"The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed," says cyber-punk, sci-fi author William Gibson. Here are two ways that seek to restore a bit of balance.
In the White Men Can't Dance department, Rushmore is a new search engine with an algorithmic black attitude. Owner and publisher, Johnny Taylor says, "We want to change the way black community drives the Web ...with everything you get from mainstream search engines like Google, PLUS an added layer of black-specific information."
The site is much more than a black Google. It intends to unite people of color in a social network by providing free membership affiliation, a black news forum and a job network. Taylor says, "The more we use it the better it will get," and of course the better will be his bottom line... $20 million a month? That's how much sites like this are making.
Yuwie.com has a different idea, one that seems a bit more democratically $ocial. Call it the "Amway" of social networking, where users get a cut of the action. Yuwie has created a rewards-based system that pays a percentage of their revenues back to Yuwie members for page views, and for friends, of friends, of friends - 10 levels deep.
ARTICLES & DISCOVERIES:
I just joined Scribd, now billing themselves as "the world’s largest document sharing community." I was looking for a copy of the free PDF version of Scott Siglers' new podiobook Infected. Someone at Crown Publishers decided to promote the hard cover release by giving it away as an e-book, on-line for the 5 days preceding its official bookstore release on April 1, 2008. I don't understand the logic, but now I'm reading the book, and I can...
- Upload and share documents.
- Find all kinds of valuable and interesting documents by category, by topic group, by searching,or by just browsing the library.
Estonia's Digitized Garbage
Bruce Sterling reports on an Estonian cybergreen millionaire's web 2.0-style participatory scheme to clean up his country's illegal garbage dump sites using Google Earth-tagging - and it worked!
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