Uncommon Meditations on the Commons

It's significant that books about the commons are starting to appear more frequently now. Here's one that came out six months ago:

Who Owns the World? The Rediscovery of the Commons, has now been published by oekom Verlag in Berlin. (The German title is Wem gehört die Welt – Zur Wiederentdeckung der Gemeingüter.) The book is an anthology of essays by a wide range of international authors, including Elinor Ostrom, Richard Stallman, Sunita Narain, Ulrich Steinvorth, Peter Barnes, Oliver Moldenhauer, Pat Mooney and David Bollier.

Unfortunately, its text no longer seems available in English (please correct me if I'm wrong), although there is a version in Spanish [.pdf]. For those of you a little rusty in that tongue, there's a handy review and summary of the book that actually turns into a meditation on some unusual aspects of the commons in its own right. The original, in French, is also available.

Here's the conclusion:

Those who love the commons and reciprocity rightly highlight the risks entailed by their necessary relationships with politics and the State, with money and the market. This caution should not lead them to isolate the commons from the rest of the world, however, or from the reign of the State and market. State and market are not cadavers which can be nailed into a coffin and thrown into the sea. For a very, very long time, they will continue to contaminate or threaten the reciprocal relationships that lie at the heart of the commons, with their cold logic. We can only try to reduce their importance. We must hope that reciprocal relationships will grow in importance with respect to relationships of exchange and of authority.

Worth reading.

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End of a (Dead Tree) Era

Ziff Davis, the tech/gaming media company that recently exited Chapter 11 bankruptcy, is now taking the brave but inevitable step of closing down the print version of PCMag to focus its energy on its growing PCMag online network of sites, led by flagship PCmag.com. The magazine, which was started in 1982, has a storied history, but its print base eroded over the years as its core brand of journalism—news you can use while shopping for computers—moved online. It cut back from bi-weekly to monthly earlier this year. PCMag, which literally invented the idea of comparative hardware and software reviews, at one time during the 80s averaged about 400 pages an issue, with some issues breaking the 500- and even 600-page marks, according to this Wikipedia history.

Indeed, as I well remember when I was Editor and Publisher of the first UK edition of PC Magazine at the beginning of the 1990s - before Ziff Davis spent enormous sums themselves trying to launch it here. I still remember the annual printers issue - which ran to hundreds of pages, filled with the most boring computer journalism known to mankind - with a kind of dread....

I'm Touched

GigaOM has a post about touch-based computers, noting that the pioneer in this field was HP. Accompanying the article is a pic of HP's trailblazing machine, the 1983 HP-150.

Reader, I marred it!

(To explain, I managed to delete a review of the self-same machine that I was writing on it, by stabbing my finger at the wrong point of the screen. An article I had not backed up. It was the last such article - well, so far....)

Why Don't You Get a Life?

This is good.

This is better.