Thing Commons

Wow.

http://www.willowgarage.com/pages/software/overview

Things are getting interesting in the machine controlling world.

Partly funded by the NSF, FabFi Network is "an open-source system that uses common building materials and off-the-shelf electronics to transmit wireless ethernet signals across distances of up to several miles."

Let’s explore what could be ahead for public libraries and how we could collectively transform them into “factories” — not factories that make things, but factories that help make people who want to learn and make things. Will libraries go away? Will they become hackerspaces, TechShops, tool-lending libraries, and Fab Labs, or have these new, almost-public spaces displaced a new role for libraries? For many of us, books themselves are tools. In the sense that books are tools of knowledge, the library is a repository for tools, so will we add “real tools” for the 21st century?

Oh, lovely:

"When they make this know-how available publicly, Facebook can effectively crowdsource its expertise because it leverages a much larger community than they have available to them internally," said Stephen O'Grady, principal analyst at Redmonk. "As smart as the Facebook community is, they're not necessarily going to be as smart as the whole rest of the industry, which now has access to this technology."