The problem is that in a globally integrated environment, there aren't room for a couple thousand rulesets like we have now; if there's room for two, it will come as a surprise to many people. This may come down to a contest on who can 'stuff' harder, the US, Europe, China, who knows?
John Gilmore on American free speech: "The rest of the world does NOT want American ideas of free speech shoved down their throats." The converse is true, too; America does not want the rest of the world's idea of free speech stuffed down our throats.
Dueling Over Digital Music Rights: "With so many applicable laws -- and ambiguities in those laws -- music fans are in a precarious position when they venture into the Net's music scene." Ambiguities always work in favor of those with the $$$.
"Distributed community"... now there's a phrase that needs explaining.
If you find ETP an interesting community effort, you should read that whole article; it has a lot that is relevent. ETP is a distributed community, and that may be something fairly new.
Sound familiar? This describes the ETP community to a T. We each have our own space. We are not anonymous. Quality runs high among those who actually try.
Resurrecting a Dying Art: "In fact, the chaos of the bulletin board and the chat room can have a profoundly negative effect upon the overall quality of conversation, a new study concludes. But when the talk moves into a less freewheeling environment, the level of the debate seems to improve. . . Unlike the dissonant interaction of public bulletin boards and chats, Reality Check tried to create online spaces where the participants have a sense of ownership and belonging."
Here's an example of what I mean: Everybody Who's Talking About This Article (As you'll see, there's at least one unrelated link from somebody simply mirroring Wired's feed... we need something better I think.)
Here's a thought... I'll work on this when I get time if nobody else beats me to it. How about a Javascriptlet that takes a link and automatically runs a search for other pages mentioning that link using the Weblogs.com search feature? It's not a perfect solution, but it might be a start. Esp. since you could easily include this in your own page.
From On Deciding... Better: "ETP on the other hand is a community where each individual has full autonomy and each person's node is fully owned by that person. Our nodes then have shifting interactions in which you have to listen to a variety of sites to participate in the conversation." How should we find these sites, I wonder? We should answer that question if this community is to develop... as things now, we naturally form cliques, where Q checks T's site daily, and misses P's insightful comment completely, having never checked P's site.