The Book "The Starfish and The Spider" uses the amazing capabilities of starfish to survive and regrow damaged limbs as a powerful metaphor for leaderless organisations.

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Amazon.Co.UK

Sharing broadband via a wireless network with your next door neighbours or even your whole apartment block is the latest social collaboration phenomenon in distributed computing. It can reduce your costs, increase your speed and enhance your download capacity. But be careful to enable your personal firewall and wireless encryption so that only those with the pin can use it and remember to disable file sharing.

Decoding the DNA of the Web

To date the web has been a bit of a black box where we search for needles of usefulness embedded in haystacks of junk. This could be changing as Alexa, the Amazon-owned search company have just announced (Dec 12) that they plan to open up their index of 5 billion documents to users and developers. This index is absolutely huge containing some 100 billion bytes of data which compares well with the complete Human Genome at a mere 3.2 billion base pairs. The release of this index will allow these mountains of data to be mined for all sorts of valuable associations plus the development of specialised applications and vertical search engines. Read the ‘heads up’ on this by John Battelle .

Businessweek Online, Jan 23, reports that In a bid to challenge search giant Google, Yahoo the Web's most-used portal, is betting on the wisdom of crowds by developing its offer beyond algorithmic search to social search. Yahoo are doing this by acquiring companies in the social networking arena such as Flickr (photo sharing), Del.icio.us (web favourites sharing aka social bookmarking) and WebJay (music sharing).