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When I first read about the computer designed for the One Laptop Per Child project, I wanted one. Not because it was adorable, cheap or a means of doing good (to buy one you had to buy a second for a child in a poor country). I coveted its screen, designed for use in full daylight. Even my Apple MacBook Pro, with all its clever tricks, can't manage that. Add the LifeStraw water filtration system to the list of do-gooder objects I crave. This little wonder, a water filter outfitted with a straw, made the cover of the Design for the Other 90 percent show catalog at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum last year.

After the official demise of the Netscape browser back in 2003, it seemed as if Microsoft's Internet Explorer would dominate the browser market, well, forever. It was hard to imagine how or why anyone would invest time and resources to create a new rival. However, they did. Out of the rubble of Netscape was born the Mozilla Foundation, which took the code from Netscape's browser and used it to create the Firefox browser. Tuesday, Mozilla released version 3.0 of the browser, causing such a stampede of downloads that its servers crashed.

A partnership with the Collaborative Software Initiative and the Utah Department of Health is cementing an emerging community sourcing software model that could thrust open source development deeper into vertical markets. CSI and the state of Utah on May 19 announced the availability of a software system that resulted from a first-of-its-kind agreement to build a Web-based, open source infectious disease management system. The system will help Utah meet the CDC requirements for infectious disease tracking and reporting.

Computers have become more complex in recent years as demands on systems have continued to increase in size due to the amount of external devices, software, hardware and communication components. Technical professionals are depending more and more on the Internet, a blog or a peer whenever they need to research complex technologies. But in this digital age, when information is just a click away, how do you know what information can be trusted? Few developers have the time to go to the library and search volumes of printed materials. So, the next logical source is the Internet.

The power of community is grossly underestimated in this country. Current collaborative trends on the Internet, from Web 2.0 to Wikipedia models, are seen as merely social or arguably informative in nature. That's a bit like saying the U.S. Constitution, another collaborative work, is a fetching flight of fancy thoroughly detached from real world application. Such a claim may be attempted, but it doesn't make a dent in the enduring truth of a multigenerational community commitment. In effect, community works on the Web soar past geographic boundaries and political restraints.

If an Internet user in China searches for the word "persecution," he or she is likely to come up with a link to a blank screen that says "page cannot be displayed." The same is true of searches for "Tibetan independence," "democracy movements" or stranger sounding terms such as "oriental red space time" -- code for an anti-censorship video made secretly by reporters at China's state TV station. It's a reflection of the stifling, bizarre and sometimes dangerous world of Internet censorship in China.

The three-year-old social networking phenomenon Facebook, worth more than $15 billion by many estimates, got a good deal on going global. Its users around the world are translating Facebook's visible framework into nearly two dozen languages -- for free -- aiding the company's aggressive expansion to better serve the 60 percent of its 69 million users who live outside the United States. The company says it's using the wisdom of crowds to produce versions of site guidelines -- especially terms specific to Facebook -- that are in tune with local cultures.

The three-year-old social networking phenomenon Facebook, worth more than $15 billion by many estimates, got a good deal on going global. Its users around the world are translating Facebook's visible framework into nearly two dozen languages -- for free -- aiding the company's aggressive expansion to better serve the 60 percent of its 69 million users who live outside the United States. The company says it's using the wisdom of crowds to produce versions of site guidelines -- especially terms specific to Facebook -- that are in tune with local cultures.

Well, it was a relatively quiet week on the Linux blogs, and we can only speculate that everyone out there was feverishly working on their taxes. Yes indeed. Taxes, as we know all too well, are one of the few certainties in this world -- along with death, as our good friend Mr. Franklin so aptly noted. It seemed fitting, then, that in this month of financial reckoning, so much of the conversation that was out there on the Linux blogs was focused on a reckoning of the other kind. A final reckoning, that is, and it relates to a technology we all know too well.

"Our principal challenge is not to decide where we want to go, but to stay upright as we go there." In his book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, author and NYU faculty member Clay Shirky describes the profound impact of social technological tools on contemporary culture -- from e-mail and blogs to Twitter and wikis. Shirky's book, an example-laden history of the development of such tools, is well-timed. Last week, as protests erupted in Tibet, China moved forcefully to quash news of the clash by restricting Internet access to YouTube.