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]