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Berkman Buzz: Week of September 6, 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 is quantifying his media interactions.
* Media Cloud analyzes coverage of the Cordoba Initiative.
* David Weinberger reworks his chapter on science, networked.
* Stuart Shieber knocks out several OA birds with one PMC stone.
* Jake Shapiro shares some exciting PRX news.
* Radio Berkman 162: "Lessig & Zittrain Take On...Competition"
* Jonathan Zittrain, reflecting on The Future of the Internet
* Weekly Global Voices: "Colombia: Hiperbarrio Bloggers on Violence in Medellín"

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The full buzz.

"The experiment in self-tracking that I’m considering is more about self knowledge than self improvement, though I’m finding it’s hard to separate the two. I’m looking for ways to monitor my personal information flow. I’d like to understand how I get information about the world – through television, the web, radio, email and the people I talk to. The hope is to use myself as a guinea pig, to see what’s possible as far as active and passive monitoring of information flows, in the hope of opening the experiment to a wider population. I’ve made the case – in my recent TED talk and elsewhere – that many of us overestimate the amount of diverse, international information we encounter through the internet and other communications networks. We run the danger of being “imaginary cosmopolitans”, convinced we’re encountering information from all corners of the world, while we might be trapped in homogenous echo chambers."
From Ethan Zuckerman's blog post Media tracking and the quantified self

"There are few stories in recent memory that have more starkly highlighted the way in which stories bubble up from partisan blogs into the mainstream agenda. Here at Media Cloud we decided to look at exactly how, when, and where this story grabbed hold and to try and understand what sort of unique language has been employed across the media landscape to describe the story. Justin Elliott at Salon did some of the work for us, charting the first appearance of the community center in the news (a NYT article from December 2009) as well as some major milestones along the life of the story. By using those milestones as guideposts, we ran some searches in Media Cloud to see what else we could learn about how the story developed."
From Catherine Bracy's post for Media Cloud, The Cordoba Initiative Story and Its Journey Through the Media Ecosystem

"I’ve been over and over the draft of the chapter on science. I believe I’ve gotten the organization better, but it’s still 14,000 words, which is twice as long as it should be. I can see how to cut out about 1,000 words, but that’s not enough. Here’s a rough outline of the chapter. Note that I’m paraphrasing myself as briefly as possible, so much of this will sound more over-stated than it is. That is, I’m over-stating my over-statements. Also, I proceed mainly through examples and interviews, which I’m not mentioning in this summary. Intro: The traditional processes of science are turning out not to scale. We have so much more data, so many more connections. The Net does scale, however. The organizing hypothesis of the chapter is that science is starting to take on properties of the Net. Each of the six sub-sections looks at one such property."
From David Weinberger's blog post [2b2k] Science chapter

"Here’s a clever way for a journal to efficiently and cost-effectively provide open access to its articles (at least in the life sciences): Use PubMed Central as the journal’s article repository. [...] I first heard about this idea a while ago at a PMC meeting in a discussion referring to Journal of Biomolecular Techniques, which uses this approach. It seemed like an awfully good idea to me, and still does. Almost a thousand journals submit all of their final published articles to PMC, but I’m not sure how many do so without embargo and as the sole and definitive version of record."
From Stuart Shieber's blog post For publishers, using PMC to kill multiple birds with one stone

"PRX operates public media’s largest open distribution marketplace http://www.prx.org – offering tens of thousands of audio programs for broadcast and digital use, clearing rights and managing royalties for over 2,000 independent producers and stations. Signature programs from PRX include The Moth Radio Hour, Sound Opinions, State of the Re:Union, Snap Judgment, and the Vinyl Cafe. PRX showcases creative stories from these programs and other top talent on REMIX – a new national channel available on XM 136 and coming soon as a broadcast, HD, mobile, and Internet service."
From Jake Shapiro's post for PRX, PRX Raises $2.7 million from Corporation for Public Broadcasting, MacArthur Foundation, and Ford Foundation

(The Berkman Center's Herdict project also had some exciting news of its own this week.)

This week, Radio Berkman returns from summer vacation with a big new episode in which Professors Lessig and Zittrain think through the Microsoft antitrust case and its implications for the current technology competition landscape...
Radio Berkman 162: Lessig & Zittrain Take On...Competition
More episodes of Radio Berkman

"This week there’s an online symposium at Concurring Opinions about the Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It. I’ll be blogging there; in the meantime here’s my opening entry. I wrote the Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It, and its precursor law review article the Generative Internet, between 2004 and 2007. I wanted to capture a sense of just how bizarre the Internet — and the PC environment — were. How much the values and assumptions of, metaphorically, dot-org and dot-edu, rather than just dot-com, were built into the protocols of the Internet and the architecture of the PC. The amateur, hobbyist, backwater origins of the Internet and the PC were crucial to their success against more traditional counterparts, but also set the stage for a new host of problems as they became more popular."
From Jonathan Zittrain's blog post Has the Future of the Internet come about?

(Harry Lewis also has a post in Concurring Opinions' Future of the Internet symposium.)

"Violence, murder, theft and crime are a constant in Medellín and its metropolitan area; issues all people must learn to live with and a social phenomenon that has grown in the last year. Members of Hiperbarrio expressed their feelings and different viewpoints on the matter in personal and group blogs. Yuliana Paniagua, in the Hiperbarrio site, highlights the area of Castilla, where members of the blog Hope Revolution (Revolución Esperanza) went to take pictures. She also shows the importance of Hiperbarrio as a positive alternative for the community."
From Lully Posada's blog post for Global Voices, Colombia: Hiperbarrio Bloggers on Violence in Medellín

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The weekly Berkman Buzz is selected from the posts of Berkman Center people and projects: http://cyber.harvard.edu/planet/current/

Suggestions and feedback about the Buzz are always welcome and can be emailed to syoung@cyber.harvard.edu