BERKMAN BUZZ: A look at the past week's online Berkman conversations
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What's being discussed...take your pick or browse below.
* Andrew McAfee thinks simplicity is key for Craigslist
* Herkko Hietanen spreads word that 26 Finnish universities have
adopted an Open Access publishing model
* Wendy Seltzer questions Google's personalized search
* David Weinberger wonders about Facebook diagnoses as the "Beacon"
ends
* danah boyd invites us to open our eyes to what the Internet reveals
* Christian Sandvig puts web browsers to the large file test
* Donnie Dong talks Google Books and Chinese law
* CMLP suggests gifts for WikiLeaks editors
* Weekly Global Voices: "Corruption Impeding Development In Nepal"
* New on Publius: "Policies for the Natives Designed by the
Immigrants?"
* Micro-post of the week: Ethan Zuckerman's down under interview about
the polyglot Internet
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The full buzz.
"So how on Earth does cl maintain its ridiculous popularity and growth?
Very simply, because it works. It lets users initiate and advance a
transaction with an absolute minimum of time, expense, hassle, rules,
or oversight. And many times, this is exactly what we want."
From Andrew McAfee's Harvard Business Review post "Craigslist: In
Praise of Primitive"
"Turre helped a consortium of Finland’s universities of applied science
(aka. AMK) to created a digital repository for theses and research
publications . The project adopted a joint Open Access mandate that
means that annually 20.000 academic thesis and thousands of scholarly
articles written by the staff of the AMK will be openly accessible
online."
From Herkko Hietanen's blog post for Turre Legal, 26 universities to
Open Access publishing model
"Google announced
Friday that it would now be “personalizing” all searches, not just
those for signed-in users....I agree this is a big deal, even if it’s
only the next step in a trend
begun by customized search for signed-in users years ago. And except
for here, I won’t even mention the P-word, “privacy.” Because on top of
the implications of storing all a user’s search history, I wonder about
the transparency of personalized search. How do we understand what
search looks like to the world as it gets sliced up by history,
location, and other inferences search providers make about their
searchers?"
From Wendy Seltzer's blog post Personalized Search Opacity
"The cheap irony is that Facebook exists because it enables its users
to
create and maintain intimacy (ok, intimacy of a sometimes weird new
form), yet it seems not to be able to read the signals of intimacy. How
does that happen?"
From David Weinberger's blog post Does Facebook have Aspbergers?
"This talk is one of my more serious talks, looking at problematic
practices in social media and inviting the audience to do something
about it. Fundamentally, it's a talk about visibility... about our
ability to see what's happening in the world thanks to the Internet.
And about our needs to ask ourselves what kind of world we want to live
in."
From danah boyd's blog post Do you See What I See?: Visibility of
Practices through Social Media
"Given that we are fumbling toward a video-enabled Web, moving large
video files around should be increasingly ordinary. Services like
Netflix streaming have invested in streaming movies because they want
to get out from under their $300 million yearly postal bill (says
Nightline). All sorts of new home technologies are trying to address
the problem of moving big HD video files around the many machines in
the bourgeois home. Verizon is investing over $10 billion in fiber
infrastructure because they think we’ll want to move around really
large files. But all is not smooth and easy."
From Christian Sandvig's blog post The Web is Still Small
"As an Internet application or online service, "Google Books" may not
necessarily be found infringement. But, Google would be held
infringement liability if it really scanned Chinese books without
authors' consents. First of all, I am talking about Chinese copyright
Law."
From Donnie Dong's blog post Is Google Books Infringing Copyright
under Current Chinese Law?
"The holiday season is in full swing, as evidenced by the marked uptick
in the number of gift-giving guides clogging up my browser. We here at
CMLP, ever the helpful sort, wanted to get in on the action. But rather
than offer yet another list of plastic doodads that are sure to be
relegated to the bottom of the sock drawer by January 1 (but how cool
are the R2D2 lights?), we thought we'd offer a helpful suggestion for
the WikiLeaks editor in your life: a copy of How to Win Friends and
Influence People. Why, you might ask? Because, after the past few
weeks, they're going to need all the help they can get."
From Kimberley Isbell's blog post for the CMLP, WikiLeaks in the
Crosshairs
"It is not secret that corruption is a major problem in Nepal.
According to Transparency International (TI), the country stands 143rd
(down from 121) among 180 countries on its anti-corruption scale. New
Zealand being the least corrupt and Somalia the most."
From Bhumika Ghimire's blog post for Global Voices, Corruption
Impeding Development In Nepal
"Three terms appearing in an agenda, "Reputation", "Privacy" and
"Quality of Information", and a somewhat vague invitation to think
about "Youth Policy" made me recall a moment in my life, a long time
ago, when my mother - while I was at school - invaded the privacy of my
room and discovered a comic book (an American comic book given to me by
an American soldier stationed in my German home town, yes that long
ago, but I digress) and scolded me for my poor judgment on information
quality, destroying once and for all my carefully built reputation of
an ardent consumer of Grimm folk tales."
From Herbert Burkert's essays for Publius, Policies for the Natives
Designed by the Immigrants?: Night Thoughts After a Workshop Day at the
Berkman Centre
"Aussie
broadcasting's Future Tense interviews me and Yeeyan founder on
polylingualism online: http://is.gd/5hsj7" [
Ethan Zuckerman points to an interview in which he discusses
translation as artform