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Berkman Buzz: Week of March 16

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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*The Internet & Democracy Project says goodbye to Iranian blogger Omid Misayafi
*On the Future of the Internet blog, Yvette Whon discusses the launch of BadwareBusters.org
*David Weinberger liveblogs Jeff Howe's Berkman Center talk on Crowd Sourcing
*Ethan Zuckerman on Lova Rakotamalala sharing the voices of Malagasy citizens with the global media
*Doc Searls gives a cheer for the wi-fi (and a jeer for the cell service) at SXSW
*Berkman's Gender and Technology Group hosted a mini conference this week
*Dan Gillmor, guest blogging for BoingBoing, proposes an experiment...that may not be so popular

*Weekly Global Voices: "Morocco: Cutting Ties With Iran"

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"I am having trouble expressing how sad and angry I feel over the death of Iranian blogger Omid Rez Misayafi. Bruce’s post this morning announcing it, via Global Voices, left me shaken and upset. I have spent the last hour frantically pouring over the accounts of a writer whom I’ve never met or read (he wrote in Farsi, mostly about traditional Iranian music), but with whom I feel the deepest and most immediate brotherhood. As the Committee to Protect Bloggers put it: 'They’ve Killed One of Us...'"
From the Internet & Democracy Project blog post, "Eulogy for Omid Misayafi"

"BadwareBusters.org was officially launched today by StopBadware.org and Consumer Reports WebWatch. The latest of a string of Berkman Center projects that aim at garnering the wisdom of the crowd through the Internet, BadwareBusters facilitates an online community for people looking for help combating viruses, spyware, and other malicious software on their computers and websites..."
From the blog post, "Busta Badware," on Jonathan Zittrain's
Future of the Internet blog

"From the beginning, he says, he’s been ambivalent about crowd sourcing. His book is a series of stories showing crowdsourcing’s promise and perils. The book is short on quantitative data, he says. As he was finishing up the edits, he came across a survey of 650 iStockPhoto.com photo contributors. iStock was one of Jeff’s main examples, a stock photo agency that undercut competitors by 99%. They were able to do this because amateur photographers were willing to upload entire libraries of their photos. iStock culled them. iStock runs its corporate decisions past the community. The survey showed that contributors had a rich mix of motivations. He’d like to revisit this question..."
From David Weinberger's blog post, "Jeff Howe on crowd sourcing"

"Lova Rakotamalala has been spending a lot of his time explaining the crisis in Madagascar to the global media. In a recent blog post, he explains some of the factors that’s led him to the unusual position of becoming citizen spokesman for his homeland. His work summarizing posts on Twitter is very similar to what he’s done so well for Global Voices - finding citizen voices, and putting them into context..."

From Ethan Zuckerman's blog post, "Lova Rakatomalala on Twitter and Madagascar. And the US State Department."

"SXSW this year is the first big conference I’ve ever attended where the wi-fi is not only solid, but fast. I’ve meaured a steady 20Mb upstream and down, over and over. HUGE high five to Hugh Forrest and the crew for making that happen. At the same time, this is the first conference I’ve ever attended where a cellular provider has just flat-out failed. In this case it’s AT&T, and I’ll bet it’s because the majority of attendees are packing iPhones..."
From Doc Searls' blog post, "Service failure inversion"

"Thank you to everyone who attended yesterday’s Gender and Technology Conference at the Berkman Center.  It was an amazing and overwhelming afternoon.  And while we wished we could have fit in more discussion on each topic, I hope that everyone had a chance to chime in and be heard. The committee is still working on culminating thoughts, notes, bibliographies, etc from yesterday’s meeting.  A video of yesterday’s conference is forthcoming and will be posted to the blog as soon as we have it.  And while the Google Moderator tool wasn’t utilized as much as we would have hoped, there was a bit of action via Twitter which you can check out here: http://tinyurl.com/c3xp6c..."
From the Gender and Technology blog post, "Post Conference Download"
About the Berkman Center's Gender and Technology Group:
<http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/genderandtech/about/>


"Time for some radical thinking in journalism business models, right? OK, try this thought experiment (wait a second while I put on a flame-retardant suit): What would happen if some top English language journalism organizations simply merged and started charging for their breaking news and commentary about policy, economics and and other national/international topics. That is, what if they were to combine for critical mass and keep most of their journalism off the public Internet for a few days after publication but then make the archives freely available...'"
From Dan Gillmor's blog post on BoingBoing.net, "Paying for News: A Mega-Merger Thought Experiment"

"Early last week, it was reported that Rabat had chosen to sever ties with Tehran, after a diplomatic spat between Bahrain and Iran over a statement by an Iranian official questioning Bahrain's sovereignty. Additionally, Morocco expressed resentment at Iran's alleged attempts to influence Moroccans in Europe toward Shi'a Islam. Ibn Kafka, who also covered the story on his French-language blog, wrote a piece in the new Maghreb affairs blog Maghreb Politics Review, assessing the situation and offering this excellent timeline of events..."
From Jillian York's blog post for Global Voices, "Morocco: Cutting Ties With Iran"