Hanging on the wall in a family friend’s home is a quilt bearing the name of our grandmothers. Surrounding their names are the names of men and women from their community. Funds were needed for a community project so a quilt raffle was developed. Each participant embroidered their names onto flour sacks in this once agricultural community now lost to the time and the metropolitan expansion of Marysville, Washington, USA. All the flour sack squares were sewn together to create a simple and colorful bed quilt, padded with a left over blanket and backed by a bed sheet.

The quilt was displayed in the community center of the now lost village while community members spent what little money they had on raffle tickets, knowing it was going for a worthy cause. Her grandmother won the raffle and the quilt comforted the beds and the spirits of their family’s sick and cold children for decades, finally finding its way to her wall in honor of the past and community spirit that once thrived in a place covered with housing subdivisions where no one knows their neighbors.

For the village of Sunnyside and others around the world, community quilts were their social media tools and resources. Neighbors would get together in between long days of planting, harvesting, and familial responsibilities to chat and share stories and news over pieces of fabric.

Local bars served the same purpose, along with food and drink, to create a family away from family where people could be “themselves” and share their thoughts with others, often encouraged by the spirits. read more

A few weeks ago, Jeff Chandler reviewed Adjix on Performancing. Adjix lets Twitter users (or perhaps other microblogging services) monetize their accounts by shrinking URLs a-la tinyurl, but then puts up ads on the resulting page.

Based on the comment thread and the one on the follow-up post detailing an interview with Adjix’s CEO, readers mostly had negative impressions. Many were appalled at the thought of monetizing Twitter readership in this way. It was tantamout to facilitating spam, they say, and this would most likely result in loss of credibility. Others have commented that Adjix is impractical because of its use of frames rather than redirects, which effectively makes bookmarking difficult. read more

Six months ago, a group of venture capitalist companies set up the iFund to promote and fund application development for Apple’s iPhone.

Now, they’ve set up the iFundVC blog, which will be used to keep the public updated on where the $100m is being invested.

There’s only one blog entry at present, and it will be interesting to see how much the site is developed. Particularly as some elements of the funding process are sure to be confidential, I wonder how much is left to talk about.

The design of the blog is certainly basic, but if pushes out interesting information then I don’t really care.

(Via TUAW)

It appears as if Google have bought TNC (site in Korean), short for Tatter and Company, which is a Korean company focusing on blogs. VentureBeat reports that TNC is providing professional blogging software and services to more to 400,000 users, and also says that the sum Google paid for the company is undisclosed. No official word from Google yet.

However, TNC founder Chang Kim blogs about it over at Web 2.0 Asia (in English, thankfully, for those of us that don’t speak or read Korean), which gives quite some legitimacy to the claim. read more