Big Switch author Nicholas Carr writes in his blog the Loom about Von Ahn’s Gwap:

As The Register notes, a new site was launched this week, by Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, that aims to entice humans into playing simple games that will help computers get smarter. The site, called Gwap (an acronym for “games with a purpose”), is the brainchild of computer scientist Luis von Ahn (who also cofathered the Captcha). “We have games that can help improve Internet image and audio searches, enhance artificial intelligence and teach computers to see,” he explains. “But that shouldn’t matter to the players because it turns out these games are super fun.”

Brazilian Minister of Culture and music legend Gilberto Gil transported audiences at Google Zeitgeist Europe with a message of hope, change and revolution through technological innovation:

“The conversion of the digital technologies, has created around the Internet a totally peaceful revolution. A bottom up unrest, happening everywhere, which I see as a very positive sign of the rising of a non governmental political movement that I believe to be a direct and matured result of cultural and countercultural movements of our most recent history, in their increasing power to influence public policies.”

(via Joi Ito - thanks Joi!)

For many, Gil’s vision is most directly experienced through his music. The ideas he presents in Google Zeitgeist are informed by many of the same concerns of the Brasileira music movement (MPB), which is a music deeply committed to social change. From Wikipedia:

“The earliest MPB (Música Popular Brasileira) borrowed elements of the bossa nova and often relied on thinly-veiled criticism of social injustice and governmental repression, being based on progressive opposition to the political scene characterized by military dictatorship, concentration of land ownership, and imperialism. A variation within MPB was the short-lived but influential artistic movement known as tropicália.”

You can learn more about Gilberto Gil at his official website.

Further viewing:
The Google Zeitgeist Youtube playlist

Image credit: (CC) Joi Ito

Crowdspring.com was launched last week and Pete Burgeson noted that the team was inspired by the book, “Smart Mobs” and it’s theories of crowdsourcing and communities.

Crowdspring tests crowdsourcing on a bigger scale by allowing users to post about their project needs, giving a firm deadline and a pay scale. Rather than the user accepting bids for the work, they accept completed work that itself is a bid for the job. The user chooses the work that best fits their project and pays the person who created it.

The community offers protections for both the user and creatives. Find out more about how Crowdspring works.

Via boingboing and FreeGovInfo

The city of Chicago has taken their first step to ‘always on’ monitoring of its citizens, with a network of camera feeds and video analytics. If cameras can monitor and alert authorities to suspicious human behavior is this a great revolution for our society or a greater invasion of privacy than we need?

With China also employing these techniques, it seems that the great divide between the way the two countries treat their people and their privacy is becoming more and more similar by the day.

Klein notes that human-rights activists say that although the surveillance tools used by China and the U.S. are the same, the political contexts are radically different. “China has a government that uses its high-tech web to imprison and torture peaceful protesters, Tibetan monks and independent-minded journalists.” But she also notes that Guantánamo Bay, the erosion of the Fourth Amendment prohibition against illegal searches and seizures, and the fact that the U.S. currently has more people behind bars than China despite a population less than a quarter of its size all mean that “the lines are getting awfully blurry.”

This reminds us that the Patriot Act gave the U.S. government far more power by taking advantage of its citizens in a time of fear after the 9/11 attacks.

An Opinion piece in COMPUTERWORLD by Paul Lamb compares the uptake on One Laptop Per Child devices with the massive adoption of mobile phones. The title “One BlackBerry Per Child” summarizes the message:

The folks at One Laptop Per Child deserve a lot of credit for raising awareness around the global digital divide. Their stylish green laptop, along with the accompanying goal of putting 21st-century technology in the hands of children in developing countries, has captured the imaginations of people, companies and governments worldwide.

But the nearly half-million orders received from developing countries thus far for the so-called $100 laptop suggests that this effort to supply the developing world with affordable PCs may be too late.

That’s because the developing world has been swept up in the mobile voice revolution, which has far outpaced the spread of desktop and laptop computers. Global mobile phone users number nearly 3 billion, and 1.3 billion of those users are able to access the Internet using their handheld devices. That compares with roughly 1.1 billion desktop users with Web access worldwide. . . .

This week’s Carnival of the Mobilists is at Symbiano-TeK, where it comes to us from Egypt. See the ancient oarmen pulling the best mobile blogging of the week through the current of the Net. Included is my post SmartMobs post on Eric Klopfer’s new book on m-learning: Augmented Learning.

The Long Now Foundation is hosting yet another incredible Seminar About Long-Term Thinking [SALT] with Iqbal Quadir, in which he will discuss how technology empowers the poorest.

“Iqbal Quadir is the legendary founder of GrameenPhone, which transformed his home country of Bangladesh in the 1990s and led the way for the cellphone revolution throughout the developing world. Currently Quadir heads the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at MIT and is building Emergence BioEnergy Inc., a project to develop electricity for the rural poor, using such devices as a fuel cell that runs on anaerobic bacteria. Linking new technology with the boundless resourcefulness of the poor drives innovation in surprising directions at surprising speed to surprising effect.”

Location: Cowell Theater, Fort Mason, San Francisco,
Time: 7pm, WEDNESDAY, May 21.
The talk starts promptly at 7:30pm. Admission is free (a donation is certainly welcome, not required).

Networks are used to represent the structure of complex systems, including the Internet or social networks, but often these descriptions are biased or incomplete. Now, researchers at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) have shown that it’s possible to extract automatically the hierarchical structure of networks. The researchers say their results ’suggest that hierarchy is a central organizing principle of complex networks, capable of offering insight into many network phenomena.’ They also think that their algorithms can be applied to almost every kind of networks, from biochemical networks (protein interaction networks, metabolic networks or genetic regulatory networks) to communities in social networks. But read more…

Links: ZDNet, Primidi

In Fall, 2007, James Fishkin’s Center for Deliberative Democracy and Jim Lehrer’s Newshour program brought together 300 American citizens to talk about citizenship and democracy in the 21st century. A documentary, By The People, was broadcast on PBS stations in January, 2008. I was invited to address this assembly. I talked about Smart Mobs in relation to the public sphere — the realm of citizen discourse that undergirds healthy democracy. The video, the first of two parts, was made available by MacNeil/Lehrer Productions.