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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.

* 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
* StopBadwarequestions 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 failwith 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]