Mediacology

How’s this for media ecology: Ecosia is a green search engine that restores rain forests. Watch the above video to see how. According to them, if 1% of Internet users search on Ecosia, an area of rainforest the size of Switzerland will be saved every year. On the surface this seems like a preposterous solution [...]

I just came across this excellent mind map of the “all things open and free” from Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation. Truly amazing.

Via collectivate.net.

Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village

Thanks DK!

This Seth Godin TED video has been making the Internet rounds, but it took me a while to view it. I’m sure glad I did, because he simplifies the process for changing the world. His inspirational talk reminds me of the old punk dictum: here’s a chord, here’s another, now go start your own band. [...]

Google’s ethic is, “don’t be evil.” Well, some feel that its book archiving project threatens to monopolize and control access to a vast digital library of out of print books, thereby changing preexisting copyright law. Democracy Now! reports.

The nuts and bolts of searching. Kind of reminds me of the Matrix, but less sexy.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Nicholas Carr is doing us a great service by raising the alarm of how the Internet is ruining our minds. I don’t agree with him 100%, though, and the quote below from a recent interview explains why. The lament is that we cannot contain civilization in our heads anymore. [...]

Twitter is the fad of the day, so we’re bombarded with news of twitter, making me increasingly numb to it as an interesting story. But what if news on twitter has an equally numbing psychological impact?

Scientists warn of Twitter dangers – CNN.com:

(CNN) — Rapid-fire TV news bulletins or getting updates via social-networking tools such as [...]

The Future of Advertising, APA, 17/02/09
View more presentations from John v Willshire. (tags: communities social)

This slide show is definitely worth giving this presentation a whirl (press the green button to hear the narrative). It’s interesting how marketers and media theorists read the same books, but the difference is what people do with the information. In [...]

A short history of marketing from Michael Reissinger on Vimeo.

There is something a little ironic about this video. On the one hand it paints a pretty good picture of the transition from one to many to many to many media, and how that has created a problem for advertisers. But it implicitly assumes that people [...]

Googling Is Not the (Environmental) Problem | Wired Science from Wired.com:

As for the carbon footprint, Google says each search is only responsible for 0.2 grams of CO2, not the 7 grams that the Harvard researcher claims, but the dispute misses the larger point. U.S. greenhouse gas emissions are estimated at 16.9 billion kilograms of CO2-equivalent [...]

An entertaining mash-up of Henry Jenkin’s Convergence Culture. If you haven’t read the book, I suggest you do as Capitão Nascimento says, or else!

Thanks Peter!

It’s that time of year for lists. Here’s a link to Feed’s Top 10 Viral Video Ads of 2008.

Two questions:

1) Can you guess the magic formula to make your video viral? Hint: see this post’s header.

2) Can you guess which ones are selling a product?

James Boyle has a written an important book, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind, which you can also download for free from his site. He has the following intriguing proposition:
In the tradition of the environmental movement, which first invented and then sought to protect something called “the environment,” Boyle hopes that [...]

Is Google Making Us Stupid?:

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described [...]

MC Lars does “Download this Song.”

Via Henry Jenkins

Does information want to be free? A case study in how to control the Internet.
Great Wall 2.0: How China Leads the World in Web Censorship – International – SPIEGEL ONLINE – News:
The virtual People’s Republic abides by other laws than the rest of the Internet. But how do the communist sentinels of cyberspace manage to [...]

Amnesty International is running a campaign to make sure the Internet is not a tool for censorship and control. You can read some background here, and take action here. Please do.

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Now that you have seen Yochai Benkler’s TED talk, you should also view this clever little Slidecast by Matt Mason who presents the main thesis of the fascinating book, Pirate’s Dilemma.