Berkman Buzz: Week of September 22, 2008

September 26, 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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*Harry Lewis takes us to the public meeting of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force
*David Ardia discusses bloggers insurance
*In honor of One Web Day, David Weinberger announces the launch of the Internet Lexicon
*Creative Commons talks to the authors of The Indie Band Survival Guide
*Publius Essay: "One Missed Call? Refocusing our attention on the social mobile long tail" by Ken Banks
*Digital Natives Reporters in the Field: "Internet Draws Masses for ‘Silent Dance’ Experiment"
*Weekly Global Voices: "Japan: Views on Wall Street Crisis"

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"All day yesterday, company after company gave presentations on how their products would help keep little Johnnie safe from predators and away from pornography. (You can check the conference program for the names of these businesses and hot links to their products. I should hasten to add that while I didn’t like much of what I was hearing, the meeting was run flawlessly — civil and lively and punctual too. Congratulations for a superb job by John Palfrey and the Berkman Center staff.) Some of the businesses offering solutions then answered the question of what we should do when Johnnie, frustrated with his overbearing parents, goes down the street to Libertarian Libby’s home, where the computer has no spyware: If we didn’t either keep Johnnie out of Libby’s house, or walk down the street ourselves and sell the same product to Libby’s parents, well, we were bad parents..."
From Harry Lewis' blogpost, "More on Internet Safety"

"Here is a simple, but often ignored, truth: if you publish online, whether it's a news article, blog post, podcast, video, or even a user comment, you open yourself up to potential legal liability.  It doesn't matter whether you are a professional journalist, hockey-mom, or an obscure blogger, if you post it, you'll need to be prepared for the legal consequences. So how big are the legal risks?  It depends on what you publish and how you go about doing so.  If you publish a blog about cute cats, for example, your risks are going to be lower than they would be if you run a website focused on local police corruption..."
From David Ardia's blogpost, "New Insurance Program for Bloggers Offered by the Media Bloggers Association"

"In honor of One Web Day, we’ve launched The Internet Lexicon, a blatant ripoff of the immensely clever Philosophical Lexicon. It’s a wiki-based list of Webby people whose names are treated as if they were definable words. For example: stone, lisa: (n) An object used to break a hard substance. E.g., “I’d like to lease a stone to throw against that glass ceiling...”
From David Weinberger's blogpost, "The Internet Lexicon"

"Randy Chertkow and Jason Feehan are true polymaths - founders of the pop band Beatnik Turtle, authors of The Indie Band Survival Guide, and a computer engineer and attorney respectively, they continuously have their hands in a bevy of different projects. Their most recent project, the wide publication of The Indie Band Survival Guide - originally and still available as a CC-licensed PDF - is a tome of knowledge that any independent musician, well-known or budding, would do well to have. We caught up with Chertkow and Feehan recentlly to find out more about the Indie Band Survival Guide, their experience as CC-license advocates, and how they manage to juggle their various roles with seeming ease..."
From the Creative Commons blogpost, "The Indie Band Survival Guide"

"In 'The White Man’s Burden – Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good', William Easterly’s frustration at large-scale, top-down, bureaucracy-ridden development projects runs to an impressive 384 pages. While Easterly dedicates most of his book to markets, economics and the mechanics of international development itself, he talks little of information and communication technology (ICT). The index carries no reference to ‘computers’, ‘ICT’ or even plain old ‘technology’..."
From Ken Banks' Essay for the Publius Project, "One Missed Call? Refocusing our attention on the social mobile long tail"

You can also checkout Aaron Shaw's response essay, "Why Politics and Institutions (Still) Matter for ICT4D"

"In this week’s video, Diane Kimball and Sarah Zhang take us into the world of the 'silent dance experiment' - a silent, synchronized dance party which, with the help of the Internet, drew throngs of people from all over Boston, the US, and the world to Faneuil Hall in Boston in February. Such 'flash mob' happenings have picked up in popularity over the last few years thanks to the publicity they have gained through blogs, online event pages, and most especially Facebook. Of the event in Boston, one site wrote, this 'silent dance party involves a large group of people assembling at a given area on a pre-decided time. They mill around inconspicuously, and at the signal (in this case, an airhorn), insert their headphones into their ears, hit play on their portable music player and start dancing as passersbys confusingly look on as a swarm of people dance in silence...'"
From the Digital Natives Project blogpost, "Internet Draws Masses for ‘Silent Dance’ Experiment"

"The ongoing collapse, bail-out and buy-out of Wall Street investment banks, threatening a U.S. and possibly worldwide recession, has triggered no lack of debates in Japanese blogs on the country's strong financial connection with its overseas ally. Michi Kaifu (known in Japan for her blog Tech Mom from Silicon Valley) writes at newsvine.com about the Japanese precedent to the current Wall Street crisis...'"
From Chris Salzberg's blogpost for Global Voices, "Japan: Views on Wall Street Crisis"