In the circles that I travel the Internet is often breathlessly embraced as the herald of all things good; the bringer of increased choice, personal empowerment, social harmony... and the list goes on. And yet, as with any powerful technology, the truth of its consequences eludes such a singular and happy narrative. More access to information doesn’t bring people together, often it isolates us.

We're launching the beta of O'Reilly Answers, and I'm inviting you to be part of it. In brief, O'Reilly Answers is a community site for sharing knowledge, asking questions, and providing answers that brings together our customers, authors, editors, conference speakers, and Foo (Friends of O'Reilly). O'Reilly is at the center of an amazing exchange of knowledge sharing and idea generation, and we want you to join us in changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators.

Democracy Live -- BBC launch searchable coverage of parliamentary discussion, using speech-to-text. One aspect we're particularly proud of is that we've managed to deliver good results for speech-to-text in Welsh, which, we're told, is unique. I think of this as the start of a They Work For You for video coverage. I'd love to be able to scale this to local government coverage, which is disappearing as local newspapers turn into delivery mechanisms for real estate advertisements. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

One of the interesting things about the new Lists feature is the expansion of the asymmetrical nature of relationships on Twitter. I use Twitter Lists to control the flow of the fire hose of my data streams into manageable list streams. But another important aspect is the ability to create lists composed of accounts I don't follow. This is radically changing relationships and the way we build communities on Twitter. As Mark Drapeau pointed out it will become more important which lists you are on than who is following you.

If you have had an opportunity to look at the Adobe Flash Collaboration Service (AFCS) you could see that there is a huge opportunity to do interesting multi-user applications without needing to write all of the server side code. However there is the challenge of how do you control who comes into your application and what they are allowed to do. In addition, keeping your application credentials safe in case your SWF file was decompiled. So as the title suggests you can use a service like Facebook to take care of the users authentication and Flash Remoting for the application authentication.

While it might be true that the number of Book apps is growing at a faster rate, Games continue to dominate the list of popular U.S. iTunes Apps. Games accounted for about a fifth of all iTunes apps over the past week^†, but the category continued to have a disproportionate share of the Top 100 charts, accounting for 52% of the Top Grossing, 56% of the Top Paid, and 50% of the Top Free apps.

1. First Test for Election Cryptography (MIT Technology Review) -- The first government election to use a new cryptographic scheme that lets both voters and auditors check that votes were cast and recorded accurately will be held tomorrow in Takoma Park, MD. Founder of the company behind the technology is David Chaum, who ran the first electronic currency company in the 90s. That was ahead of its time (Internet faced a credibility problem, not a convenience problem), but his timing for this seems spot-on. (via timoreilly on Twitter)

I just held a reunion with people I worked with at a real-time and data acquisition computer vendor 20 years ago, and was interested to see how many ended up in another, related line of work.

Advanced Flash Tactics or AFTs are techniques that come from deep within the Flash Art Of War, the oldest Flash military treatise in the world. In this AFT I will go over - 5 Tips for Documenting Code. Documenting code is not high on many people's lists of things todo. Most of the time it is boring, repetitive, and time consuming. If you want to get better at documenting your own code then this is the post for you. I have 5 simple rules to follow while coding to make the process easier.

Scamville: The Social Gaming Ecosystem of Hell (TechCrunch) -- Many of those games on Facebook that your friends play are evil. To get in-game money or objects, they'll let you take a survey but at the end you're signed up for crap you never wanted. This and more in today's Four Short Links.