Brandymore Castle

I'm not going to name the site that got me starting writing this post. Its a sentiment I've seen on many sites with a traditional publishing orientation. They follow the old tradition from the age of print, where all submitted works are required to be "not published elsewhere," requiring "first print" rights and demanding every "reprint" (copy) should cite the publisher as place of first publication (what is this, vanity?). These guidelines ignore the reality of the new age of immediacy, of information abundance, of venue abundance, the network. There is no scarcity in publication, there is no value in "first publication" or artificial scarcity on the network. The document is the conversation the conversation is the document. The old publishing world is gone, stop trying to hang on. The attitude simply does not fit with a universe of networked information being shared and reshared by millions of people, winding its way in bits and pieces ...

A good introduction to what Yahoo Pipes are and the possibilities they offer posted to Read/WriteWeb . Also, a simple, clear, concise explanation of emergence: It is this automagical process through which elements of a system give rise to a higher order system. Emergence is how physics becomes chemistry and chemistry becomes biology.