This evening I had the pleasure of attending an open house for the CommerceNet Labs center for decentralization or Zlab. I’ve been meaning to write about Zlab for awhile, and I’m taking advantage of tonight’s event to write without having anything to say.

If I may boil down Zlab’s aim to one paraphrase: Make software that works the way a fully decentralized society would work.

Check out their The Now Economy for a flurry of deep items concerning decentralized commerce and net infrastructure, lab projects that abet the above aim and publications. Of personal interest, see Nutch: A Flexible and Scalable Open-Source Web Search Engine, which uses the Creative Commons search engine to demonstrate how a Nutch plugin is implemented.