Internet and Democracy Newsfeed

Political Change in the Digital Age: The Fragility and Promise of Online Organizing

rtabasky — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 15:55:26 -0500

In this paper, we discuss the possible impact of digital technologies in authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes. We conclude that policymakers and scholars that have been most optimistic about the impact of digital tools have over-emphasized the role of information, specifically access to alternative and independent sources of information and unfiltered access to the Internet. We argue, in contrast, that more attention should be paid to the means of overcoming the difficulties of online organization in the face of authoritarian governments in an increasingly digital geopolitical environment.

An encyclopedic interview with Ethan Zuckerman on global citizen media, Net filtering, "cyber war," and everything in between...

syoung — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 15:56:42 -0400

A Tale of Two Blogospheres

syoung — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 10:00:00 -0400

The Berkman Center is pleased to announce the release of a new paper exploring U.S. political blogs:

A Tale of Two Blogospheres: Discursive Practices on the Left and the Right, by Yochai Benkler and Aaron Shaw

This paper compares the practices of discursive production and participation among top U.S. political blogs on the left, right, and center during the summer of 2008 and, based on qualitative coding of the top 155, finds evidence of an association between ideological affiliation and the technologies, institutions, and practices of participation across political blogs. Sites on the left adopt more participatory technical platforms; are comprised of significantly fewer sole-authored sites; include user blogs; maintain more fluid boundaries between secondary and primary content; include longer narrative and discussion posts; and (among the top half of the blogs in the paper's sample) more often use blogs as platforms for mobilization as well as discursive production.

The variations observed between the left and right wings of the U.S. political blogosphere provide insights into how varied patterns of technological adoption and use within a single society may produce distinct effects on democracy and the public sphere. The study also suggests that the prevailing techniques of domain-based link analysis used to study the political blogosphere to date may have fundamental limitations.

To read the full abstract and download the paper, visit http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/publications/2010/Tale_Two_Blogospheres_Discursive_Practices_Left_Right

Also, The Nation has published a piece about the study, as well as an interview with Yochai Benkler.

Special thanks are due to Silpa Kovvali for research assistance and data collection, to professors Eszter Hargittai and Henry Farrell for feedback on a previous draft, and to John Kelly and the folks at Morningside Analytics for sharing their list of top blogs.

As always, we welcome your feedback.

Berkman Buzz: Week of March 8, 2010

syoung — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 16:35:00 -0500

BERKMAN BUZZ: A look at the past week's online Berkman conversations
If you would like to receive the Buzz weekly via email, please sign up here.

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What's being discussed...take your pick or browse below.

* David Weinberger turns out an aphorism, expertly.
* Doc Searls responds to Pew's Future of the Internet IV survey.
* Ethan Zuckerman blogs John Wilbanks' talk on generativity in science.
* Herdict is looking for a few good sheep.
* Harry Lewis on the "madness" of criminal libel in France.
* Internet & Democracy chews changes from the Office of Foreign Assets Control.
* CMLP reviews the copyright confusions of Walsh against Walsh.
* Chilling Effects tallies up "innocent infringer" damages.
* Future of the Internet updates the TiVo / EchoStar saga.
* A year ago in the Buzz: "Introducing MediaCloud"
* Weekly Global Voices: "Haiti: Two Months Later"

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The full buzz.

"Because of some talks I’m giving, I’ve been thinking about how to put the concrete effects the change in expertise has for the authority of business. I want to say that in the old days, we took expertise and authority as the last word about a topic. Increasingly, the value of expertise and authority is as the first word — the word that frames and initiates the discussion."
From David Weinberger's blog post [2b2k] Authority as having the first word

"Yet money can still be made with goods and services — even totally commodified ones. Amazon makes money with back-end Web services such as EC2 (computing) and S3 (data storage). Phone, cable and other carriers can make money with “dumb pipes” too. They are also in perfect positions to offer low-latency services directly to their many customers at homes and in businesses. All the carriers need to do is realize that there are benefits to incumbency other than charging monopoly rents."
From Doc Searls' blog post Futures of the Internet

"The truth is that the scientific world is far less generative than the digital space. He proposes three major obstacles to generativity: accessibility, ease of mastery, and tranferability. He points out that, as science has gotten more high tech, it’s far harder to master. The result is hyperspecialization: neuroanatomists don’t talk to neuroinformaticists… “and god help you if you cross species lines.” And so universities are making huge investments to try to encourage collaboration: MIT’s just build a $400 million building – the Cook Center – to force collaboration between cancer researchers… and predictably, researchers are fighting the mandate to move in and work together."
From Ethan Zuckerman's blog post John Wilbanks on Science Commons, and generativity in science

"Want to help us spread the word about Herdict? We’re looking for a few good volunteers to become country leaders, especially for the following locales: Syria, China, Iran, Australia, Morocco, Turkey, Vietnam, Burma, Tunisia, UAE. Being a Herdict Country Leader requires an interest in Internet filtering (censorship), experience using social media, and a desire to create a strong network of Herdict users in your country or community."
From Jillian York's blog post for Herdict, Promote Herdict: Be a Country Leader!

"I have been thinking for awhile about the myriad ways in which we could wind up knowing less, not more, as a result of the digital explosion. So this will be the first in a series. Feel free to post or email others you’d like to suggest. The editor of the European Journal of International Law is going to stand trial in criminal court in France, because a book review on a web site associated with the journal displeased the author of the book. The book’s author demanded that the review be taken down; the editor wrote a thoughtful response, inviting the reviewer to alter his review if he wished, and inviting the author to post a comment of her own if she wished."
From Harry Lewis' blog post How We Could Know Less #1

"This morning the New York Times quotes a ’senior administration official’ who says that the US is set to relax sanctions against Iran, Syria and Cuba to allow US companies such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to allow downloads of personal Web-based services in those countries. Around the water cooler this morning, my colleague Jill York correctly pointed out that the article appears to conflate too many things together when it describes ‘Internet services’ that are currently banned, and that might be allowed as part of the planned waiver."
From Bruce Etling's blog post for Internet & Democracy, US Set to Relax Internet Restrictions Towards Iran, Syria and Cuba

"The campy video features musician and political supporter Joe Cantafio performing his take on the 1971 classic "Walk Away." Cantafio used the same, or substantially similar, music from the song to create “Lead the Way,” an ode to Walsh’s campaign. When Walsh the Rocker found out a Republican used his music as part of a campaign video, an entertaining—though misguided—discussion on copyright law began."
From Justin Silverman's blog post for the CMLP, Candidate Joe Walsh vs. Rocker Joe Walsh: A DMCA Knockout

"A second federal appeals court has now eviscerated the “innocent infringer” defense for copyright infringement, this time for residents of Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. The court concluded that, as long as a copyright notice appears on a physical CD somewhere, anyone who illegally downloads that music from the Internet is subject to the higher $750 statutory minimum damages; even if that person believed he or she had permission to download the material. In 2005, a different appeals court made a similar ruling affecting residents of Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana."
From David Abrams' blog post for Chilling Effects, Careful What You Download - What You Don’t Know Can Cost You

"The latest development in the story, from last week, is that the Federal Circuit has again affirmed that EchoStar needs to destroy the DVRs. The court didn’t directly review the merits of the order, but rejected EchoStar’s narrower claim that the order should be construed to allow other remedies other than remotely disabling the DVRs. EchoStar’s delay in implementing the bricking has resulted in a finding of contempt of court."
From Jonathan Zittrain and Elisabeth Oppenheimer's blog post, The end draws near(er) for EchoStar DVRs

"One of the questions Yochai and I have debated is whether cases of bloggers shaping the news agenda are common or rare. To answer this question, we’d need to track not just cases when bloggers succeed in propogating memes, but those cases where propogation fails. My guess is that looking for terms that are unusually common in specific blogs versus blogs or newspapers as a whole is one way to find these cases – someone at Powerline was hoping that Samir Kantar would become a major discussion point in talking about Obama’s engagement with Iran. It didn’t. Being able to identify these failures as well as successes is a first step towards understanding how ideas do and don’t move between blogs and mainstream media."
From Ethan Zuckerman's blog post Introducing MediaCloud [originally included in the Berkman Buzz in March 2009]

"Today marks two months since the January 12 earthquake devastated Haiti - and even in the midst of other natural disasters, bloggers still seem to be struggling to come to grips with what this tragedy actually means for the people of a nation that is often referred to as “the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.” The day to day reality of post-quake life in Port-au-Prince and environs is markedly different from the glory days of Haiti's proud past, which HaitiAnalysis.com ably chronicles in this post by Mara Chinelli of CampusTimes.org..."
From Janine Mendes-Franco's blog post for Global Voices, Haiti: Two Months Later

Berkman Buzz: Week of March 1, 2010

syoung — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 17:00:00 -0500

BERKMAN BUZZ: A look at the past week's online Berkman conversations
If you would like to receive the Buzz weekly via email, please sign up here.

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What's being discussed...take your pick or browse below.

* OpenNet Initiative exposes Bing filtering in Arab countries.
* Harry Lewis recognizes his subjects.
* CMLP asks after Italy's conviction of Google executives for invasion of privacy.
* Judith Donath thinks through the misrecognitions of juries.
* Ethan Zuckerman digs into Jonathan Stray's investigation of "the new news ecosystem."
* Weekly Global Voices: "Chile: Army Deployed to Streets of Concepción"
* Internet & Democracy reads the numbers on Twitter.
* Micro-post of the week: Web styles of the rich and saavy?
* Doc Searls -- the personal is the radio.
* David Weinberger live-blogs Karrie Karahalios' talk on ties in social media.
* Peter Suber treats the middle ground between publishing markets and missions.
* Stuart Shieber shares open access news from Harvard Business School.

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The full buzz.

"Google's recent decision to stop filtering keywords on its Chinese platform, Google.cn, sparked discussion in the media about the role of corporations in controlling access to online material in repressive nations. Microsoft recently added a new layer of complexity to the ongoing debate regarding the filtering and censorship practices of U.S. search engines via its own search engine, Bing. ONI testing reveals liberal filtering by Bing in one of the most censored regions in the world: the Arab countries."
From Jillian York's blog post for ONI, ONI Releases Special Report on Microsoft Bing Filtering in Arab World

"I recently noticed that the latest digital cameras have a feature that not only tags people the camera can identify because you have tagged them before, but stops you to ask if you’d like to identify them if the camera notices that they keep turning up in your photos. Facial recognition is in the camera software."
From Harry Lewis' blog post The Camera App that Identifies your Subjects

"I've no doubt that CMLP blog readers, fellow netizens that you are, are well aware of an Italian court's conviction last week of three Google executives for invasion of privacy of an Italian teenager. (In case you missed the story, here it is in short: the teenager (who either suffered from Down's syndrome or autism; reports differ) was filmed by four other teens who were bullying him, and the bullies posted the video on YouTube..."
From Arthur Bright's blog post for the CMLP, Will Italy's Conviction of Google Execs Stick?

"But can we make justice blind? What, ideally, should juries and judges be able to see of the defendant, plaintiff or witnesses? Many feel that it they need to see the accused in order to assess their words and gauge how believable they are. Yet if that judgment is based on distorted character perception, then perhaps justice is better served by being blind, by not seeing the participant in a case, no matter how important it feels. Would we be better off with a purely audio court?"
From Judith Donath's post for the Law Lab, A Reflection on Leslie Zebrowitz’s talk

"This evening, Google News tells me that I have my choice of 5,053 articles on conflicts between Congressional Republicans and Democrats over healthcare reform. (Oh goody.) How many of those stories contain original reporting? In a world with thousands of professional media outlets at our fingertips – as well as hundreds of thousands of amateurs – how much original material do we really have access to? Pew’s annual State of the News Media report made one pass at answering this question in their 2006 edition. They did an exhaustive study across media of May 11, 2005 and concluded that, of the 14,000 stories posted on Google News that day, only 24 unique “news events” were represented."
From Ethan Zuckerman's blog post Jonathan Stray on original reporting: imaginary abundance

"The deployment of the army occurs at a time when regional authorities had begun to point fingers at the national government of President Michelle Bachelet for not sending the army earlier. Currently, citizen and mass media outlets in Chile report that Concepcion is experiencing a shortage of food and water. The city has no electricity and its water supply is intermittent. Apart from these complications, several buildings have collapsed throughout the city. Perhaps the most dramatic and devastating collapse that occurred was that of a 15-story building, where survivors are still thought to be trapped under the rubble."
From Felipe Cordero's blog post for Global Voices, Chile: Army Deployed to Streets of Concepción

"While #iranelection was a major story in 2009, it pales in comparison to the number of Tweets about Michael Jackson’s death (78 per second at its peak) over a similar two week period. In fact, it appears that Jackson’s death actually sucked all the air out of the Iran election discussion on Twitter, according to what Ethan Zuckerman tells me based on Media Cloud data."
From Bruce Etling's blog post for Internet & Democracy, 50 Million Tweets a Day

"my new paper on Digital Na(t)ives http://bit.ly/9ZQC3B challenges assumptions about "Net generation" tx 2 @sivavaid & others 4tweets" [9:45 AM Mar 4th]
Eszter Hargittai pointing to her new paper on differences in youth Internet skills and uses

"At this point Public Radio Player (with which I have some involvent) and other ‘tuners’ for the iPhone (such as the excellent WunderRadio) are my primary radios. I use them when I’m walking, driving, or making coffee in the kitchen at home. I listen to KCLU from Thousand Oaks/Santa Barbara here in Boston, I listen to WBUR, WUMB, WERS, WEEI (Celtics basketball) and other Boston stations when I’m in California."
From Doc Searls' blog post Radio gets personal

"Karrie grew up in a small town in Greece. Every Sunday her father would call from America. The call would come to the one phone, which was in a tavern. The people around expected the call and would participate. People use communication media differently in rural and urban areas, she says. E.g., rural communities used to like party lines; it was like a sub-net. Urban folks didn't and the telephone companies moved to individual lines.Her group sampled communication usage in rural and urban communities. They had five hypotheses..."
From David Weinberger's blog post [berkman] Karrie Karahalios: Strong and weak ties in social media

"For these reasons, let me call journalism and education "mission-oriented" economic sectors, as opposed to "market-oriented" sectors like hat and hardware manufacturing. These are two ends of a spectrum, not airtight categories. In fact, I'm more interested in the complicated middle ground between the two poles than in the two poles themselves. When a newspaper's revenues decline, it may have to scale back on investigative stories about health insurance and scale up on stories about new-fledged ducklings at the zoo. When a university's endowment tanks, it may have to close some low-enrollment programs in favor of high-enrollment programs."
From Peter Suber's essay Open access, markets, and missions

"Two years to the day after the Faculty of Arts and Sciences became the first school at Harvard to vote an open-access policy, the Harvard Business School enacted their own policy on February 12, 2010, becoming the fifth Harvard school with a similar policy. Under the HBS policy, Like the previous policies, faculty agree to provide copies of their scholarly articles for distribution from the university’s DASH repository and grant the university a waivable license to distribute the articles."
From Stuart Shieber's blog post Harvard Business School approves open-access policy

Berkman Buzz: Week of February 1, 2010

syoung — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:00:00 -0500

BERKMAN BUZZ: A look at the past week's online Berkman conversations
If you would like to receive the Buzz weekly via email, please sign up here.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

What's being discussed...take your pick or browse below.

* Ethan Zuckerman finds a box of rubber duckies in the forest.
* David Weinberger loquaciously filters Clay Shirky.
* John Palfrey provides a view into Joel Reidenberg's "Transparent Citizens" talk.
* OpenNet Initiative reviews the past year in Internet filtering and surveillance.
* Judith Donath reflects on the complexities of deception.
* Internet & Democracy discusses a recent DDOS attack.
* Weekly Global Voices: "Russia: Anti-Government Protest Covered By Bloggers, Ignored By Media"
* CMLP unpacks a decision on anti-SLAPP in Massachusetts, on journalism versus activism.
* Dan Gillmor broadens the mission of journalism education.
* ProjectVRM makes the pile higher.
* Christian Sandvig: "Ich bin kein Erving Goffman!"
* Doc Searls returns to Borg's Woods.

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The full buzz.

"I was more impressed with the thinkers at Metaverse Roadmap who were exploring augmented reality, ways of overlaying layers of information over the real world. Rather than starting with a blank canvas as the virtual worlds folks did, the augmented reality crowd started with satellite photos or camera views of the physical world. It was much easier to judge the success or failure of their work – did layering information on the physical world enable interesting new behaviors? Reveal hidden truths? Or did it obscure what was already visible?"
From Ethan Zuckerman's blog post Geocaching: Augmenting Reality for Enhanced Serendipity

"I do want to push on one of the edges of Clay’s idea, though. Knowledge traditionally has responded to the fact that what-is-to-be-known outstrips our puny brains with the strategy of reducing the size of what has to be known. We divide the world into manageable topics, or we skim the surface. We build canons of what needs to be known. We keep the circle of knowledge quite small, at least relative to all the pretenders to knowledge. All of this of course reflects the limitations of the paper medium we traditionally used for the preservation and communication of knowledge."
From David Weinberger's blog post [2b2k] Clay Shirky, info overload, and when filters increase the size of what’s filtered

"As a practical matter, in the cloud era, we’ve lost the practical obscurity of information about all of us. What used to exist about us, but in private/not-that-accessible form, is now accessible and associate-able with an individual. We now have transparent citizens, Reidenberg contends. How does this challenge the rule of law, he wonders?"
From John Palfrey's blog post Joel Reidenberg: Transparent Citizens and the Rule of Law

"The OpenNet Initiative is proud to release its 2009 Year in Review, a look into instances of filtering, surveillance, and information warfare around the world in 2009. The events of 2009 demonstrated a global rise in third-generation Internet controls."
From Jillian York's blog post for ONI, ONI Releases 2009 Year in Review: Filtering, Surveillance, Information Warfare

"Looking at these attempts to measure physical corollaries of deception, Stephen Kosslyn and his colleagues asked: Why look at the side effects of lying? Why not go right to the source – what is the brain doing? What can we see in brain activity that enables us to distinguish lying from truth-telling?"
From Judith Donath's post for the Law Lab, A Reflection on Stephen Kosslyn’s talk

"The fiercely independent Novaya Gazeta has been under a sustained DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack for the last week. Many have speculated that the site came under attack because of a story last week on corruption by Yulia Latynina, but the deputy editor of the paper told the Sydney Morning Herald that the paper had “many friends” who might like to see the paper at least temporarily inaccessible."
From Bruce Etling's blog post for Internet & Democracy, Russian Independent Paper Suffers Week-Long Cyber Attack

"At least 7,000 protesters gathered on the streets of Kaliningrad, the country's westernmost city, on January 30 to demand, among other things, the resignation of the regional governor Georgy Boos and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. But don't count on the leading Russian media outlets to tell you about it. The biggest and most popular TV channels keep their silence. Mainstream newspapers and radio stations ignore the rally and go about their business like nothing happened."
From Vadim Isakov's blog post for Global Voices, Russia: Anti-Government Protest Covered By Bloggers, Ignored By Media

"Earlier this week, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) ruled in Fustolo v. Hollander..., that the writer of newspaper articles on a local development controversy could not use the state's anti-SLAPP statute to get defamation claims by a developer dismissed, even though the writer was also involved in the story as the co-founder of a community group that opposed the development. The writer's involvement in the community group did not make her articles an exercise of her "right to petition" on the development issue, the high court said, because the articles were objective journalistic accounts that did not advocate a particular position or disclose the writer's involvement."
From Eric Robinson's blog post for the CMLP, Denying Anti-SLAPP Coverage, Massachusetts High Court Draws Activist/Journalist Boundary

"If I ran a journalism school, I would start with the same basic principles of honorable, high-quality journalism and mediactivism, and embed them at the core of everything else. If our students didn’t understand and appreciate them, nothing else we did would matter very much. With the principles as the foundation, I would, among many other things: Emphasize undergraduate journalism degrees as great liberal arts programs, even more valuable that way than as training for journalism careers. At the same time, focus graduate journalism studies on helping people with expertise in specific areas to be the best possible journalists in their fields."
From Dan Gillmor's blog post The Future of Journalism Education

"Graham Sadd...Damon Cortesi...Nicolas Shriver...John Cass...Paul Madsen...Dennis Howlett...Robin Wilton...Yep."
From Doc Searls' blog post for ProjectVRM, VRMspotting

"As an ethnographer, my plan of attack has often been to choose a somewhat obscure object, technical system, or site (recently, I’ve studied several wireless Internet systems). It might be a large technical system but it’s usually obscure, and that used to make me feel safe. Most people haven’t heard of the wireless systems I’ve written about. I get to have my site all to myself. If another social researcher suddenly started to talk about my object that would be horrible news–they might contradict me. (Yikes!)"
From Christian Sandvig's blog post A Plea for the Obscure Parts of Obvious Systems

"We mostly skated at Borg’s pond, in Borg’s Woods, a private paradise under a canopy of old growth hardwood on the Maywood-Hackensack border, owned by the Borg family, which published the Bergen Record during its heyday as a truly great newspaper."
From Doc Searls' blog post Heavy Whether

Berkman Buzz: Week of January 18, 2010

syoung — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 16:00:00 -0500

BERKMAN BUZZ: A look at the past week's online Berkman conversations
If you would like to receive the Buzz weekly via email, please sign up here.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

What's being discussed...take your pick or browse below.

* Peter Suber takes stock of open access in 2009.
* John Palfrey reports from a reader privacy event.
* danah boyd argues that privacy is still very much alive.
* Fernando Bermejo wonders aloud about flash cookies.
* Future of the Internet puts out a HIT about worker satisfaction.
* Difficult Problems in Cyberlaw looks for a fight.
* CMLP tries not to cut itself on the First Amendment.
* Doc Searls connects the dots of the Content-o-net.
* OpenNet Initiative ballparks the number of Internet users being filtered around the world.
* Weekly Global Voices: "More websites banned in Myanmar. Global Voices banned too"
* David Weinberger reacts to Hillary Clinton's Internet speech...
* ...and Ethan Zuckerman weighs in as well.
* Internet & Democracy reads that the Kremlin tells governors to blog.
* A year ago in the Buzz: "Inauguration Day Online"

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The full buzz.

"2009 was Open Access Year in the Netherlands, but it might have been Open Access Year worldwide. The growth on every front was extraordinary. In this review of the highlights, I won't cover individual new OA journals, repositories, or databases; and like last year, the volume has forced me to omit most new developments in open education, public-sector information (PSI), and wikis. Last year I had a special section on OA to humanities research, but this year I cut that as well to make room for a section on the recession. As always, apologies to the many projects I had to omit. ... BTW, if you track these things, March 31 was OA Day in Copenhagen, and October 19-23 was OA Week worldwide."
From Peter Suber's Open Access in 2009

"Anne Klinefelter, the beloved law library director at UNC-Chapel Hill (you should hear her dean introduce her; really!), is hosting a Data Privacy Day event on reader privacy. She makes the case in her opening panel remarks that, if we wish to translate library practices with respect to privacy into a digital world, we need to figure out how to translate not just law but also ethics."
From John Palfrey's blog post Reader Privacy Event at UNC-Chapel Hill

"When I learned that Mark Zuckerberg effectively argued that 'the age of privacy is over' (read: ReadWriteWeb), I wanted to scream. Actually, I did. And still am. The logic goes something like this: * People I knew didn't used to like to be public. * Now "everyone" is being public. * Ergo, privacy is dead. This isn't new. This is the exact same logic that made me want to scream a decade ago when folks used David Brin to justify a transparent society. Privacy is dead, get over it. Right? Wrong!"
From danah boyd's blog post Facebook's move ain't about changes in privacy norms

"Last September Adobe purchased Omniture for $1.8 billion. In my view, it was a surprising mix, and I went around trying to understand what was behind it. While for some people the deal seemed to make business sense , others were more skeptical. And I left it at that. But a couple of weeks after the operation was announced, I came across a post in a rather laconic blog that pointed to flash cookies as a key element for understanding the deal."
From Fernando Bermejo's blog post Tracking the trackers

"Much of the point, as I read it, was just that cloudwork practices are so new, dynamic, and varied that it’s hard to know what the good and bad effects will turn out to be. As they point out, this could be a boon for workers here in the US who want flexibility and autonomy, as well as creating new kinds of opportunities for workers abroad."
From Elisabeth Oppenheimer's blog post for Jonathan Zittrain's Future of the Internet blog, Life in a clickshop

"DisputeFinder is a Firefox extension, that is a collaboration between Intel Research and UC Berkeley. Its basic premise is to allow readers of web content to understand the broader context of claims made on websites. If a claim about a controversial topic (think global warming, gun control or a “healthy” new diet) is made on a site, users of this plugin will be immediately notified by colored text that there are conflicting viewpoints on that particular topic."
From Dharmishta Rood's blog post for Difficult Problems in Cyberlaw, DisputeFinder: crowdsourcing controversy

"From a functional perspective, I think that the First Amendment is the most important amendment in the bunch, because it ensures that the people can denounce any injustices the government perpetrates. To be sure, various other amendments bar greater evils than censorship—the Thirteenth Amendment ban of slavery springs to mind as an obvious example. But I'd argue that, without the First Amendment, banning such evils would be harder to do as a practical matter without a legally sanctioned watchdog function of constitutional proportions."
From Arthur Bright's blog post for the CMLP, The Double-Edged Sword of Online Free Speech

"Encirclement is more than censorship. It’s a war strategy, and China has been at war with the Internet from the start. But while China’s war is conscious, efforts by other countries to encircle the Net are not."
From Doc Searls' blog post How the Internet becomes the Content-o-net

"The OpenNet Initiative (ONI) has been monitoring Internet filtering around the world since 2002. Currently, more that 40 countries are filtering the Internet to varying degrees, while a number of others, including Australia, Iraq, and Spain, are considering enacting filtering policies. So, just how many people are censored online around the world?"
From the OpenNet Initiative blog post, More than half a billion Internet users are being filtered worldwide

"Bagan ISP, one of the two internet service providers under MPT (Myanmar Post and Telecommunication), has started banning more websites, including blogs with their own domains. Some of the newest addition to the ban list includes twitter, wordpress (and its subdomain blogs), and Global Voices."
From tan's blog post for Global Voices, More websites banned in Myanmar. Global Voices banned too

"First, my overall reaction to Hillary Clinton’s speech: It’s thrilling that a Secretary of State would claim “freedom to connect” as a basic human right. That’s a very big stake in the ground. Likewise, it’s sort of amazing that the State Department is funding the development of tools to help users circumvent government restrictions on access. On the negative side, it’s distressing (but not surprising) that the Secretary of State should come out against anonymity so we can track down copyright infringers. Of course, in response to a question she said that we have to strike a balance so that the anonymity of dissenters is protected even as the anonymity of file sharers is betrayed. I just don’t know how you do that."
From David Weinberger's blog post Hillary Clinton’s Internet policy speech

"It was encouraging to hear Secretary Clinton sounding like a dyed in the wool cyberutopian. Her description of the Internet as a “new nervous system for the planet” reflects aspirations much more than reality. Yes, we’re getting information from Hunan and Haiti… but we’ve got a lot of work to do to ensure that these networks allow all people to speak and to be heard."
From Ethan Zuckerman's blog post Reacting to Clinton’s Freedom to Connect speech

"The Russian daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta reports that the Kremlin, worried about the waning influence of official mass media in the regions, has told regional governors to become active bloggers and participants in online social networks, or risk losing their posts. The article further explains that the governors’ Internet activities will become one of the criteria by which their effectiveness will be judged, and that those who do not perform well will be weeded out."
From Bruce Etling's blog post for Internet & Democracy, Kremlin Tells Governors to Blog, or Pack their Bags

"On Tuesday morning at 11:45, I ran out of my last final exam and plopped myself down in front of the nearest screen, determined not to miss a moment of Barack Obama’s inauguration. Televisions are harder to find around campus these days, but all I needed was a laptop with Internet access, and nearly everyone in the dining hall was congregated around one or another. I was only one of millions who found themselves in front of a computer rather than a TV (or in DC in person.)"
From Sarah Zhang's blog post for Digital Natives, Inauguration Day Online [originally included in the Berkman Buzz in January 2009]

Berkman Buzz: Week of December 14, 2009

rtabasky — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 17:48:11 -0500

BERKMAN BUZZ: A look at the past week's online Berkman conversations
If you would like to receive the Buzz weekly via email, please sign here.

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What's being discussed...take your pick or browse below.

* CMLP releases a legal guide to the Federal Trade Commission's endorsements and testimonials in advertising guide
* Donnie Dong passes along a cartographic take on the position of Chinese netizens
* Internet & Democracy responds to Thomas Friedman's NYT opinion piece "www.jihad.com"
* John Palfrey blogs Sahara Byrne's Berkman lunch on Internet safety techniques
* Herdict appeals to Internet users in Russia to test recent blockage reports
* David Weinberger has begun to charge at his next book
* OpenNet Initiative shares info about Australian tweets and filters
* Doc Searls frames the 'Net beyond the social
* ...and Andrew McAfee warns that the word social should not be overused
* Andy Eggers responds to Lessig's transparency paper
* StopBadware questions the process for new Chinese domain name registrations
* Weekly Global Voices: "Ecuador: Debates Over New Communication Law"
* Micro-post of the week: danah boyd points to Facebook's post about user diversity

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The full buzz.

"As part of our legal guide series on Risks Associated with Publication, today CMLP published a guide to Publishing Product or Service Endorsements. The new legal guide section takes on the Federal Trade Commission's controversial "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising" (the "Guidelines") that took effect on December 1, 2009. The FTC Guidelines call for bloggers, Tweeters, Facebook users, and other online publishers to disclose "material connections" they have with companies whose products or services they endorse. The Guidelines also say that bloggers may be held liable for making misleading or unsubstantiated claims about a product or service."
From the CMLP's blog post CMLP Publishes New Guide to FTC Disclosure Requirements for Product Endorsements

"A "Map of Internet Encirclement Compaign in China" was released by some Chinese netizens yesterday. It is very interesting and has been switfly spreaded to BBS and weblogs in Chinese Internet sphere."
From Donnie Dong's blog post Map of Internet Encirclement Compaign in China

"The broader point to be made here is that blaming the Internet for extremism is like blaming boats, cars or shoes, just because terrorists used them in the last attack."
From Bruce Etling's post for Internet & Democracy, www.jihad.com?

"Prof. Sahara Byrne, of the communications department at Cornell, is the Berkman Center’s lunch series speaker today. Prof. Byrne studies responses to Internet safety techniques. She’s interested in the “recipes for disaster,” such as when parents love a given safety technique and kids hate it. She’s a believer in psychological reactance theory: that when kids really don’t like something, they’re going to work hard to get around it."
From John Palfrey's blog post Sahara Byrne: Parents, Kids and Online Safety

"According to a recent article in The Moscow Times, Russian ISP Yota, which is co-owned by Russian Technologies, admitted to blocking some web sites, including Garry Kasparov’s Kasparov.ru, Solidarity’s Rusolidarnost.ru and the banned National Bolshevik Party’s Nazbol.ru over the past few weeks. Kasparov.ru was reported as inaccessible to Herdict twice on December 3, while Rusolidarnost.ru and Nazbol.ru were each reported once."
From the Herdict blog post, Russian Provider Admits to Filtering: Report to Herdict!

"Next, I think I want to gesture at one way of understanding the change: We now face “knowledge overload.” But, the point of the book is that knowledge is no longer what it once was, so I don’t want to point to ordinary cases of knowing things; I fundamentally disagree with the idea that knowledge is to information as information is to data. So, I’m thinking that I might here use an example that will show the reader that this is a real, concrete issue, and it is not exactly the issue that she probably assumes it is from the fact that I’m talking about “knowledge.”"
From David Weinberger's blog post From information overload to knowledge overload

"As celebrated today on iTWire, Australian and international activists are fighting Australia's impending filtering policy on Twitter. Users opposing the filter are using the hashtag #nocleanfeed to disseminate information, and to fight against the filter."
From Jillian York's blog post for ONI, Australian Activists Fight Filter on Twitter

"Not long ago I even suggested that “social media” is a crock. My point was not to denigrate people doing good work in the social media space, but rather to point out that our collective vision of this space was wrongly limited to what could be done on Facebook, Twitter and other commercial “platforms”. Ignored was the freedom and independence granted by the Net’s own open and essentially ownerless platforms and protocols — and the need to equip individuals with their own instruments of independence and engagement: work that’s still mostly not done."
From Doc Searls' blog post Building better markets. Not just better marketing.

"I ended my talk at last month’s Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco (viewable here; free registration required) by trying to be cute: I gave advice about how to fail with E2.0. My goal, of course, was to talk about good practices by highlighting bad ones. I gave six bad ideas: *Declare war on the enterprise; *Allow walled gardens to flourish; *Accentuate the negative; *Try to replace email; *Fall in love with features; * Overuse the word ’social’."
From Andrew McAfee's blog post The S Word

"I basically agree with what I take to be the two basic points he makes about the reception of transparency data. His first point is that much of the transparency we've created does not help us answer causal questions. We can't answer questions about government corruption by looking at a single contribution or even a set of carefully produced regression coefficients because, after all, correlation is not causation; it is a rare correlation that would provide convincing evidence of corruption as it is usually defined. The second basic point is that the public will not carefully consider the complexity of the issue when presented with these correlations; if indeed they encounter these correlations at all, the data will merely serve to reinforce coarse generalizations like "DC is corrupt."
From Andy Eggers' blog post Thoughts on Lessig's "Against Transparency"

"The China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) announced new rules a few days ago that are intended to "enhance the authenticity, accuracy, and integrality [sic] of the domain name registration information." These rules require applicants for .cn domain names to submit copies of their business license and personal ID for review by the registrar within five days of registering the name. There are two big questions that aren’t clear from the announcement."
From StopBadware's blog post, China restricts registration of .cn names

"Ecuador's new Constitution, which was passed by a national referendum in 2008, says in Article 16 that all people, individually or as a group, have the right to free, intercultural, inclusive, diverse, and participative communication [es]. However, the interpretation of this article in the form of laws has created some controversy. Many have started to debate about the contents the new Communication Law, which is the very first one of this kind in Ecuador."
From Milton Ramirez's blog post for Global Voices, Ecuador: Debates Over New Communication Law

"Facebook released fantabulous data on change in ethnicity/racial makeup of users over time: http://bit.ly/4BWdPE (def see last graph!)"
danah boyd points to Facebook's post about user diversity, [http://twitter.com/zephoria/status/6786697966]

Berkman Buzz: Weeks of November 23 and 30, 2009

syoung — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 16:00:00 -0500

BERKMAN BUZZ: A look at the past week's online Berkman conversations
If you would like to receive the Buzz weekly via email, please sign up here.

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What's being discussed...take your pick or browse below.

* Christian Sandvig will never have done with watching babies laugh.
* Dan Gillmor is troubled -- deeply -- by Comcast and NBC together.
* Chilling Effects smells a nice fresh dubious trademark claim.
* Donnie Dong is waiting to see what will happen with the Chinese Literary Copyright Association.
* Wendy Seltzer argues that "open-source DRM" is a contradiction in terms.
* Internet & Democracy reads the news about the IDF's new media unit.
* Weekly Global Voices: "Mongolia: Climate Change Affecting Nomadic Way of Life"
* OpenNet Initiative discovers that the .il TLD is unblocked in UAE.
* danah boyd on the importance of hanging out.
* Herkko Hietanen may do some innertubing next year.
* CMLP is a bit happy about SLAPP and anti-SLAPP in Cali.
* David Weinberger live-blogs Kevin Werbach interviewing Larry Strickland.
* Doc Searls translates the phrase "transition from circuit switched network to all-IP network."
* Micro-post of the week: Eszter Hargittai thanks John Palfrey.

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The full buzz.

"It’s not that Media Studies has ever been held in particularly high regard as an important subject (though the cinema people keep trying), but when writing about online video there’s an even greater presumption of frivolousness. As I am often arguing about the valuable role of public media and media generated by what we used to call “the audience,” I get stuck between the dead-boring vibe of PBS pledge drives and scenes of people freaking out on their webcams. Either this is perceived a good-for-you but not something we’d actually watch (PBS), or it’s momentarily amusing but perceived as ultimately valueless (YouTube freakout)."
From Christian Sandvig's blog post In Search of the Most Defensible YouTube Video

"So it’s official. Comcast has announced its intention to buy NBC Universal from GE. The danger of this cannot be overstated, but it could actually be the catalyst for a policy conversation the nation desperately needs to hold. A Comcast-NBC combination is brazenly anti-competitve and anti-democratic. It would give one company far too much ownership over not just professionally produced media but also the ways media consumers can receive it."
From Dan Gillmor's blog post Comcast-NBC: The Road Toward Control Over What We Create

"Getty Images has been sued by Car-Freshner Corp. for trademark infringement, dilution, and unfair competition over stock photographs of cars that include images of tree-shaped air fresheners hanging from the rear-view mirror. Rebecca Tushnet's 43(B)log reports, via Seattle Trademark Lawyer, that Car-Freshner Corp. has sued the online photo-licensing clearinghouse Getty Images for allegedly distributing photos of car interiors that include tree-shaped air fresheners."
From Rebecca Schoff's blog post for Chilling Effects, Something Smells Off: Getty Images Sued Over Silhouette of Air Freshener

"China Association of Copyright on Literature Works (CACLW), the governmental authorized org for collective copyright management) is searching the books which are scanned by Google, and calling Chinese authors either sign the GoogleBookSettlement or join CACLW's collective legal action."
From Donnie Dong's blog post Fighting Google Unarmed?

"Why did it take nearly a decade for portable video to move beyond compact DVD players? Why can we do so much more with music CDs and their successors than with DVDs and theirs? I argue the difference is baked-in DRM and its legal side-effects."
From Wendy Seltzer's blog post New Paper: Anticircumvention Versus Open Innovation

"In a quote that could have just as easily have come out of Sarah Palin’s mouth, IDF Spokesman Brig. Gen. Avi Benayahu recently told a journalism conference that the Israeli military is creating an Internet and new media unit to get past the ‘filter’ of the mainstream media. This after their self-described success with YouTube during ‘Operation Cast Lead’ last year in Gaza."
From Bruce Etling's blog post for Internet & Democracy, Israeli Defense Forces Embrace Web 2.0

"Mongolian nomadic families have historically depended on the vast land for their livelihood. In the past, rangeland for their grazing animals had been plentiful, and food and water were readily collected from their surroundings. However, all is that is changing, as climate change is having a negative impact on their way of life."
From Eduardo Avila's blog post for Global Voices, Mongolia: Climate Change Affecting Nomadic Way of Life

"The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has unblocked access to Web sites on the Israeli country code top-level domain “.il" ONI noticed earlier this month that .il Web sites have been accessible from the UAE, and has since been testing for filtering of tens of .il Web sites from different categories including government, politics, religion, and entertainment. All sites have been found consistently accessible via the country's two ISPs, Etisalat and du."
From Helmi Noman's blog post for ONI, UAE unblocks access to top Israeli domain ".il"

"As adults, we take social skills for granted... until we encounter someone who lacks them. Helping children develop social skills is viewed as a reasonable educational endeavor in elementary school, but by high school, educators switch to more "serious" subjects. Yet, youth aren't done learning about the social world. Conversely, they are more driven to understand people and sociality during their tween and teen years than as small children."
From danah boyd's blog post Sociality Is Learning

"Vantaa district court decided in a case that defines the limits of freedom of speech and online liability that discussion forum administrators are not liable for people gathering to float down the river drinking beer. That is even as the participants used the discussion forum to discuss the organization of the event."
From Herkko Hietanen's blog post for Turre Legal, Finnish court: Administrators are not liable for activities planned at discussion forum

"California SLAPP jurisprudence is the gift that keeps on giving, especially for weary bloggers looking for something to write about. (SLAPP stands for Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation. You can read all about them in our Legal Guide.) Our friend Adrianos Facchetti over at the California Defamation Law Blog has been blogging and tweeting up a storm this week about anti-SLAPP cases."
From Kimberley Isbell's blog post for CMLP, SLAPP Me Baby, One More Time

"Larry says that he’s the President’s chief advisor on information policy. “The bulk of our resources go to the assignment of federal spectrum.” They handle the relationship with ICANN and issues of Internet governance. They have a “policy shop” that they are going to “rebrand” as the Internet policy shop, rather than an telecom policy shop. Danny Weizner of MIT is heading that up. And there’s a lab in Boulder that does spectrum research. They have a grant-making organization that has $5B in Recovery funds for project that expand broadband adoption."
From David Weinberger's blog post [sn09] Larry Strickland

"Yesterday the FCC released a public notice seeking comment on the “transition from circuit switched network to all-IP network.” ...Translation: from the phone system to the Internet. This is huge. Really. Freaking. Huge. Or maybe not. Could be it’s all just posturing or worse. But I don’t think so. Or I hope not."
From Doc Searls' blog post Liberating the Net from Telephony

"Tx @jpalfrey for very generous review of my book Research Confidential: http://bit.ly/8lMgFm it's been so much fun teaching this course w/u!" [10:02 AM Dec 1st]
Eszter Hargittai thanks John Palfrey in connection with her book and their shared course on research methods.

Berkman Buzz: Week of November 16, 2009

syoung — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:00:00 -0500

BERKMAN BUZZ: A look at the past week's online Berkman conversations
If you would like to receive the Buzz weekly via email, please sign up here.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

What's being discussed...take your pick or browse below.

* Christian Sandvig insists on watching television alone.
* Internet & Democracy isn't the only group digging into the Russian blogosphere.
* Andrew Eggers takes a second look at lobbying as legislative subsidy.
* StopBadware weighs (in on) market incentives for cyber security.
* Doc Searls doubles our pleasure on the ProjectVRM blog.
* Ethan Zuckerman peers into the advertising blind spot.
* David Weinberger recommends two long posts by others.
* Dan Gillmor returns to the question of social norms and information permanence.
* Chilling Effects is also interested in the cease and desist of Stopp and Stopp.
* The CMLP rolls out its pro bono legal network to help online journalists.
* New on Publius: "Bring in the Human Rights," by Rikke Frank Jørgensen
* Weekly Global Voices: "Impact of ICT on Indigenous Cultures: Rejuvenation or Colonization?"
* Micro-post of the week: David Weinberger, reluctantly.

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The full buzz.

"I really appreciated Nicholas Carr’s article “The Price of Free” in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, mostly because it makes many of the same points as my last blog post. I see from Web searching that the original title was possibly “The Price of Free (Television).” As Carr and I both wrote, the Comcast merger is about the threatening decline of the cable TV business. It is Comcast’s attempt to get into the content business and the Internet business before they are left out of business. Luckily the conference paper that my post was based on was first published in 2000 so we can win any disputes about priority… because Carr is a much better writer than I am."
From Christian Sandvig's blog post My Television is a Computer

"The wildly popularly Russian search engine Yandex has released another useful report on the Russian blogosphere based on its search data. While it is nearly silent on methods, it is nonetheless helpful to have another data point out there on the Russian blogosphere, which we’ve also been digging into at the Berkman Center following our Iranian and Arabic blogosphere research. 'The "average" Russian blogger is a 22 year old woman who lives in Moscow and posts on LiveInternet or Diary.ru (this is the first blogosphere we’ve looked at in detail where female bloggers are in the majority, and about 20% to 30% more females than we find in Middle Eastern blogospheres we’ve studied). Women write more often, and also comment more frequently on others’ blogs, than men in Russia.'"
From Bruce Etling's post for Internet & Democracy, Yandex on the Russian Blogosphere

"I spent some time this morning reading Hall and Deardorff's 2006 APSR article 'Lobbying as Legislative Subsidy,' because Larry Lessig cited it in his talk on institutional corruption. I had looked at this a while ago, but somehow reading it again I saw it as newly significant. The basic idea is that most lobbying is a subsidy to legislators; lobbyists essentially act as 'adjunct staff' who increase the productivity of legislators who already agree with them. This contrasts with the more common view of lobbying as bribery or persuasion."
From Andrew Eggers blog post Lobbying as legislative subsidy

"According to Wired’s Threat Level blog, the president of the Internet Security Alliance, Larry Clinton, blames many cyber security problems on individuals and businesses failing to take responsibility for the role they could/should play: [...] Clinton goes on to say that the solution lies in government creating market incentives, and he promises a proposal from the Internet Security Alliance soon. It will be very interesting to see what they propose."
From Maxim Weinstein's blog post for StopBadware, Larry Clinton: Government must change market incentives

"Two posts worth noting over at the ProjectVRM blog. The first is Intention Economy Traction, which riffs off David Gillespie’s illustrative and wise 263-slide narrative Digital Strangelove (or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Internet). Both of us see The Intention Economy as pretty much inevitable. The second is Advertising In Reverse..."
From Doc Searls' blog post Swelling ground

"Who pays for content and services on the internet? My friend Bo Peabody thinks we should be asking not just whether ad-supported journalism is feasible, but whether ad-supported social networks will work. In a Washington Post op-ed titled “Twitter.org?“, Bo leverages his experience founding and running Tripod.com to suggest that social networking sites are misunderstood as content sites, and won’t be profitable as ad-supported properties. He suggests that, because these spaces are critically important digital public spheres, we should consider supporting them as nonprofits if necessary, but shouldn’t expect them to sustain themselves based on advertising. As I look more closely at Bo’s thinking, I’m concerned that advertising may not be a viable model to support anything other than search online, and that systems we are increasingly reliant on may be supported by the shakiest of foundations."
From Ethan Zuckerman's blog post What if they stop clicking?

"Ethan Zuckerman ponders what good is knowing if it doesn’t lead to effective action…and he isn’t asking this rhetorically. You want to read this because Ethan himself is an extreme knower, an extreme care-er, and a full time agent of change. I found that this post caused me to have an internal dialogue in which I kept interrupting myself. The world is just so hard to change, even when the need is so obvious and urgent, and yet we can’t let ourselves believe that knowing and caring can make no difference at all."
From David Weinberger's blog post Two long posts well worth reading

"The German murders, Werlé and Lauber, don’t get much sympathy in this regard. Nor should they: Murder strikes me as the central act of these men’s lives, though we should also note that they have paid the debt to their society that entitles them to re-enter that society with some respect from others, difficult as that may be. Do they really expect, however, that even a ban on publishing their names will expunge their deeds from people’s knowledge? Yet the motive behind the German law is a sound one: to help those who’ve transgressed restore their membership in society."
From Dan Gillmor's blog post Scrubbing the Past

"Wolfgang Werlé, who was convicted of the cruel murder of a well-known German actor, has employed the wonderfully named law firm of Stopp and Stopp to send cease and desist letters to media outlets covering his crime and his release. The German-language version of Wikipedia has reportedly already been sued and the English version has been threatened with legal action if the name of the murderer, who was recently paroled after serving fifteen years of a life sentence, is not removed from the article on Walter Sedlmayr, the victim. The Electronic Frontier Foundation notes that Werlé has also sued an Austrian ISP for the publication of his name and that case may go to the European Court of Justice."
From Rebecca Schoff's blog post for Chilling Effects, German Murderer Threatens to Censor Wikipedia

"The idea for OMLN [Online Media Legal Network] came out of CMLP's work over the last 3 years helping online journalists understand their legal rights and responsibilities. During this time period, we've published and updated our legal guide and legal threats database, blogged on topics of interest to online publishers, partnered with like-minded organizations on a variety of educational projects, and filed amicus briefs in cases with significant implications for online speech. While we are proud of the impact we've made and the success of the CMLP website, we also recognize that many online journalists and bloggers need more than generally applicable legal information—they need their own lawyers to tackle their own individualized legal issues."
From the CMLP blog post Citizen Media Law Project Launches Legal Assistance Network for Online Journalists

"The UN-based human rights system is supplemented by regional human rights mechanisms, which vary widely in constitution and effectiveness. In addition, development agencies have increasingly adopted a so-called right-based approach in recent years. According to the definition used by the UN Office of the High Commission of Human Rights, a rights-based approach is a conceptual framework for the process of developing policies that are normatively based on international human rights standards and operationally directed to promoting and protecting human rights. Following from this, it would be natural to expect that the UN arenas for Internet policy also apply a rights-based approach, thus making Internet policies 'operationally directed to promoting and protecting human rights.'"
From Rikke Frank Jørgensen's essays for Publius, Bring in the Human Rights

"But can ICT truly preserve and protect distinct identities and culture? Does ICT by its very intervention introduce an element of westernization amidst the indigenous culture that it purports to preserve and protect? What is the optimum balance between preserving traditional knowledge and embracing remix culture? The cultural debate surrounding deployment of ICT in the field of indigenous/ knowledge and culture simply refuses to die down."
From Aparna Ray's blog post for Global Voices, Impact of ICT on Indigenous Cultures: Rejuvenation or Colonization?

"Since I tweeted Eco's wonderful interview about lists (http://bit.ly/288iu5), I guess I should tweet my response http://bit.ly/4sdXQv" [9:59 AM Nov 15th]
David Weinberger promotes his comments on Umberto Eco's promotion of his Louvre exhibit.