Berkman Buzz, week of February 11

BERKMAN BUZZ:  A look at the past week's online Berkman conversations.  If you'd like to receive this by email, just sign up here.
The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School
Week of February 11, 2008

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What's going on... take your pick or browse below.

*Citizen Lab's Psiphon wins Netxplorateur Grand Prix 2008
*Ethan Zuckerman looks at Kenya's bloggers
*Melanie Dulong de Rosnay discusses Harvard's decision to go open access
*Gene Koo lays out the problem with New York Times blogs
*William McGeveran looks at how the passing of Congressman Tom Lantos will effect Congress
*Read danah boyd's frightening tale of a disappearing digital identity
*Weekly Global Voice: Fouad's week: Fouad will not be forgotten!

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The full buzz.

"Psiphon, a tool developed at the Citizen Lab to help Internet users evade censorship, has won its latest in a string of awards and accolades, the Netxplorateur Grand Prix 2008. As Internet filtering grows around the world, so does commitment against it. Psiphon was chosen from 100 nominees for the award by a panel of French and international government, media and business experts, who called it 'the world’s most original, significant and exemplary Net and Digital Initiative...'"
OpenNet Initiative, "Congratulations to Psiphon and the Citizen Lab!" 

"There’s a strong overlap between the emerging middle class in the developing world and the world of citizen media. Bloggers in Africa are highly educated, and generally are wealthier than the average African. (It’s not cheap, in African terms, to afford the amount of internet access you need to maintain a blog.) Kenya’s got a large middle class, and it’s got one of the largest blogger populations on the continent, behind South Africa, Egypt and very few others..."
Ethan Zuckerman,  "The Kenyan middle class… or is that the digital activist class?"

-continued-

"Faculty members will retain copyright in their articles, and provide an electronic version to the University together with a license to make them available in an open access repository.  Faculty members are writing, reviewing, editing scientific articles and sometimes have to assign all their rights to commercial publishers, making impossible for them for instance to reuse their own work in their course materials, or archive their article in an institutional repository. Libraries are purchasing back access to their faculty members’ scholarly work through journals subscriptions..."
Melanie Dulong de Rosnay, "Harvard goes Open Access"

"With feedback from my colleagues at Berkman, I have some major upgrades to my rather testy post yesterday. I think I’ve distilled my critique of the NY Times’ (and other MSM newspapers’) foray into blogging, or perhaps better to say into the Internet, into the following points:  1. Journalists’ professional integrity depends in part on public perception. Letting them blog their opinions about the news or readers poses the same risks as letting your CEO blog about her customers: it’s a high-risk sport. Some training would be advisable..."
Gene Koo, "Revision: BAD Blogging is undermining the NY Times’ credibility"

"Ars Technica has reported that a chain reaction resulting from the death of Congressman Tom Lantos may mark a significant improvement in the line-up of chairmanships influential on Info/Law issues. (It may seem a bit ghoulish to speculate on the spoils right after the death of a great legislator like Lantos, a towering figure in the House for many years, but as a former congressional aide I can guarantee to you that it’s entirely par for the course — and surely a parlor game Mr. Lantos himself played many times)..."
William McGeveran, "Congressman From Hollywood to Yield His Chair"

"Earlier this week, Bob received a notice that there was a spam problem in his Orkut community. The message was in English and it looked legitimate and so he clicked on it. He didn't realize that he'd fallen into a phisher's net until it was too late. His account was hijacked for god-knows-what-purposes until his account was blocked and deleted. He contacted Google's customer service and their response basically boiled down to 'that sucks, we can't restore anything, sign up for a new account.' Boom! No more email, no more calendar, no more Orkut, no more gChat history, no more Blogger, no more anything connected to his Google account..."
danah boyd, "a google horror story: what happens when you are disappeared"

"The Free Fouad campaign has organized and carried out 'Fouad’s Week', during which bloggers were invited to republish one of Fouad’s posts on their blogs and to embrace 'We Are All Fouads' as a slogan. This week-long event marked two months since the dean of the Saudi bloggers, Fouad Alfarhan, was arrested on December 10, 2007 and held in Jeddah’s Dahban prison without any charges brought against him..."
Sami Ben Gharbia, "Fouad's Week: Fouad will not be forgotten!"