Wired Magazine

This month's Wired Magazine has a number of articles relevant to The Geebus.

1. The Rise of Crowdsourcing is right on point with Benkler's book The Wealth of Networks discussed on The Geebus here (April 28th) and here (May 28th). The article highlights 4 examples of business models that are leveraging off of the collective.

A sidebar to the article outlines the 5 Rules of the New Labor Pool which sum it up very well:

• The crowd is dispersed
• The crowd has a short attention span
• The crowd is full of specialists
• The crowd produces mostly crap
• The crowd finds the best stuff

2. Free Radical is about how Nobel prize winner Harold Varmus is trying (with some success) to open up scientific journals.

Varmus has been invited by Charles Nesson, a professor of law at Harvard, to enlighten the student editors of the various Harvard Law School journals about the virtues of so-called open-access publishing. Nesson introduces his guest as “the prophet of open access.” Varmus’ smile doesn’t fade, and his hair stands proudly where the wind last left it.

He calmly lays out his campaign. For centuries, journals have been the means both of disseminating scientific knowledge and building scientific careers. Accordingly, the journals atop the hierarchy draw the highest-quality submissions, which reinforces their lofty reputations, which in turn enhances the status of the scientists who publish there. This positive feedback loop puts the power in the hands of the journals, even though their existence depends entirely on the scientists who write, edit, and serve as reviewers, usually without compensation.

Meanwhile, their colleagues can gain access only through subscriptions that their institutions pay for, sometimes dearly. (A yearly subscription to Brain Research, for instance, costs more than $20,000.) Worse, most of the public – scientists in developing countries, faculty and students in underfunded colleges, high schoolers, patients – have no access at all, even though taxes fund the government grants that support much of the research. Varmus asks: Shouldn’t this ancient system have changed with the Internet, which allows information to be disseminated cheaply and immediately searched, mined, archived, reviewed, and improved?

3. Wired 14.06: 100% Pure Indie: Clap Your Hands and Say Yeah is an Indie band with no label that has sold 100,000 of its CD with a little help from the Blogosphere.