguity is inevitable.To achieve a comparable level of flexibility with formal ontologies, this paper proposes an organization with a dynamically evolving collection of formal theories, systematic mappings to formal concept types and informal lexicons of natural language terms, and a modularity that allows independent distributed development and extension of all resources, formal and informal.

In particular, I am thinking about intentional communities -- communities in which people live geographically near one another, and participate in community together, by choice. They may live together or not, dine together or not, work together or not, worship together or not -- but at least they need to live within some limit of proximity to one another and participate in community together. These are the minimum requirements. But is there a model that works? Or is it time to design a new model that fits the time and place in which we live better?