The so called virtual reality Guru, Jaron Lanier, long known for his criticism of “Wisdom of Crowds” attitude of Open Source development model and the Internet Collectivism (so called Web 2.0), recently wrote an article called Long Live Closed Source Software. I call his article as “Ignorance of an Individual”. In his article, he argues against open source process and calls upon the scientific community to not fall into the trap of the open source development model. I don’t know much about this dude but he comes out as someone who thinks that he can talk about science just because he attended a scifoo camp (a meeting where most of the participants are from the fringes of science. They do invite some hardcore scientists but mostly can be classified as a fringe group of geeks and people with experience in science. Well, such a meeting is important because it helps drive discussion about the interface between science and technology. But, my argument is that attending a scifoo meeting alone doesn’t make an individual a scientist). He uses Martha Stewart and Science in the same sentence and I am sure it talks about how much science he knows. (more…)

This is the first post in the Facebook-Scoble Fiasco Series. I want to use this incident to raise the awareness of the users of social networks. This incident brought into focus many claims and counterclaims. Some of them are valid and the rest are plain bullshit. I hope this series helps people make a distinction between what is correct and what is incorrect. This post is not about whether Scoble is right or wrong. It is about things we should be worried before jumping into the social networking bandwagon. (more…)