Berkman Buzz: Week of July 20, 2009

July 24, 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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*Citizen Media Law Project: "The Future of Digital Book Burning: Why Remote Line-Item Retraction is Scarier than Remote Volume Deletion"
*MediaBerkman: "Alexander Macgillivray of Google on the Google Book Search Settlement"
*Internet & Democracy Project: "Russia Has World's Most Engaged Social Networking Audience"
*David Weinberger: "Transparency is the new objectivity"
*Chris Soghoian: "Some of the worst opt-outs failures in the online advertising industry"
*Chris Peterson: "In Praise of [Some] DDoSs"
*Ethan Zuckerman: "When the Times reports rumors"
*Jonathan Zittrain: "NYT cloud op-ed"
*Weekly Global Voices: "Trinidad and Tobago: Online Art Networks"

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"Amazon did its best impersonation of Big Brother last week, when it reached into Kindles the world over and remotely deleted copies of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm. Witty title writers thanked their lucky stars and began stamping out stories comparing Amazon to the Ministry of Truth. Once again, the Twitterati mercilessly mocked Amazon. Double-Plus Outrage ensued..."
From Andrew Moshirnia's blog post for the Citizen Media Law Project: "The Future of Digital Book Burning: Why Remote Line-Item Retraction is Scarier than Remote Volume Deletion"

"The proposed Google Book Search settlement creates the opportunity for unprecedented access by the public, scholars, libraries and others to a digital library containing millions of books assembled by major research libraries. But the settlement is controversial, in large part because this access is limited in major ways..."
From MediaBerkman blog post, "Alexander Macgillivray of Google on the Google Book Search Settlement"

"According to a recent report by ComScore, based on data from its World Metrix audience measurement service, Russians are the world’s most engaged social networkers. ComScore’s report is based on data collected over May 2009. According to the report, 1.1 billion people aged 15 or older went on line during that month, and 65% of those - or 734.2 million people - visited at least one social networking site..."
From Karina Alexanyan's blog post for the Internet & Democracy Project, "Russia Has World’s Most Engaged Social Networking Audience"

"A friend asked me to post an explanation of what I meant when I said at PDF09 that 'transparency is the new objectivity.' First, I apologize for the cliché of 'x is the new y.' Second, what I meant is that transparency is now fulfilling some of objectivity’s old role in the ecology of knowledge..."
From David Weinberger's blog post, "Transparency is the new objectivity"

"I'll be releasing a new version of TACO in the next few days. In the process of collecting a bunch more opt-out cookies, I came across a couple examples of horribly broken opt-outs. In order to share my amusement/frustration with the rest of the Internet, I'm presenting them here..."
From Chris Soghoian's blog post, "Some of the worst opt-outs failures in the online advertising industry"

"Germany’s major carrier Lufthansa became the target of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack...The attack was initiated by Andreas-Thomas Vogel, an activist and website administrator for the Libertad, an advocacy group criticizing as “inhumane” Lufthansa’s policy of letting the police use its planes for the forced deportation of asylum seekers. On June 20, 2001, Vogel called for Internet users to participate in what he claimed to be an “online demonstration..."
From Berkman Center intern Chris Peterson's blog post "In Praise of [Some] DDoSs"

"Robert Mackey of New York Times News Blog, The Lede, has been covering Iran-focused events in the citizen media space. He posts time-stamped updates to The Lede that excerpt from tweets and blogposts of people in Iran or outside the country who are writing about Iran. It’s an interesting experiment, a form of coverage much closer to what some bloggers and tweeters were doing at the height of the Tehran protests than to what the Times usually does..."
From Ethan Zuckerman's blog post, "When the Times reports rumors"

"Here’s a copy of Monday’s NYT op-ed about cloud computing.  The Kindle/Orwell incident broke about ten minutes before the piece closed.  (The original new hook, somewhat oddly, was the announcement of the Google Chrome OS — not at all bad in itself, but a milestone on our progression from PC to cloud.)"
From Jonathan Zittrain's blog post, "NYT cloud op-ed"

"Over the last few decades, the art world in Trinidad — one of the Caribbean's key art locations — has increasingly divided into two hemispheres. The first, driven by a handful of galleries and collectors, is both commercial and conservative, with highest praise (and prices) reserved for paintings of traditional subjects like landscapes and still lifes, alongside tasteful “abstract” works. The other, centred on artist-led initiatives and embracing a range of other contemporary media — installation, video, sound, conceptual work — is characterised by experiment and improvisation, and attracts international critical attention..."
From Nicholas Laughlin's blog post for Global Voices, "Trinidad and Tobago: Online Art Networks"