from Ethan: how to fight net-censorship

Beyond breaking firewalls: how to fight net-censorship

Ethan Zuckerman’s new piece on Worldchanging, “Internet Freedom: Beyond Circumvention,” looks at the technical and social limitations of circumvention of censoring firewalls that we love so much as a tool for helping people in repressive regimes liberate themselves. It’s an excellent and thought-provoking piece that raises more questions than it answers, but it points to some very meaty research problems that people who care about technology and freedom need to attend to.

Can Social Media Chatter Predict Oscar Winners?

The biggest night in movies is two days away, and everyone has an opinion as to who will win an Oscar. While there isn’t a proven formula that can tell us which film is going to win, a closer look at social media such as blogs and Twitter can provide some interesting perspective as to which nominees are dominating conversations and spurring emotional reactions.

Criticism of Google at Wikipedia

Wikipedia has a whole page dedicated to criticism of Google.

Growth of the Internet from 1998 to 2008 [INFOGRAPHIC]

from Mashable! by Stan Schroeder

augmented reality, serious games, and pedagogic secrets

I was reminded earlier of Don DeLillo’s White Noise and the scene early in the novel where Gladney visits the “most photographed barn in America” and his friend observes that, of course, no one can actually see the barn. It’s an observation that summons Baudrillard’s precession of the simulacra. 25+ years later, seeing the same barn through an augmented reality lens (e.g. layar on a smartphone), what might we be able to say that we see?

Last week’s web-censorship proposal shows that supporters of every party need ORG

In the wake of last week’s introduction of a LibDem pro-web-censorship amendment to the Digital Economy Bill in the House of Lords, Open Rights Group executive director Jim Killock has a call to action for supporters of all the UK’s political parties to join ORG and its nonpartisan effort to promote liberty and openness in the digital realm.

Full-content RSS feeds harm page views, but not viewership

Merlin Mann calls for websites to offer free, full-text RSS feeds. Jason Snell agrees, but wonders if offering them harms web traffic. As Boing Boing’s had a full-content feed since the dawn of time, we can’t really tell, but John Gruber switched only recently. He says that in his experience, a dip in traffic did result–but that in the long run, his RSS feed became the primary source of income for Daring Fireball:

SuperPower: BBC and Global Voices

It’s a great pleasure for me to announce a joint project between Global Voices and BBC News as part of the BBC’s SuperPower season, which launches today.

This past year has been particularly eye-opening in terms of the increasing interplay between mainstream media and citizen journalism. Events in Mumbai, Moldova, Iran, Haiti, and now Chile are but a few examples in which the world has been eager to make immediate and direct contact with citizens in crisis in local contexts. These citizens may have had blogs, Twitter accounts, and cell phones for years, but only in the last year has the mainstream media adopted the narrative of citizen media as an integrated element in their news reporting.

JOURNAL: Education and Media in a Resilient Society

If anyone is going to save the media, as a business, it’s probably Jeff Jarvis.  He recently gave a talk at TEDxNYED (a conference that runs with the TED format but is not associated with it) that’s very interesting from the perspective of building a resilient society (one that runs in parallel to the current broken system and displaces it).  Here are some highlights:

Google vs. Yahoo: Who Has the Right Social Strategy?

from Mashable! by Ben Parr