Last year, Internet luminary and entrepreneur Marc Andreessen wrote a significant essay in the Wall Street Journal, outlining the many ways in which software has become absolutely vital to our world. Software allows us to extend our reach even further than we did before, automating processes, accelerating the rate of change, and providing the sinews between people and data. It seems only natural then, that software has come to the forefront of business technology.

Here’s what we’re reading online, this week at Involution, on design, tech, and the digital life, in our links round up.

SOPA: Anatomy of a Public Uprising
As most of us of are aware, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) bill in the US House of Representatives, while purported to protect content providers, in fact hides within its depths the chilling ability to freeze online businesses and tech innovation through a set of draconian provisions, that would, for instance, force search engines to filter their search results.

Here’s what we’re reading online, this week at Involution, on design, tech, and the digital life, in our links round up.

Better off TED?
Richard Saul Wurman is re-inventing the conference format for the 21st century with his follow up to the wildly popular TED conferences. The new venture, WWW.WWW, is billed as "Intellectual Jazz" and will have no presentations, schedules, or tickets. Instead, two high-level thinkers from related fields will discuss a topic presented to them at the time of the conference. The conversations will be streamed live, and also available via a cross-platform tablet application. Through this new endeavor, Wurman hopes we will find "an energetic exploration of the lost art of conversing". Whether this new format will light up the imaginations of the business elite, and catch on as readily as TED did, only time will tell. But Wurman is, no doubt, changing the rules of the conference game yet again. Fast Company's Co.Design blog features a piece on the WWW.WWW conference, which will debut in 2012.

Here’s what we’re reading online, this week at Involution, on design, tech, and the digital life, in our links round up.

Tech Talent Wars: Boston
The Talent Wars are heating up in Boston, as tech companies of every kind, from start ups to Fortune 500 firms, unload their best artillery fire in the recruiting battle. One of the most original recruitment efforts in the fight so far comes from the rapidly growing, venture funded HubSpot, which is trying to encourage software developers at big companies to make a "prison break" for HubSpot's hipper environs. Of course, Boston and the surrounding tech burbs are filled with many of the aforementioned large company "prisons" for devs to break out of, and HubSpot is willing to make it worthwhile for experienced talent, with a $1K bonus for each year spent at a big firm. A 20-year veteran of an enterprise software giant could stand to get the equivalent of a new car as a signing bonus … not too shabby. Whether other cash rich, talent strapped companies in Boston will counter HubSpot's aggressive move remains to be seen, but it's clear that the war for development brainpower is escalating in Beantown, with no end in sight.

Here’s what we’re reading online, this week at Involution, on design, tech, and the digital life, in our links round up.

Facebook Closes the Door on User Data
Facebook is racing to shore up the walls of its garden, in an attempt to keep Google+ and others from leveraging its social graph and contact data.

Remember Classmates.com? Arguably the first-ever social networking website it "connected" each of us to the people we went to school with over the years. Plagued by clumsy and poorly executed "Web 1.0" thinking, and an absolutely atrocious pay-to-play business model, Classmates.com could have been Facebook. Instead, it unintentionally ushered in many thousands of social networking start-ups that, as the market shook out, have become "Facebook and everyone-else-who-doesn't-matter-much-anymore." Still, there were plenty of steps between here and there.

For the week ending March 13, 2010, and for the first time in its spectacular ascendancy, Facebook became the most visited site on the Internet. Already, analysts and experts are hailing this as a momentous event, one that validates the power of social networking in the rapidly evolving universe of the World Wide Web. There’s just one problem: the premise is simply false.

Dusting off the history of the recent past, almost exactly two-and-a-half-years ago, Google passed MySpace to become the most visited site on the Internet – and has held that position until last week. Yes, that’s right: MySpace, the once-meteoric and now-languishing social network that went from Internet sensation to, in the eyes of marketers, the social network for less affluent and educated demographics, fairly recently held the lofty moniker “most visited site.” So this symbolic achievement of Facebook harkens less to any real milestone moment in the history of social networking on the Internet, and more to the hyperbolic crowning of a flavor of the month.