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"Behind the Web site, Wikipedia stories are being manipulated for cash and written and edited by insiders without a clue while outside experts are ignored."

"If you're interested in human development, the opportunity set has never been more interesting. Search in the browser marked the beginning of anywhere/anytime learning opportunities, but the official beginning of the new era was a decade ago with the Wikipedia launch. As noted in the Lessons from SkillShare blog, anywhere, anytime learning sites have been popping up at an increasing rate. You can learn about rate of change and differential calculus on Khan Academy. Academic Earth was an early source of college knowledge. Udemy let anyone teach anything. Saylor.org and P2PU.org made it all free. Anya Kamenetz outlined the expanded post-sec landscape in DIY U last year. This year, massively open online courses (MOOC) from Coursera, Udacity, and Edx are all the rage. The aggregate impact is a dramatic increase in access to great content and great teachers."

 Two recent announcements from Canada prompt my mood this morning: Canada Joins International Open Government Partnership Conservative Cuts put half of Statscan jobs at risk A government can simultaneously be the most secretive, controlling Canadian government in recent memory and be welcomed into the club of "open government". The announcements highlight a few problems with the "open data movement" (Wikipedia page): It's not a movement, at least in any reasonable political or cultural sense of the word, It's doing nothing for transparency and accountability in government, It's co-opting the language of progressive change in pursuit of what turns out to be a small-government-focused subsidy for industry. In short, the open data movement is a joke. Those who are on the political left who lend their support to it have some hard decisions to make.

"Cable companies weren't interested when the federal government dangled millions of dollars to expand broadband Internet service and boost economic opportunities in Lake County, Minnesota, on Lake Superior (Wikipedia map). But "They didn't want anyone else to build a system, either," report Jim Spencer and Larry Oakes of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. "That would mean competition in small parts of the county they already serve, even if it would leave thousands of northeastern Minnesota residents and businesses without broadband. So in 2010, when Lake County applied for federal stimulus funds to build a countywide network, it ran straight into a challenge from industry giant Mediacom and the Minnesota Cable Communications Association. The conflict that ensued is part of a national struggle," one that is repeated over and over in communities across the country, perhaps one you know or cover. "

Seriously, if you want serious, the gaming industry is serious. It was a $21 billion business in the U.S. alone last year. Recession proof, gaming is still a growth industry. The gamers are serious, too. The World of Warcraft wiki (WOWwiki) is the second largest wiki in the world, behind Wikipedia. Gamers walk around with games devices in their pockets, allowing for almost no mental downtime.

With this map, Gregor Aisch tried to visualize the global digital divide. It shows more than 80,000 populated places in blue and about 350,000 locations of IP addresses in red. White dots indicate places where many people live and many IP addresses are available.