Just as you stand up to take the stage for your presentation at a conference or whatever your colleague / friend / irritating co-worker hands you a 3×5 card with five random words. If you can smoothly integrate all five words into your presentation the players in the audience jump up and yell bingo!

Blogger Overstadig Bruseth is trying to identify all the different artists appearing in the U2 video “Window in the skies”. Help him!

UPDATE: The article is now available in html format.

UPDATE: NextGenTel seem to have received the message – they now backtrack on limiting bandwidth for NRK.

Other bloggers covering the story: Alf Kåre Lefdal, Espen Andersen, Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing(!). The story also made it to Slashdot.

The graph shows the development of households with broadband internet connections in Norway, by household income in 1000 NOK (source: Statistics Norway).

By 2014, or maybe as early as 2010, all Norwegians will have superfast broadband connections “anywhere” – at home, school, work, cafes, librarian blogger Plinius predicts. Then at least the purely technical side of the digital divide will be bridged.

The development is encouraging, as the overall growth rate is increasing. But bear in mind that “broadband” is very liberally defined here, as “more than ISDN” capacity. As users want to download and view video more and more, and upload their own content, demand for capacity will grow.

There are some astonishing numbers in the material. For instance, although low-income households are lagging behind as expected, still one-third of all households with under 200000 NOK income own a laptop. And of those online (70 percent), 79 percent of unemployed have been online the last three months, 39 percent every day.

• Online communities and news websites: A Slashdot-inspired list of rules on how to build a successful community. Check out the comments as well, and some healthy opposition. For an example of how not to do it, see Aftenposten’s solution – scroll down to bottom – for readers’ comments to articles. Here it’s not even possible to go directly to the comment you want to read!
• More global voices: Interlocals.net is a new citizen media service created to enhance dialogue across language divides – see explanation of concept (via RConversation).
• Open, global collaboration in science: Initiative to share and publish data on avian influenza.

Unsurprisingly the book is published under a Creative Commons licence, which makes it possible to download for free in the pdf format.

More about the book will be forthcoming here, but as a start, here’s an important quote from the concluding chapter:

The basic material capital requirements of information production are now in the hands of a billion people around the globe who are connected to each other more or less seamlessly. These material conditions have given individuals a new practical freedom of action. If a person or group wishes to start an information-production project for any reason, that group or person need not raise significant funds to acquire the necessary capital. In the past, the necessity to obtain funds constrained information producers to find a market-based model to sustain the investment, or to obtain government funding. The funding requirements, in turn, subordinated the producers either to the demands of markets, in particular to mass-market appeal, or to the agendas of state bureaucracies. The networked information environment has permitted the emergence to much greater significance of the nonmarket sector, the nonprofit sector, and, most radically, of individuals.

…for most of July. At least mentally. Summer in Norway doesn’t always look like that! No grid, no blogging…