Eric Goldman, Catching up with Wikipedia -- a round up of links w/commentary about the state of Wikipedia as an institution (and, by proxy, poster child for au courant buzzwords like 'collective intelligence'): "I remain baffled by the folks who are so enraptured by Wikipedia's mystique that they believe the site will defy gravity. Whatever you take away from the data points I cite in this post, I think it's undeniable that Wikipedia is changing in material ways. Bright minds might disagree about whether those changes are good or bad."

Keith Hart, The social meaning of the power law -- an anthropologist's take on the au courant statistical pattern (e.g. think "the Long Tail" etc.) anchoring a lot of 'the new science of networks'-type arguments: "Does the recent rise to prominence of the power-law distribution, with its premise of extreme inequality, tell us something about our collective experience of society today?"

Fred Stutzman, Google Buzz as Experience Pattern: "Google’s has had to walk a very fine line with how they 'reveal' what they know about your social circle. Realistically, Google sits on behavioral social network data that is of equal value to what is created in Facebook or Myspace. Mining our web search patterns, our chat and email logs, and our travels across the web with analytics, Google knows who we connect with. The challenge Google has always faced is putting this information into play in a way that doesn’t freak everyone out."