Flutterby™! : Shopping Center blog

I find this interesting: Petaluma's Plaza North Shopping Center has a blog, in which they're doing things like highlighting vegan options.

I find it particularly interesting because at one point this sort of fluff "local color" piece was the sort of thing the weekly papers would publish, and now it's moving to the shopping center management. It'll be interesting to see how this stuff propagates through aggregators and search engines.

Somewhat relatedly, or maybe it's just 'cause I read them close together and am willing to pull links out of thin air, Dave Winer wrote about some event called "Hacking Society", in which he observed:

The best way to preserve Internet freedom is to use it.

That means creating a network that is of the Internet, only. Without any corporate ownership of rights to individual people's content.

The problem of aggregated demand means that economies of scale work, but there was a time when the Internet connected people's workstations together. This was actually pre my involvement, back in the Tim Berners-Lee days, but the notion that you'd run a server on the machine under your desk was the norm. We've lost that, in the rush to "cloud computing" and whatever else, and in the process the web has become more like television, a mediated broadcast experience, than the ways in which the pioneers experienced the web (or even, for those of us willing to spring for a phone line, the BBS scene).

What would happen if bandwidth stopped being the limiting feature, if we had gigabit to the home and sharing pictures with the family no longer demanded the intermediary of Facebook? Is it possible to move towards that vision? How can we change our visions of what might be to gain some of the freedoms that that world can offer?