ws009 - Ted Perlmutter on Diigo

30 Sep 09

The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It » Chapter 6: The Lessons of Wikipedia

But Wikipedia is the canonical bee that flies despite scientists’ skepticism that the aerodynamics add up.

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ws007 zittrain libertarian communitarian ws009 conflict09

But Wikipedia is the canonical bee that flies despite scientists’ skepticism that the aerodynamics add up.
But Wikipedia is the canonical bee that flies despite scientists’ skepticism that the aerodynamics add up.
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- When people can come to take the welfare of one another seriously and possess the tools to readily assist and limit each other, even the most precise and well-enforced rule from a traditional public source may be less effective than that uncompelled goodwill.
- verkeersbordvrij
- verkeersbordvrij
- But Wikipedia is the canonical bee that flies despite scientists’ skepticism that the aerodynamics add up.
- But Wikipedia is the canonical bee that flies despite scientists’ skepticism that the aerodynamics add up.
- But Wikipedia is the canonical bee that flies despite scientists’ skepticism that the aerodynamics add up.
- people of diverse backgrounds can work together on a common project with, whatever its other weaknesses, a noble aim—bringing such knowledge to the world.
- - Wherein should generativity lie? - on 2008-12-25
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- even the most precise and well-enforced rule from a traditional public source may be less effective than that uncompelled goodwill
- People have anticipated digital “libraries of Alexandria
- Britannica to experiment both with a CD-ROM and a subscription-only Web site in 1994
- This scenario exhibits generativity along the classic Libertarian model: allow individuals the freedom to express themselves and they will as they choose.
- “GNUpedia,” then GNE (“GNE’s Not an Encyclopedia”). There would be few restrictions on what those submissions would look like, lest bias be introduced
- GNE would be an accumulation of views rather than an encyclopedia
- Nupedia, and it was to be built like other encyclopedias: through the commissioning of articles by experts. Wales hired philosopher Larry Sanger as editor in chief, and about twenty-five articles were completed over the course of three years
- The discussion page provided a channel for such debate and helped new users of Wikipedia make a transition from simply reading its entries to making changes and to understanding that there was a group of people interested in the page on which changes were made and whom could be engaged in conversation before, during, and after editing the page.
- The third crucial attribute of Wikipedia was a core of initial editors, many drawn from Nupedia, who shared a common ethos and some substantive expertise.
- “Postel’s Law,” a rule of thumb written by one of the Internet’s founders to describe a philosophy of Internet protocol development: “[B]e conservative in what you do; be liberal in what you accept from others.
- Eric Raymond’s observation about the collaborative development of free software: “[g]iven enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”³⁷
- The value of the idle processing power of millions of Internet-connected PCs makes it worthwhile to hijack them, providing a new, powerful rationale for the creation of viruses and worms.
- ne of Wikipedia’s community-developed standards is that individuals should not create or edit articles about themselves, nor prompt friends to do so. Instead they are to lobby on the article’s discussion page for other editors to make corrections or amplifications.
- the survival—even growth—of a core of editors who subscribe to and enforce its ethos, amid an influx of users who know nothing of that ethos.
- Together these tools and conventions facilitate a notion of “netizenship”: belonging to an Internet project that includes other people, rather than relating to the Internet as a deterministic information location and transmission tool or as a cash-and-carry service offered by a separate vendor responsible for its content.
- Wikipedia—with the cooperation of many Wikipedians—has developed a system of self-governance that has many indicia of the rule of law without heavy reliance on outside authority or boundary
- Wikipedia shows us that the naïveté of the Internet’s engineers in building generative network technology can be justified not just at the technical layer of the Internet, but at the content layer as well. The idiosyncratic system that has produced running code among talented (and some not-so-talented) engineers has been replicated among writers and artists.

30 Aug 09

Mapping Initiatives | Crisis in Darfur

Holocaust Museum / google maps updates

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ws009 googleearth darfur sudan gis mapping

Crisis in Darfur (2009 Update)

In partnership with Google Earth, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is releasing compelling new visual evidence of the destruction in Darfur.

10 Aug 09

Facebook Group vs Facebook Fan Page: What’s Better?

Search Engine Journal comparison

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rc09 facebook groups ws009

Facebook Group vs Facebook Fan Page: What’s Better?
- Unlike groups, fan pages are visible to unregistered people and are thus indexed (important for reputaion management, for example);
- Unlike pages, groups allow to send out “bulk invite” (you can easily invite all your friends to join the group while with pages you will be forced to drop some invites manually). Groups are thus better for viral marketing, meaning that any group member can also send bulk invites to the friends of his.
- Major difference between pages and groups - on 2009-08-10
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- Extra applications added
  Yes
  No
- Related” event creation and invitation
  Yes
  No
- Pages are generally better for a long-term relationships with your fans, readers or customers;
  Groups are generally better for hosting a (quick) active discussion and attracting quick attention.

04 Aug 09

50 Awesome Ways to Use Skype in the Classroom | Teaching Degree.org

50 Skype Uses

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50 Awesome Ways to Use Skype in the Classroom

27 Jun 09

ICT for peace foundation - Inventory

Resources from 2005 report

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ict4peace wiki conflictresolution earlywarning ws009

ICT4Peace Inventorisation Wiki

03 Jun 09

The Extraordinaries -- On-demand crowdsourced volunteerism via smartphones. (Got a few minutes free? Be extraordinary!) | NetSquared, an initiative of TechSoupGlobal.org

Using spare minutes to take up volunteer projects

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techsoup prize sms mobile volunteer ws009

The Extraordinaries is smartphone software (iPhone, Blackberry, and more) that allows millions of people to perform brief micro-volunteer tasks on their smartphones in a few minutes of spare time. People login to our system from any place on Earth within cell reception, and constructively use small windows of spare time for science, medicine, nonprofits, government, and more. Tasks are accessed on-demand, from anywhere, at any time -- while riding the bus, waiting in the doctor’s office, standing in line at the post office, and more.
The root cause, is that most volunteer opportunities require vetting, many hours, and a long-term commitment. It’s akin to a second job, and the old industrial age model of traditional volunteerism has been outpaced by our rat-race society. For most of us, doing social good is inconvenient, takes too much time, and doesn’t easily fit into hectic lives. As a result, most of us don’t do it.
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- These aren’t just phones anymore, these are powerful tools that we can use to change the world, a few minutes at a time.

01 Jun 09

The Associated Press: Many turn to internet for Sri Lanka war news

Jounralists and aid workers as source war

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srilanka internet news ws009

Much of their reporting comes from locals — some of them former journalists and aid workers — who are working anonymously in the war zone and e-mailing their reports to editors in Europe.

09 May 09

David Ignatius - Will The Post Figure Out Its Future in a New-Media World? - washingtonpost.com

Optimistic take.

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newspaper ws009 economics wp

But this larger online readership brings us much less advertising revenue. You can see the numbers in The Post's quarterly financial report. In the first quarter, ended March 29, The Post received $74.3 million in print advertising revenue. That was down 33 percent from a year earlier, but it still dwarfed the company's online revenue (mainly from washingtonpost.com) of $22 million.

Why are Internet news sites less valuable to advertisers than their print forebears? One reason is that people spend less time on news sites than with newspapers -- an average of 16 minutes for users of The Post's Web site in March, compared with a median of 30 minutes daily and 60 minutes Sunday for readers of the paper. But that's our challenge: Web users will spend more time as we make our online offerings more compelling.

08 May 09

Swine flu creates controversy on Twitter - CNN.com

Swine flu creates controversy on Twitter

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ws009 twitter disaster

Zack Exley: The New Organizers, What's really behind Obama's ground game

New forms of political organizing

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obama organizing election ws009

The New Organizers, What's really behind Obama's ground game
Training is a huge part of quality control and we need our leaders to be good trainers. If a potential leader is a successful trainer then we meet with them again to ask them to take that next step and become a Team Coordinator or Team Leader. If at any moment in this process a volunteer isn't successful our organizers are trained to spend time coaching them through getting better. We are an inclusive team here and our goal is always to make people better."

26 Apr 09

MacKinnon

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censorship China ws009 firewall isp activism

By mid–2008, 253 million Chinese had gone online
47 million bloggers in China with 72 million blogs
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- In late 2007 Cai Mingzhao, a vice minister in charge of government information policy and regulation, emphasized that the Chinese online media of all forms must “have a firm grasp of correct guidance, creating a favorable online opinion environment for the building of a harmonious society” (Bandurski, 2007).
- Thousands of “Internet police,”
- Tens of thousands of overseas Web sites are blocked
- In China, filtering is achieved by plugging “blacklisted” Web site addresses and keywords into the routers and software systems controlling Internet traffic across Chinese domestic networks and at the gateway points through which information travels between the domestic Chinese Internet and the global Internet
- China’s official Golden Shield Project: a much broader project focused on surveillance, data mining and the upgrading of Internal public security networks, of which Internet filtering is only a very small part
- “the most sophisticated in the world” (OpenNet Initiative, 2005)
- authorities had created a system of regulations and obligatory “self discipline” pledges in hopes of compelling Web companies to keep user–generated content from going beyond certain limits
- Politically sensitive content is deleted from the Web by company employees, or by computer programs written by company employees, either in response to official directives or often simply in anticipation of trouble (Weiquan Wang
- Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft all offer censored versions of their search engines to the Chinese market in order to maintain good government relations and their business operations in China
- prevent groundswells of public conversation around politically inflammatory topics that might inspire a critical mass of people to challenge Communist Party authority
- “Compared to the content of mainstream, traditional media, blogs are much more likely to contain opposing perspectives and criticism of the state.
- Chinese bloggers frequently deploy satire, euphemisms, literary allusions, vague or coded phrases, and even graphics to convey critical messages
- First, censorship levels across 15 different BSPs varied even more than expected. Second, a great deal of politically sensitive material survives in the Chinese blogosphere, and chances for survival can likely be improved with knowledge and strategy. Third, censorship methods vary greatly from company to company, implying that companies do have at least some ability to make strategic choices.
- Items labeled with the following subject categories also received heavy censorship (more than 10 instances in which a post with one of these labels was censored): sudden incidents, Olympics, Tibet, corruption, dissidents, ethnic minorities, national leaders, political arrests, labor issues, censorship/surveillance, critiques of government human rights practices, independence movements, involuntary relocation, “rights defending” cases, historical issues, and misc. religious matters
- despite the authoritarian nature of the Chinese state, people working in both old and new media are not entirely powerless: Individual choices, values, and actions by individual journalists are proven to have an impact on the quality and range of information and ideas available to the Chinese people. It would appear that in China’s new media, individual values and choices similarly help to shape the extent to which Chinese netizens are able to engage in an informed public discourse. On the other side of the coin, private and non–government actors collaborate with the government to muzzle each other for various reasons of self–interest, expediency, and even patriotism.
- Bloggers and Internet users would benefit from more systematic information about strategies for successfully disseminating politically sensitive information via domestic Web sites on which content is frequently censored. Finally, free expression advocates should consider how an “Internet user rights” movement might push for greater transparency and accountability by Internet companies.

24 Apr 09

Global Network Initiative

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norms it network ict microsoft censorship ws009

In response, a multi-stakeholder group of companies, civil society organizations (including human rights and press freedom groups), investors and academics spent two years negotiating and creating a collaborative approach to protect and advance freedom of expression and privacy in the ICT sector, and have formed an Initiative to take this work forward.

01 Apr 09

Microsoft to shut down Encarta Web sites

end of the encyclopedia era?

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wikipedia microsoft ws009

Microsoft Corp. is shutting down its Encarta encyclopedia Web sites and will also discontinue its Student and Premium Encarta software products.

29 Mar 09

Mobile Activism In African Elections: A Paper and a Missed Opportunity | MobileActive.org

Criticism of Heacock paper on same subject.

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Mobile Activism In African Elections: A Paper and a Missed Opportunity

27 Mar 09

Intellectuals and their Publics

2009 and with Calhoun chapter

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intellectuals ws009

Intellectuals and their Publics

When Stars Twitter, a Ghost May Be Lurking - NYTimes.com

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twitter celebrity mass ws009

In its short history, Twitter — a microblogging tool that uses 140 characters in bursts of text — has become an important marketing tool for celebrities, politicians and businesses, promising a level of intimacy never before approached online, as well as giving the public the ability to speak directly to people and institutions once comfortably on a pedestal.
But for candidates like Mr. Paul, Twitter is an organizing tool rather than a glimpse behind the curtain. During the presidential campaign, said Jesse Benton, Mr. Paul’s campaign manager, “we assigned a staffer to each social network site. Each was used to generate the same message as a way to amplify the message and drive people back to our site.”
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- “Facebook is like ‘Cheers,’ where everyone knows your name,” she said. “Twitter is the hipster bar, where you booze and schmooze people.”

26 Mar 09

Investors Against Genocide - Investors Against GenocideDraw the line at investing in genocide

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Investors Against Genocide
Draw the line at investing in genocide

25 Mar 09

Web 2.0: Clay Shirky On Wikipedia, Sitcoms, And Gin - Digital Life Blog - InformationWeek

web 2.0 better than television, w/ 15 minute tape

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shirky ws009 television web2.0 community wikipedia

Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan's Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don't? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn't posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it's not, and that's the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.
And he quantifies the surplus. All of Wikipedia, "every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in," required around 100 million hours of human thought to complete.

24 Mar 09

Edge; DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism By Jaron Lanier

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socialsoftware wikipedia wisdomofcrowds collaboration community ws009

the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used;
how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that
is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism
that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective
is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in
a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity
and force.
only online
fetish site for foolish collectivism
1 more annotations...
- No, the problem is
  in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been
  elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern
  of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a
  resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to
  have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with
  the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or
  meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from
  the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact
  that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and
  futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less
  dangerous.

16 Feb 09

Socialreporter | Clay Shirky: online crowds aren’t always wise

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ws009 shirky online community

online crowds aren’t always wise

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