As you can probably tell, i’m doing a lot of research on social networks, to understand how best to make these so that they work on a local, place specific scale. Here is a nice video about the story of Metafilter:

Matt Haughey (Metafilter founder) at Gel 2010 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.

An old Clay Shirky talk at Google, eloquently explaining the fundamental changes that are making collective action more and more common.

Comparing political election campaigns to reality tv game show voting isn’t new. However, i had never considered the use of social networking sites for democratic purposes until Myspace announced last week they are going to run mock American presedential elections (you can read about it here and here. )

The city of Ordos – built for 1 million people but no one has moved in!!