These days there’s a lot of buzz about “Web 2.0” and making websites more interactive, but what’s really going on is a reconnection to the community nature of the internet. Collaboration, cooperation, and the information commons are all ideas that pre-dated the world wide web in the form of older internet technologies. In today’s distributed computing environment, though, these technologies have really flourished. Here’s a guide to eight that you should consider making use of in building a community around an information commons project of any kind, from multimedia, to hardware, to software.

The Google App Engine doesn’t really advance the cause of evil all that much, but it’s not exactly good, either. Google makes a big deal about its corporate motto, “Don’t be evil”, but at the end of the day, Google really is just another corporation, no matter how well-intentioned its founders may have been. Regardless of whether the corporation holding the carrot is called “Microsoft” or “Google”, developers should think long and hard before following the primrose path towards lock-in to non-standard designs.

After the comments on my last post, I decided that perhaps I should investigate the world of free web apps a bit further, and give some real thought to the licensing implications of software that is, in many peoples’ view, not actually distributed.