In the month of October, nearly 700 Iraqis died violent deaths as direct victims of sectarian violence. This is Good News [Corp.], says the Weekly Standard:

Peace is breaking out through Iraq and the sectarian violence declining because that is the demand of the Iraqi people.

The Real Iraqi Miracle

Politics might be rock 'n' roll for nerds, but the nerds aren't supposed to be quite this nerdy.

Meet Ron Paul.

And the nerdiness lends Paul's simple message an aura of credibility, especially on a stage with more polished politicians and their nuanced positions.

"He's about something that American nerd culture can get on board with: really knowing one subject and going all out on it. For some people, it's Star Wars. For some people, it's Japanese cartoons. For Ron Paul, it's free-market commodity money."

The Ron Paul Revolution

In the Sunni neighborhood of Adhamiya, al Qaeda is doing a few things: first, distributing fliers claiming that the group promotes ethnic reconciliation ... Second, they’ve been passing out cash, as part of what is apparently an Eid Al Fotor tradition. Last, they’ve been doing small jobs around Adhamiya to encourage shuttered shops to reopen.

Does the attempt to attract sympathizers with good deeds, mean that al Qaeda has a new interest in longer-term influence in Iraq, whether it stays chaotic or not?

al Qaeda pulls a Hezbollah

The simplest human network is brainstorming: people connected by streams of shared thoughts (MemeStreams) that result in “aha” moments.

In large part, the broad sweep of the Internet has been about recreating the plumbing of the human network. Technology has solved the need for physical location (space), and it has solved the need for simultaneity of communications (time). We're now facing the ability to solve the problem of augmentation -- accelerating the “aha” moment.

In the enterprise, this “augmentation” lives somewhere between knowledge management, corporate wikis, “social” networking, search, and business intelligence.

In the world of the end-user, it lives somewhere between next-level discovery, attention, aggregation, relevance, trusted relationships and tagging.

Defrag is the first conference focused solely on the internet-based tools that transform loads of information into layers of knowledge, and accelerate the “aha” moment. Defrag is about the space that lives in between knowledge management, “social” networking, collaboration and business intelligence. Defrag is not a version number. Rather it’s a gathering place for the growing community of implementers, users, builders and thinkers that are working on the next wave of software innovation.

Defrag

Virgil is back in the news ... (though it's sort of a year in review angle ...)

"A professor who encourages the use of Wikipedia is the intellectual equivalent of a dietician who recommends a steady diet of Big Macs with everything."

Google and Wikipedia are creating a generation of "intellectual sluggards incapable of moving beyond the Internet," with no interest in exploring non-digital resources.

About WikiScanner:

"It was dead easy. I just combined two databases and -- poof -- you have these public relations disasters."

Use with caution: The perils of Wikipedia

What I find interesting is that when I’m using a wiki, I love the fact that all of the users can do whatever they want — edit anything, delete articles, and generally make a mess of things. So I can’t help but think that the simple existence of user roles drives me to think in terms of those roles and who should be in them.

I think there’s something deep here about the way software is designed. When you provide users with features that define structure in some way, there is some compulsion to adhere to that structure, whether or not it makes sense. If your mail system provides folders, people feel like they ought to organize their mail in folders. If your bug tracking system provides a highly granular system of access control, people feel like they ought to assign privileges in that way.

...

These considerations add a layer of complexity to software design. As developers, we tend to think of adding new features simply as adding optional ways of usage that users can ignore, but there’s more to it than that. As users, we feel like we should use the options that are provided to us, whether it makes sense or not. I suspect this is one of the reasons for software spoilage.

How software warps your brain

Paper by danah boyd, published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.

Social network sites (SNSs) are increasingly attracting the attention of academic and industry researchers intrigued by their affordances and reach. This special theme section of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication brings together scholarship on these emergent phenomena. In this introductory article, we describe features of SNSs and propose a comprehensive definition. We then present one perspective on the history of such sites, discussing key changes and developments. After briefly summarizing existing scholarship concerning SNSs, we discuss the articles in this special section and conclude with considerations for future research.

Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship

Paper by Kristina Lerman at ISI.

Social networks are a prominent feature of many social media sites, a new generation of Web sites that allow users to create and share content. Sites such as Digg, Flickr, and Del.icio.us allow users to designate others as "friends" or "contacts" and provide a single-click interface to track friends' activity. How are these social networks used? Unlike pure social networking sites (e.g., LinkedIn and Facebook), which allow users to articulate their online professional and personal relationships, social media sites are not, for the most part, aimed at helping users create or foster online relationships. Instead, we claim that social media users create social networks to express their tastes and interests, and use them to filter the vast stream of new submissions to find interesting content. Social networks, in fact, facilitate new ways of interacting with information: what we call social browsing. Through an extensive analysis of data from Digg and Flickr, we show that social browsing is one of the primary usage modalities on these social media sites. This finding has implications for how social media sites rate and personalize content.

Social Browsing & Information Filtering in Social Media

We take the world's best long-form content and boil it down to 100 words. Brijit abstracts summarize, review and rate to make it easy for you to choose what to read, listen to and watch.

Ah, serendipity. Our editors work with our community of smart readers and writers to help you find terrific stuff you might otherwise miss.

We know it can be frustrating to try to sort through all of your favorite sources one at a time. Brijit lets you subscribe to summaries of all your favorite media in one place.

Anyone can write for Brijit. If we publish your abstract you get paid (and of course, your very own byline).

Brijit - Great content in 100 words or less

The magazines stack up, unread, on your coffee table: the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Sports Illustrated, Vanity Fair. You subscribe to them but don't have time to read them.

So there they sit, a glossy pile of guilt.

Where you see wasted money, Jeremy Brosowsky saw a business opportunity.

The Washington publishing entrepreneur recently rolled out Brijit, a Web site that creates 100-word abstracts of articles from dozens of magazines and rates them. Brijit, Brosowsky said, aims to be "everyone's best-read friend."

Mmmm, Warm Guilt ...

Brijit Cuts Magazine Pile Down to Bite-Size Pieces