A href="http://us1.campaign-archive1.com/?u=33d934c165e69e4b507504c2b&id=8771dc3ae5&e=77c352ede8#mctoc1">report
from the Peer to Patent initiative shows
that the project is having salutary effects on the patent system.
Besides the greater openness that Peer to Patent promotes in
evaluating individual patent applications, it is creating a new
transparency and understanding of the functioning of the patent system
as a whole. I'll give some background to help readers understand the
significance of Manny Schecter's newsletter item, which concerns prior
art that exists outside of patents. I'll add my own comments about
software patents.

Let's remind ourselves of the basic rule of patenting: no one should
get a patent for something that was done before by someone else. Even
if …

1. Law of Success 2.0 -- a blog of interviews with famous and/or interesting people, from Brad Feld to Uri Geller.
2. Pioneer One -- crowdsourced funding for TV show, perhaps a hint of the future. Pilot shot for $6,000 which was raised through KickStarter. Distributed via BitTorrent.
3. DrasticTools -- PHP/MySQL visualisation tools, including TreeMap, tag cloud, hierarchical bar chart, and animated list. (via TomC on Delicious)
4. GoogleCL -- command-line interface to Google services. At the moment the services are Picasa, …

An unusual href="http://www.meetup.com/Distributed-Work/calendar/13300733/">Distributed
Distributed Work Meetup was held last night in four different
cities simultaneously, arranged through many hours of hard work by href="http://www.meetup.com/Distributed-Work/members/9584137/">Lukas
Biewald and his colleagues at distributed work provider href="http://crowdflower.com/">CrowdFlower.

With all the sharing of experiences and the on-the-spot analyses
taking place, I didn't find an occasion to ask my most pressing
question, so I'll put it here and ask my readers for comments:

How can you set up crowdsourcing where most people work for free but
some are paid, and present it to participants in a way that makes it
seem fair?

This situation arises all the time, with paid participants such as
application developers and community …

Stimuluswatch.org is a great example of how easy it is today for people to, as Clay Shirky says, “organize without organizations.” Stimuluswatch.org began after Jerry Brito attended a mayor’s Conference and posted this request:

"Let’s help President-Elect Obama do what he is promising. Let’s help him “prioritize” so the projects so that we “get the most bang for the buck” and identify those that are old school “pork coming out of Congress”. We can do this through good clean fun crowdsourcing. Who can help me take the database on the Conference of Mayors site and turn each …