Marshall Kirkpatrick has written a thoughtful piece over on Read/Write Web entitled ‘Facebook and the future of Free Thought‘ in which he explains the hard facts about news consumption and the open subscription models that were supposed to create a more open playing field for niche voices. In it, he states that news consumption has ...

[Editor’s Note: This was originally published at Chris Saad’s personal blog as his new years resolutions, but the points he brings up for himself can be brought to bear on those of us who live in the tech and social media fishbowl, if we’re looking to be more effective at what we aim to do. ...

Over on the Open Web Foundation mailing list Eran Hammer-Lahav who, despite his gruff and disagreeable personality, I respect greatly for his work in the development of open standards, is effectively calling for a complete shakeup of the foundation and the efforts being poured into the ‘common ground’ of the standards efforts. Let me define ...

I give Facebook a lot of crap. But I don’t think their latest privacy changes are nefarious in any way. It’s pretty obvious what they are doing. They want search inventory to sell to Google and Microsoft. They want to be as cool as Twitter. I think the more important story is that they are ...

As you might know if you follow my work even remotely, my projects almost always come from a place of philosophical supposition. That is, I first create a model that I think matches the current and emerging state of the world, and then I create a product, project, format or other that works inside, encourages ...

In my mind, there are four kinds of open. Torvalds Open. Zuckerberg Open. Not Open but we use the word Open anyway. Saad Open. This fragmentation has diluted the word open to the point where it almost has no value. It’s time to re-define the word open. First let me explain each category. Torvalds Open. ...

Many, many of the things in our lives could be called ‘Memes’.  Here’s what happens when you type ‘Define:meme’ into Google. a cultural unit (an idea or value or pattern of behavior) that is passed from one person to another by non-genetic means (as by imitation); “memes … wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn The Morlocks are a group of ...

Steve Gillmor often writes fantastic (and fantastically long) editorials on the landscape of the real-time web, but they are often very dense and sometimes fail to cover some key points. I thought I would take the liberty of translating and correcting his latest post with my own contributions. Ever since FriendFeed was sold to Facebook, ...