Boris, I think you mentioned that last week:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/12/05/darpa.balloon.challenge/

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
MIT team was first to discover the locations of 10 balloons scattered across U.S.
Contest tested use of Web-based techniques to achieve time-critical tasks
Challenge was announced on anniversary of first message sent on Internet's precursor
DARPA: Winning team discovered balloons' locations less than nine hours after launch

This article from the Economist discusses the continued relevance of hits even in the days of near-infinite choice of online content: http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14959982

This weeks reading takes an interesting look at the economic importance of looking at the huge number of niches rather than small number of hits, specifically in entertainment. Essentially, the idea here is that, while a large number of people may purchase a few specific hits, if you compare the combined sales of everything that is not a "hit", there is much greater aggregate sales in the so-called “long tail".

Both Gershenfeld and Eisenberg & Buechley, in this week’s reading, agree that personal fabrication, the creation of high quality one off items (“the prototype is the product”), is likely to be an even greater society game changer than ubiquitous computing because the “matter” it let’s us control belongs to our world, the world of the physical, rather than the “world of the computer”.

This week's readings discuss the Open Source movement/phenomenon/development model from a few different angles. Lakhani and Wolf present a statistical analysis of developers' motivations for contributing to free/open source software projects. The major finding from their research is that creativity is large motivating factor for open source developers. Fitzgerald discusses some of the challenges that the open source model must overcome in order to continue to thrive. Fried and Torrone's slides explore the translation of open source software principles into the realm of electronics hardware.