Berkman Buzz: Week of June 8, 2009

June 12, 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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*Dan Gillmor remarks on the ever changing face of public companies in "Metrotwin: Why Every Company is a Media Company"
*Wendy Seltzer warns, "Don’t believe the anti-hype: Twitter succeeds by leaving room for failure"
*Stuart Shieber asks, "Are the Harvard open-access policies unfair to publishers?"
*danah boyd cuts straight to the bone while investigating "The gender gap in perception of Computer Science"
*Rebecca Mackinnon reports on Chinese censoring software in "Green Dam filtering software scorned by many Chinese"
*Weekly Global Voices: "Denmark: #TV2Wikigate"
<http://globalvoicesonline.org/2009/06/12/denmark-tv2wikigate/>

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"Consider British Airways’ Metrotwin - London & New York, a site that has information about London and New York, the airline’s two most important cities. It’s the best evidence yet that all companies with a public presence — which is to say almost all companies, period — are becoming media companies in addition to their core businesses..."
From Dan Gillmor's blog post, "Metrotwin: Why Every Company is a Media Company"

"More power to the Twitter team for creating a tool that allows so many people to try it so easily that the seemingly small percentage who get value out of it can find and continue using it. We should be celebrating what happens when infrastructure is cheap enough that we can accept that 60% just throw it away (even assuming all those non-tweeters aren’t using the service to listen). Rather than trying to force users to its model, Twitter has usually adapted to the customs its users have developed — and has responded to feedback when it breaks some of those conventions (see #fixreplies)..."
From Wendy Seltzer's blog post, "Don’t believe the anti-hype: Twitter succeeds by leaving room for failure"

"Of course, as a private company, Harvard is well within its rights to set up its policies to favor whatever it wants, even if third-parties are disadvantaged. For instance, Harvard has policies that disallow faculty performing research for funders that have certain kinds of policies, even though that disadvantages such potential funders. But I for one am not interested in unfairly advantaging one business model for scholarly publishing over another, and in any case, the argument that the Harvard policy does so is fallacious..."
From Stuart Shieber's blog post, "Are the Harvard Open-Access policies unfair to publishers?"

"While 67% of all boys rated computer science as a 'very good' or 'good' career choice, only 9% of girls rated it 'very good' and 17% as 'good.' Digging down deeper, it is fascinating to note that there's a gender gap between boys and girls when it comes to feeling that 'being passionate about your job' is 'extremely important' (F: 78%, M: 64%), 'earning a high salary' is 'extremely important' (F: 39%, M: 50%), and 'having the power to do good and doing work that makes a difference' is 'extremely important' (F: 56%, M: 47%). These all play into how these youth perceive computer science and computing-driven fields..."
From danah boyd's blog post, "The gender gap in perception of Computer Science"

"The Foreign Ministry spokesman may have defended Green Dam, but it's his job to defend everything any part of the Chinese government does unconditionally. Many others in China clearly don't agree with him and are publicly saying so. Even the state-approved Caijing magazine has a long critique of the government's Green Dam mandate, arguing that decisions and control over censorship to protect children should be left in the hands of parents and teachers - that centralized censorship even when well-intentioned 'throws the baby out with the bathwater...'"
From Rebecca Mackinnon's post, "Green Dam filtering software scorned by many Chinese"

"Last month, two Danish television hosts aiming to show that the participatory online encyclopedia Wikipedia is unreliable, instead ended up defending their own credibility when it was uncovered that the errors they showed off on television had been created by someone working for the program..."
From Solana Larsen's blog post for Global Voices, "Denmark: #TV2Wikigate"