Berkman Buzz: Week of March 9, 2009

March 13, 2009

BERKMAN BUZZ:  A look at the past week's online Berkman conversations.  If you'd like to receive this by email, sign up here.

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*Ethan Zuckerman introduces us to Media Cloud
*Dan Gillmor, guest blogging for Boing Boing, examines the latest idea for saving newspapers
*David Ardia looks at the Cook County Sheriff's lawsuit against Craigslist
*The Internet & Democracy Project explores farce as an outlet against censorship
*Corinna di Gennaro shares some lessons learned on the Internet and democracy
*Diana Kimball discusses education from a Digital Native's perspective
*Weekly Global Voices: "New Citizen Media Projects Foster Rising Voices in Ivory Coast, Liberia, China, Mongolia, and Yemen"

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"We’re launching a very cool new project at Berkman today, Media Cloud. Basically, Media Cloud is a platform to help researchers find quantitative answers to questions like: What type of stories are covered more heavily in blogs than in newspapers? How does coverage of a topic like Iran differ between national newspapers, local newspapers and political blogs? How much overlap in coverage do two news sources have? If you’re reading the New York Times and the Boston Globe, how much topical difference do the sources have? How do news stories move between bloggers and mainstream journalists? How common or infrequent is it that bloggers “break” stories or introduce new analytic frames..."
From Ethan Zuckerman's blog post, "Introducing MediaCloud"

"So we're down to naked collusion? That's the proposal from the NY Times' David Carr this morning, in his latest column about the crumbling business of newspapers, who begins: 'Back when I was a young media reporter fueled by indignation and suspicion, I often pictured the dark overlords of the newspaper industry gathering at a secret location to collude over cigars and Cognac, deciding how to set prices and the news agenda at the same time...'"
From Dan Gillmor's blog post, "Saving Newspapers, Part MMIX: Collude and Conspire"

"Last Thursday, Thomas Dart, the Sheriff of Cook County, Illinois, filed a lawsuit against online classified site Craigslist, claiming that the site is a 'public nuisance' because its users post ads in the 'erotic services' category that facilitate prostitution.  Yes, you read that correctly.  The top law enforcement officer in Cook County is using a civil lawsuit to go after Craigslist because he believes users of the site are creating a 'public nuisance...'"
From David Ardia's blog post, "Cook County Sheriff Sues Craigslist for Creating a 'Public Nuisance'"

"This morning my blackberry buzzed with a link to this gem of an internet censorship story (Hat Tip: Byran Haut). I haven’t had a chance until now to pile on, and of course Andrew Sullivan has already beaten me to the punch. Regardless, here’s the story. Since China moved to contain the pro-democratic Charter 08 movement by shutting down sympathetic online forums, China’s massive internet firewall has become even more draconian. The government’s public campaign has always about pornography, but this is often convenient cover to censor sites with uncomfortable political content..."
From the Internet & Democracy Project blog post, "Alpacas Launch War on Chinese Censors!"

"I have just come back from a three day workshop on: 'The Internet and Democracy, Lessons Learnt and Future Directions of Research', which we at Berkman’s Internet & Democracy project have been organizing in collaboration with the Oxford Internet Institute and the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. The workshop gathered around 25 leading academics working in the field in order to investigate:  (1) what are the lessons learnt from existing research? (2) how can we best measure the impact of the Internet and new media on democracy and what are the insights provided by different research methodologies? (3) what are the future directions for the field..."
From Corinna di Gennaro's blog post, "The Internet and democracy: lessons learnt and future directions of research"

"Last Thursday, Alex and I were lucky enough to be interviewed by Steve Hargadon for the Future of Education interview series. The experience was quite remarkable, in a number of ways; our conversation felt a like a tele-unconference, with everyone bringing ideas and energy and questions to the table, thoughtfully pursuing answers. The full audio of the interview and the parallel chat transcript are now up at The Future of Education. We had a compact but enthusiastic set of teachers in the audience, listening live, and I was transfixed watching their comments fly by on the backchannel. The audience members responded to and augmented our interview in real-time. As a result, so did we..."
From the Digital Natives Project blog post, "Answering for Ourselves: An Antidote to Alarmism"

"In January we received over 270 proposals from activists, bloggers, and NGO's all wanting to use citizen media tools to bring new communities - long ignored by both traditional and new media - to the conversational web. It was, by far, the highest number of proposals Rising Voices has ever received in its two-year history of supporting citizen media training projects. The growing interest in citizen media from civil society shows that we truly are undergoing a major transformation in how we inform ourselves about the rest of the world and who is able to contribute that information. Of the 270 project proposals, the following five are most representative of the innovation, purpose and goodwill that Rising Voices aims to support..."
From David Sasaki's blog post for Global Voices, "New Citizen Media Projects Foster Rising Voices in Ivory Coast, Liberia, China, Mongolia, and Yemen"
About Global Voices:
<http://globalvoicesonline.org/about/>