Info/Law

Do yourself a favor right now and go read Ethan Zuckerman’s lengthy, thoughtful review of Cass Sunstein’s recent book, Infotopia. Among many virtues, Ethan’s post connects Sunstein’s ideas to other developments in cyberspace. A taste of Ethan’s comments:

Whether or not I agree with all of Sunstein’s conclusions, his quest for systems that aggregate knowledge across networks is an exciting way to look at the contemporary Internet. A large number of the most interesting projects taking place on the Internet use strategies to aggregate information from multiple users to create new knowledge - this is the magic behind Google’s PageRank algorithm, Digg’s headlines and Amazon’s collaborative filtering recommendations. Analyzing these systems in terms of their effectiveness in getting people to reveal hidden knowledge is, in my opinion, an excellent framework for evaluation.

And this:

You can think of Infotopia as a caged deathmatch between Hayek and Habermas, streamed live on the Internet. Habermas taps out somewhere around page 200.

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