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Posts from ‘June, 2006’

Future in Review: Citizen Media

Dave Winer and I participated in a moderated discussion at the excellent Future in Review conference last month. Here’s the podcast (MP3 file).

Community, Not Hive

Jaron Lanier’s essay, “Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism,” has sparked tons of responses, as he no doubt hoped. Here’s mine: The collected thoughts from people responding to Jaron Lanier’s essay are not a hive mind, but they’ve done a better job of dissecting his provocative essay than any one of us […]

The Wealth of Networks

Yochai Benkler has written perhaps the most important book of year, The Wealth of Networks, which expands on work he’s been doing for a long time now on the advantages of peer production as opposed to top-town production. Anyone who wants to understand much of the intellectual underpinning of what comprises citizen media needs to […]

Reporting Badware from the Trenches

My colleagues at StopBadware.org, a Berkman Center project, report: Thousands of visitors to StopBadware.org have shared their badware experiences with us since we launched. From their stories, we’ve identified and tested four applications that contain annoying or objectionable behaviors. The idea here is that people — perhaps we can call them citizen journalists for this […]

Easy Way to Record Skype Conversations

Just installed Call Recorder, a new Skype add-on (Mac OS X only) that lets me record both sides of a voice call as a QuickTime file. The application comes with a utility that converts the file to an MP3. With QuickTime Pro, each side of the call can be separated into a channel, which is […]

News Co-opetition

Amy Gahran, on the Poynter site, asks if competition has outlived its usefulness in news gathering: Imagine: someday a Pulitzer Prize might be awarded jointly to an enterprise reporting team spread across several news organizations. This convergence has already occurred. The New York Times collaborated with Frontline on a brilliant series of articles/broadcasts, and won […]

Island-ing

We’re in Massachusetts with some fellow fellows of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

Phones as Web Servers

Linux Devices: Nokia turns cellphones into webservers: “If every mobile phone or even every smartphone initially is equipped with a webserver, then very quickly most websites will reside on mobile phones.” Interesting possibilities for citizen media in this — talk about real-time updating, among other things.

Surveillance of Everything You Do

NY Times: Internet firms are asked to keep search records. Justice Dept. tells executives it may need data to counter terrorism and child porn. This is roughly akin to having them follow you around everywhere you go with a video camera, watching everything you do, including in your home, just to have a record later […]

Martha and Howard

The Wall Street Journal’s D Conference was notable for several things, but key among them was Martha Stewart asking Sony CEO Howard Stringer why she had to have so many different chargers and add-ons for her various devices. (And, she noted without apparent irony, separate sets for all of her houses.) Stringer, who was clearly […]