Berkman Buzz: Week of June 30, 2008

July 03, 2008

BERKMAN BUZZ:  A look at the past week's online Berkman conversations.  If you'd like to receive this by email, just sign up here. The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University

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*Doc Searls thinks the FCC need to reexamine what "free" means
*Intern Zack McCune goes web-less for one day
*Digital Natives intern John Randall would like to be a digital native
*Sam Bayard looks at a New Jersey court's decision to dismiss a defamation suit against Wikimedia
*Ethan Zuckerman discusses Polymeme's push against cocooning
*Weekly Global Voices: "Bahrain: Bloggers’ Code of Ethics Against Sectarianism"

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The full buzz.

"It's time to get ornery again with the FCC. Fortunately, they're asking for it, by soliciting comment on this FCC rulemaking proposal for "Service Rules for Advanced Wireless Services in the 1915-1920 MHz, 1995-2000 MHz, 2020-2025 MHz and 2175-2180 MHz Bands.  It's a chocolate-covered spider.  The chocolate is cost. The rulemaking proposes making Internet access over that spectrum "free" — in the free-as-in-beer sense. Not the free-as-in-freedom sense. Especially not in the free-as-in-speech sense. And least of all in the free-as-in-markets sense.  The spider is in the fine print..."
Doc Searls, "Time to school the FCC on what 'free' really means"

"9:23.  I don’t want to get up. I never really want to get up but this is different, this is like a rainday; getting up will only mean confronting the cold reality of my pledge to not use the internet. For 24 full hours. Maybe I could just sleep through it. But the phone rings. It’s my editor, Janine Weisman, responding to my email autoreply. “Not using the internet today?” she asks rhetorically, “Wow. Well let me tell you what I would have emailed.”  I am up now, for better or worse. I walk by the sleeping macbook on the desk. Usually I would open the lid, boot up firefox, and jaunty over to nytimes.com, just to see where the national and international world is at..."
Zack McCune, "noe web day - 'the journal'"

"I thought I was. I was born January 9th, 1980. I missed the 70s by just nine days.  I love technology. I was luckiest 6 year-old kid in he world when my uncle gave the family a Commodore 64 for Xmas. I programmed in BASIC. I was in chat-rooms on Prodigy and CompuServe. I played in Multi-User Doors (MUDs) on local direct dial-up bulletin board systems before I even knew what the Internet was.  I thought that I was a Digital Native..."
John Randall for the Digital Natives Project, "Are you a Digital Native?"

"News reports indicate that New Jersey Superior Court Judge Jamie S. Perri dismissed Barbara Bauer's defamation lawsuit against the Wikimedia Foundation yesterday. In what appears to have been an oral ruling from the bench, the court relied on section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA 230), which protects providers and users of interactive computer services from state-law tort liability for publishing the statements of third parties, to dismiss Bauer's claims. (For more on CDA 230, see our Primer on Immunity and Liability for Third-Party Content Under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act)..."
Sam Bayard, "Citing CDA 230, Court Dismisses Defamation Suit Against Wikimedia Foundation"

"My friend Evgeny Morozov is one of the most insightful technology journalists working today, writing for The Economist, BusinessWeek and Le Monde. (That’s what I think even on weeks where he hasn’t written extremely kind things about my projects.) His blog, dominated by long lists of consistently interesting bookmarks, is one of my few daily reads, in part because he’s one of my main sources of serendipity, finding things interesting to me, often on topics I didn’t know I was interested in.  Evgeny is deeply concerned with the question of serendipity and on the phenomenon of media cocooning, the tendency of people to surround themselves with media that echoes topics, interests and political points of view that we share..."
Ethan Zuckerman, "Polymeme: Architecting the way out of echo chambers?"

"With the political divide in Bahrain usually framed in sectarian terms, blogger Mahmood Al Yousif has posted a code of ethics aimed at stopping the propagation of hate online. Mahmood explains: I believe that in the current circumstances, it is time to…stand united together against sectarianism and discrimination in all their forms. Therefore, I propose the following code to be adopted and signed by all Electronic Publishers, be they bloggers, webmasters, forum moderators, etc..."
Ayesha Saldanha for Global Voices, "Bahrain: Bloggers’ Code of Ethics Against Sectarianism"