"Bloggers to AP: You're Dead to Me
Bloggers to AP: You're Dead to Me
Last week the Associated Press began taking a very aggressive stance on the use of its content. They threatened the Drudge Retort with take-down notices over several items that contained very short 39 to 79 word quotes from its articles. Many bloggers slammed the AP's new tactics. Now, the New York Times reports that the AP is going to set guidelines about how its content can be used on the Internet later this week even though bloggers are following "fair use" rules when quoting AP stories....Takedown Tiff::AP Badly Mistaken on Drudge Retort
Last week, the Associated Press decided that the Drudge Retort was in violation of copyright laws because it excerpted parts of AP stories and linked to them. The AP legal team sent a cease-and-desist letter to Drudge Retort’s owner, the technology book author Rogers Cadenhead.
The AP v. Everybody: Not So Clearly Fair Use
Today, Michael Arrington made a lot of hay about the AP sending mutliple DMCA takedown notices to the Drudge Retort, a collaborative politics blog. Retort founder Rogers Cadenhead summarizes the matter. To summarize: Users of the Retort copied small snippets (~50 words) of AP content and linked back to the content. The snippets were there to give an introduction to the full article, and also to spark a conversation hosted at the Retort about the facts being discussed by the article. The AP responded by sending takedown notices to the Retort for seven of these alleged infractions.
Activism, art and future civic media
Chris Csikszentmihalyi is an artist and provocateur as well as a programmer, inventor and professor. The projects he’s most excited about within MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media focus on the interface between political action, art, journalism and technology. He offers the observation that “all technology is politics”, and suggests that one of the best ways to do art, as in journalism, is to follow the money.
His framing talk invokes Manuel Castells, suggesting that people live within two spaces: the space of flows and the space of places. People think of themselves as living in places, but they’re affected by the flows of powerful forces. The architecture of flows, Chris suggests, can be visualized like a rhizome - a plant that shares a root structure, but where the visible manifestations pop up all over the place.
8 simple rules for succeeding on the Web
Here are Jon Friedman’s eight simple rules to ensure success on the Internet. …5 Reasons to Buy the Apple iPhone 3G
Now may be the time to become an Apple iPhone owner at last.Read the story
Turks are Contact Crazy
Mavi Boncuk
Turks are now the fourth largest community on Facebook, after the US, the UK and Canada, with 2.1m users. They form the largest non-English speaking group on the site.
US: Google and Yahoo team up
After months of stagnant negotiation with Microsoft, Yahoo has taken its business elsewhere, agreeing yesterday to a deal with search-engine king Google. The move puts to an end, for now, a hectic four months for Yahoo (the deal still needs to be reviewed by antitrust regulators).The Growing List of Things You Can Do With Google Maps
Brian Ussery is director of SEO at Search Discovery in Atlanta, Georgia, and develops using Google’s tools and APIs.
The Google Maps team has been hard at work launching a number of new features in recent months. In case you’ve missed them, here are a few of the features available in Google Maps these days.
From Wired, here are the 8 best non-Wikipedia pedias
Who will rule the new Internet? Time goes inside the struggle for Web supremacy.
Google admits it still can't make money from YouTube
Carpet bombing in cyberspace
Source: Armed Forces Journal
The world has abandoned a fortress mentality in the real world, and we need to move beyond it in cyberspace. America needs a network that can project power by building an af.mil robot network (botnet) that can direct such massive amounts of traffic to target computers that they can no longer communicate and become no more useful to our adversaries than hunks of metal and plastic. America needs the ability to carpet bomb in cyberspace to create the deterrent we lack.
DigiActive News: DigiActivists at the Global Voices Summit
Four members of the DigiActive team will be going to the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit in Budapest on the 27th and 28th of this month. Co-founder Mary Joyce will moderate a panel on Citizen Media and Online Free Speech, on which co-founder Amine will be a panelist (see more information below). Writer Simon Columbus and Research Director Patrick Meier will also be in attendance.
How can the internet improve the world?
Strange bedfellows seek your ideas
THE OECD, essentially a club of the world's richest nations, is digressing from its stuffy image to collaborate with YouTube. They want to know how the Internet can make the world a better place. Video entries and ideas are welcome, and will be considered at the OECD's ministerial meeting on June 17-18 in Seoul (hence all the Korean subtitles).Guide: How to Access Banned Blogs
Title: How to Access Banned WordPress.com Blogs
Author: Lorelle VanFossen
Published by: Lorelle on WordPress (2008)
What is it?: A detailed post reviewing how to access blocked blogs (and other sites). Unlike other guides to circumvention, Lorelle gives links to specific proxy site and downloads. The guide is a quick and easy read and a great reference. Topics covered include:
Campaign:JA gays fight to get into UN AIDS meeting
Description: World leaders and civil society activists are gathering this week at UN Headquarters for the 2008 High-Level Meeting on AIDS. The goal of the meeting is to reevaluate the amount of progress the international community has made in combating the HIV/AIDS epidemic. However, some governments are being criticized for obstructing meaningful advocacy and implementation of HIV/AIDS prevention tactics. Specifically, the Jamaican government has been chastised in recent weeks for letting stigma fester on the island around HIV/AIDS and sexuality. The Jamaican government went as far as preventing its country’s leading gay rights group from even attending the New York meeting. Bloggers throughout the Caribbean are taking the country’s government to task.
Tools Being Used: Blogs
Action Alert: Support a Kurdish human rights activist
What? Send a mail to the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei to express your concern for the medical condition of the Kurdish journalist and human rights activist, Mohammed Sadigh Kabodwand.
When? Now!
Where? Email or fax the letter below the “more” tag to:
Theory: Chinese Gamer Activism Goes Offline
In 2006, 10,000 Chinese gamers protested at the government office inside the virtual world of The Fantasy of the Journey West due to the perceived presence of a Japanese flag (pictured).
Sociologist Matthew Chew of Hong Kong Baptist University is interested in online and offline activism by Chinese gamers. Game corporations are media businesses in the real-world but function as authoritarian states in the virtual worlds they create. Gamers are real-world middle-class cultural consumers, but grassroot, politically active citizens in the virtual world, notes Chews. Can virtual world gamers become a source of real-world political change?
"8 Unanswered Questions About Apple's 3G iPhone":
What's with the plastic back, does the iPhone 3G have real GPS, what's the future of the iPod Touch, and many other questions spring to mind.
Read the report
Resource: What should YouTube do for activists?
Yesterday I had the pleasure of speaking with Ramya Raghavan, the new Nonprofits and Activism Manager at YouTube (see her intro video below). She is the head of the new Agent Change project for non-profits and activists.
Ramya is very dynamic and committed to making YouTube a better tool for activists. So, what do you think, how should YouTube being doing for activists? Let us know in the comments or e-mail her your thoughts at agentchange@youtube.com.
