Berkman Buzz: Week of February 1, 2010

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.

* 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