/**
 * @article	The Appleseed Project 
 *
 * @since	May 25, 2010 
 * @package	Shortpost, Uncategorized 
 *
 * @tags	social media 
 *
 */

For all the publicity and money the Diaspora project has raised lately ($175,000 raised without sharing a single line of code!) with its unstated promise to “take on Facebook”, one thing that’s getting lost is that several other projects have been working for years on similar frameworks… mostly in obscurity and without media attention, but nevertheless working out standards and code to back up a distributed open-source social networking platform.

The Appleseed Project was probably the first project of its type. Started in 2004, apparently abandoned for few years but recently reinvigorated, Appleseed is truly open source distributed social networking… like Diaspora, but with working code. 

/**
 * @article	iPads and Xboxes on Obama 
 *
 * @since	May 12, 2010 
 * @package	Shortpost 
 *
 * @tags	social media,
 * 		tech culture 
 *
 */

Ta-nehisi Coates kills it as usual in his riffs (here and here) on Obama’s speech at Hampton’s graduation, where the prez warned students (and their parents) against the dangers and distractions their newfangled technology — “iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations” — pose; the fear that with new media, “information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation.”

Comments range from betrayed (“we thought we was hip, one of us”) to cynical (“this probably plays really well to the conservative middle aged crowd”) to just sad (“it just hurts to see someone smart pretend ignorance to fit in”). But with all that out of the way, there’s a decent defense of the geek worldview in there.