Erkan meets Ethan Zuckerman and many other cool and geeky people!
Ethan Zuckerman and Erkan. A high point in Erkan's cyberlife, that takes place in a traditional Turkish food restaurant.
Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School had organized a fantastic 2-day conference in Istanbul last week. I had attended the event as the conference liasion. I have met several great cyberactivists as well as professors affiliated with the Center. Ethan is the co-founder of Global Voices Online in addition to many other projects. I will talk about other finds from time to time...
Here is a fragment he writes from the Istanbul conference:
"Im in Turkey this week participating in a Berkman conference on internet and democracy - its a meeting of activists from almost twenty countries, talking about ways that activists can use the internet to promote democratic movements. Many of the sessions are off the record or under Chatham Rules, to protect the identity of people speaking here. But the first speaker this morning is Sami ben Gharbia, the leader of Global Voices Advocacy and a leading Tunisian free speech advocate, and hes not exactly a shy guy. :-) Samis presentation is on video advocacy and mashups, with a focus on advocacy in Tunisia. While Sami and other Tunisian activists have worked hard on other free speech campaigns around the world, this presentation focuses specifically on activism in Tunisia, specifically around the legislative and presidential elections of 2004 and the World Summit on Internet and Society in 2005...."
Ethan Zuckerman,
Turkey at the Edge
From Berkman Center Executive Director John Palfrey...
The people of Turkey are facing a stark choice: will they continue to have a mostly free and open Internet, or will they join the two dozen states around the world that filter the content that their citizens see?
Over the past two days, Ive been here in Turkey to talk about our new book (written by the whole OpenNet Initiative team), called Access Denied. The book describes the growth of Internet filtering around the world, from only about 2 states in 2002 to more than 2 dozen in 2007. Ive been welcomed by many serious, smart people in Ankara and Istanbul, Turkey, who are grappling with this issue, and to whom Ive handed over a copy of the new book the first copies Ive had my hands on.
And a huge round-up on the cyberworld:
EU mulls new measures to protect privacy on the Web
European institutions have a range of initiatives in store which could lead to the imposition of clearer limits for the conservation of personal information by useful but occasionally privacy-breaching Internet technologies such as search engines.EU acts to remove Web barriers for disabled
The hurdles faced by disabled citizens every day are not just infrastructure-related. Despite the disabled being the most frequent users of media, just 5% of websites in Europe are accessible to the blind and an even smaller proportion of TV programmes are deaf-friendly.A Microsoft-Yahoo! merger: good for the Internet?
The proposed acquisition would leave Google and Microsoft as the only major conduits connecting advertisers and online publishers – until a better search technology comes along.
Facing Free Software, Microsoft Looks to Yahoo Internet-centered programs that compete with Microsoft’s core products are an overlooked driver of its bid for Yahoo.
What About the People?::The Pros, Cons and Weirdness of Microsoft-Yahoo
After years of rumors, it finally happened. On Friday, Microsoft made its buyout offer for Yahoo. But while that was expected to happen, as both companies have had trouble catching online advertising juggernaut Google, what wasn’t so expected was that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer would go all Murdoch on Yahoo with a hostile bid at a 62% premium over Yahoo’s stock price. But unlike Rupert Murdoch’s hostile bid for Dow Jones, Ballmer doesn’t have to contend with family ownership or strange stock structures.
25 Incredible Skins, Resources & Tools for the Gmail Power User
Gmail is one of those rare things unanimously loved by everyday web users and tech-heads alike. The possibilities are endless. It can be anything from a simple email client to your central nervous system on the web. How far you take it is up to you.
Facebook: not just zombies biting chumps
Last week, I noted that rogue French trader Jérôme Kerviel had become a minor-league Internet superhero, largely through Facebook fan groups. (Today, the member count for the group "Jérôme Kerviel should be awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics" stands at 2,813.) But along with online jokesters, Facebook's members apparently also consist of highly motivated social activists.
In Egypt, High-Risk Blogging By: Jeffrey Fleishman | Los Angeles Times
Blogging in the Middle East can be as liberating as it perilous. With autocratic governments wielding security and intelligence forces, freedom of expression on human rights and politics is often safest when whispered
Google and the Microhoo!
The blogs were alight last year on a similar news and it is the same this time. Microsoft announced another bid for Yahoo totaling to a staggering $44 billion ( at a premium of 62% to Yahoo’s current share price). In a conference note made public, Microsoft announced its move as:
Security Trends of 2008 Part 2: A New Breed of Spam
One of the Internet threats that made viruses lose their shine is the evolution of spam from mere disturbance to a force to reckon with. Continuing this three-part saga of Internet security trends for this year, we discuss our dearly annoying spam.
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2007 was even more baffled by the sudden increase of spam forms, as shown below:
The Mozilla model of participatory innovation
Mitchell Baker, the chairman and former CEO of the Mozilla Corporation, seeks to explain how the free browser has come to rival Microsoft's market-leading Internet Explorer in just ten years during an interview with the McKinsey Quarterly.Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign and Yahoo! Join OpenID Foundation
The OpenID Foundation is announcing that today Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign and Yahoo! are joining the Foundation as the first corporate board members. This is a great step forward in the adoption of OpenID across the Web.
Google Works to Torpedo Microsoft Bid for Yahoo Google is making an unusually aggressive effort to block Microsoft’s $44.6 billion hostile bid for Yahoo.
Microsoft's Yahoo Gambit
By Michael S. Malone
The sum of two also-rans is almost never a winner.
A Study of a Southern California Wired Community: Where Technology Meets Social Utopianism
Q + A With Berkman Fellow Judith Donath on "Designing Society"
This afternoon, Berkman Fellow Judith Donath will be our guest at the Berkman Center's Tuesday Luncheon Series, where she will discuss "Designing Society". Berkman intern Yvette Wohn caught up with Judith for a Q + A, where they discussed the influences and implications of online design, the tension between legibility and abstraction in online design, and avatar facial expressions.iWar: pirates, states and the internet, Johnny Ryan
On 27 April 2007 a blizzard of distributed "denial-of-service" attacks hit important websites in Estonia and continued until at least as late as mid-June. The targets included the website of the president, parliament, leading ministries, political parties, major news outlets, and Estonia's two dominant banks, which were rendered unable to interact with customers.
Facebook translated into Spanish
Facebook introduces a Spanish version of its popular social networking site, and promises German and French versions soon.From Wired, an article on the life cycle of a blog post, from servers to spiders to suits — to you.
