Berkman Buzz: Week of May 4, 2009

May 08, 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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*Eszter Hargittai: "Facebook and grades revisited aka peer-reviewed publication at record speed"
*Dan Gillmor: "Using Distributed Media (and People) to Ask Hard Questions"
*Wendy Seltzer: "Theater of the DMCA Anticircumvention Hearings"
*David Weinberger: "WolframAlpha vs. Google"
*Kimberly Isbell: "The Future of Journalism and How to Start It"
*Doc Searls: "Some clues for covering wildfires"
*Herdict: "Friday Top 5: Most Reported Countries (Inaccessibility)"
*Weekly Global Voices: "Brazil: The Character Assassination of a Presidential Candidate"

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"Following up on my blog post from a few weeks ago, a couple of colleagues and I have published a formal response to the media frenzy covering the study that claimed a relationship between Facebook use and lower grades. Back when the story broke, most media outlets ran with the claims made in the original press release or even took it to a next step by suggesting a causal relationship between Facebook use and lower grades. Only a few outlets took care in reporting, among them the Chronicle of Higher Education. In the last few days, the BBC has had a piece considering the various perspectives..."
From Eszter Hargittai's blog post, "Facebook and grades revisited aka peer-reviewed publication at record speed"

"Ari Melber, at Personal Democracy Forum, explains 'Condi Rice’s Tortured Macaca Moment,' in which Stanford University students questioned her about her role in our nation’s torture of prisoners in recent years. To call her response inept is an understatement, as many have explained (see Scott Horton’s deconstruction). But Melber nails the larger import of what the students did..."
From Dan Gillmor's blog post, "Using Distributed Media (and People) to Ask Hard Questions"

"Every three years, as mandated by Congress in Sec. 1201(a)(1)(C) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Librarian of Congress and Register of Copyrights conduct a rulemaking on exemptions from the DMCA’s prohibition on circumvention of access controls protecting copyrighted works. This year’s revival opened in Stanford, then moved here to Washington DC for a three-day run..."
From Wendy Seltzer's blog post, "Theater of the DMCA Anticircumvention Hearings"

"David Talbot at Technology Review has run the same queries through Google and WolframAlpha. (WA isn’t yet open to the general public, i.e., to you and me.) The queries tend to be of the sort that WA will be better at: comparisons and computations. WA comes out well, but be sure to read David’s writeup of comments on his article..."
From David Weinberger's blog post, "WolframAlpha vs. Google"

"'Where do we go from here?' In the wake of the demise of local papers like the Rocky Mountain News and the well-publicized battle between the New York Times Co. and the Boston Globe's unions, this question has increasingly been on the lips of media professionals and those interested in the future of journalism in the Internet age. This past week, lawmakers, professional journalists, and representatives of some of the most successful Internet ventures all weighed in with their own predictions and prescriptions..."
From Kimberly Isbell's blog post for the Citizen Media Law Project, "The Future of Journalism and How to Start It"

"With all due respect to the good jobs that most of the legacy media are doing, their coverage could be much, much better if they paid respect to those listening and watching online, which includes their smart phones. What they need are plain hard facts, rather than the vague, boiled-down or sensationalized stuff that was News As Usual for the duration. Here are a few clues that should help..."
From Doc Searls' blog post, "Some clues for covering wildfires"

"As we now know, Internet filtering is no longer limited to the usual suspects (China, Iran, Burma); Herdict has allowed us to get wind of new filtering across the world, in places the OpenNet Initiative has never even tested.  That is why this week we’re bringing you the top 5 countries reporting inaccessibility..."
From the Herdict blog post, "Friday Top 5: Most Reported Countries (Inaccessibility)"

"Her name has already been put forward by Brazilian President Lula da Silva as his preferred Workers' Party (PT) candidate for the 2010 presidential election. Since gaining Lula's support, Dilma Roussef has received overwhelming attention from the Brazilian press. It seems, however, that the mainstream media have set aside good journalistic standards when it comes to news stories about Roussef..."
From Thiana Biondo's blog post for Global Voices, "Brazil: The Character Assassination of a Presidential Candidate"