I’m cribbing notes from Rising Voice‘s David Sasaki who wrote an excellent roundup of how the Web is a tool for Kenyan activists to document the current crisis.
Ushahidi is an organization that is combining SMS alerts of Kenyan violence with google maps that gives a timeline of civil incidents but also a way to map the state of the conflict in real time. You can view the timeline here.
Something to consider the next time you log into Facebook.
Facebook’s privacy policy
Just for fun, try substituting the words ‘Big Brother’ whenever you read the word ‘Facebook’
1 We will advertise at you
“When you use Facebook, you may set up your personal profile, form relationships, send messages, perform searches and queries, form groups, set up events, add applications, and transmit information through various channels. We collect this information so that we can provide you the service and offer personalised features.”
2 You can’t delete anything
“When you update information, we usually keep a backup copy of the prior version for a reasonable period of time to enable reversion to the prior version of that information.”
3 Anyone can glance at your intimate confessions
“… we cannot and do not guarantee that user content you post on the site will not be viewed by unauthorised persons. We are not responsible for circumvention of any privacy settings or security measures contained on the site. You understand and acknowledge that, even after removal, copies of user content may remain viewable in cached and archived pages or if other users have copied or stored your user content.”
4 Our marketing profile of you will be unbeatable
“Facebook may also collect information about you from other sources, such as newspapers, blogs, instant messaging services, and other users of the Facebook service through the operation of the service (eg, photo tags) in order to provide you with more useful information and a more personalised experience.”
5 Opting out doesn’t mean opting out
“Facebook reserves the right to send you notices about your account even if you opt out of all voluntary email notifications.”
6 The CIA may look at the stuff when they feel like it
“By using Facebook, you are consenting to have your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States … We may be required to disclose user information pursuant to lawful requests, such as subpoenas or court orders, or in compliance with applicable laws. We do not reveal information until we have a good faith belief that an information request by law enforcement or private litigants meets applicable legal standards. Additionally, we may share account or other information when we believe it is necessary to comply with law, to protect our interests or property, to prevent fraud or other illegal activity perpetrated through the Facebook service or using the Facebook name, or to prevent imminent bodily harm. This may include sharing information with other companies, lawyers, agents or government agencies.”
Technorati Tags: facebook
Is the Web returning us to an oral society?
PressDisplay.com – Newspapers From Around the World:
The growth of social networks — and internet as a whole — stems largely from an outpouring of expression that often feels more like “talking” than writing: blog posts, comments, homemade videos and, lately, an outpouring of epigrammatic one-liners broadcast using services like Twitter and Facebook status updates (usually proving Gertrude Stein’s maxim that “literature is not remarks”).
“ If you examine the web through the lens of orality, you can’t help but see it everywhere,” says Irwin Chen, a design instructor at Parsons who is developing a new course to explore the emergence of oral culture online. “Orality is participatory, interactive, communal and focused on the present. The web is all of these things.” An early student of electronic orality was the Rev. Walter J Ong, a professor at St Louis University and student of Marshall McLuhan who coined the term “secondary orality” in 1982 to describe the tendency of electronic media to echo the cadences of earlier oral cultures. The work of Father Ong, who died in 2003, seems especially prescient in light of the social-networking phenomenon. “Oral communication,” as he put it, “unites people in groups.”
Another brilliant video from Michael Wesch‘s Digital Ethnography program at Kansas State University. Makes one want to scrap the education system entirely.
You should definitely check out his other videos, The Machine is Us/ing Us and Information R/evolution. Wesch is brilliant at capitalizing on the medium to tell a story. These are truly zeitgeist movies.
Technorati Tags: Michael Wesch
By now you have probably heard the big news that Radiohead will be selling their new album through their Web site, and you will be able to set your own price. Yes that’s right. Shivers from the record industry are reverberating so strongly right now I expect an earthquake to register on the Technorati scale at any moment.
I agree that this is a beautiful thing, but I’d like to play devil’s advocate for a second, only because I’m trying to process this new concept. Isn’t it the initial strength of the record industry’s marketing that elevated Radiohead to the position that enables them to do this? Would “Creep” ever have ended up on MTV if they were just an obscure Internet band? It’s clear that unless a band sells 750,000 units, they are a loss to a major label record company (and a bummer because they have to pay the label back for all the money they fronted for their coke expenditures), so major labels have to do the one thing that indies cannot: exposure. And for a band like Radiohead, it has been on a global scale.
I know, I know the long tail changes this dynamic and bands will organically become famous, but bands do benefit from the marketing muscle that labels have. Personally the trade off isn’t worth it (that is, selling your soul to corporate record companies), but I just wanted to state the situation is not black and white. I don’t know if the swarm will find the next Radiohead, but I hope it does.
There are people more informed and smarter than me already commenting on this, so I suggest you click through the following link to get a more contextual understanding. Meanwhile, gods in the machine do exist!
With Trent Reznor also recently announcing that once Nine Inch Nails fulfill their Universal commitments, they will be selling their albums direct to fans from their websites, this signifies a sea-change in distribution methods by A-list artists. Of course this is not an option for every band, but if all the superstar-bands that actually benefited from the old system to get to where they are, are now subsequently deciding to go totally “indie” where are the major labels going to find the mega-revenues that used to subsidize the rest of the money-losing acts in their stable?
Technorati Tags: In Rainbows, Radiohead
I don’t know anything about a government regulated Internet 2, nor am I familiar with Prison Planet (an image I don’t agree with), but I did find the following news of MySpace censorship disturbing, but not surprising.
MySpace Censors Anti-War Websites:
MySpace Censors Anti-War Websites
Prison Planet blocked as the model for government regulated Internet 2 gets a dry runPaul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Tuesday, September 25, 2007Rupert Murdoch’s MySpace has been caught in another act of alternative media censorship after it was revealed that bulletin posts containing links to Prison Planet.com were being hijacked and forwarded to MySpace’s home page. MySpace has placed Prison Planet on a list of blocked websites supposedly reserved for spam, phishing scams or virus trojans.
It has been apparent for at least two weeks that all bulletin posts containing links to Prison Planet were being censored but we decided to wait and see if it was just a technical error before drawing any attention to the problem.
Now there is little doubt that MySpace has deliberately filtered out Prison Planet, preventing anyone from accessing the site via the social networking giant.
Technorati Tags: prison planet
Deltoid » The Disinformation Cycle:
One of the features of the endless stream of articles about the nonexistent DDT ban is the way they all cite each other instead of cracking open a textbook or checking with an actual scientist. I call this the disinformation cycle. As far as I can tell, it is nearly 100% efficient and there is little danger of actual facts about the world contaminating the pure flow of disinformation.
OK, this reveals what a ridiculous geek I am. There is a “viral” Bob Dylan marketing project that allows people to remix the infamous Subterranean Homesick Blues film made by D. A. Pennebaker. The campaign does not allow me to embed the video (I don’t know how to capture the streaming flash- I guess I’m not such a geek after all). Anyhow, this is a mash-up with my favorite series, Battlestar Galactica. Click here to see the video I created.
Apparently Vladimir Lenin will be making a historic documentary within Second Life for HBO. Ah, the miracles of virtual reality.
Titled “Molotov’s Dispatches in Search of the Creator: A Second Life Odyssey,” the 35-minute documentary follows the titular avatar as he traverses the virtual world’s shores, acting as a stranger in a strange land as he explores the environment and observes the interactions of Second Life inhabitants. The documentary is being directed by Douglas Gayeton, whose prior work includes “Johnny Mnemonic: The Interactive Action Movie” on the PC.
Technorati Tags: SecondLife
Are you tired of the social web? Had enough of virtual friends? Maybe it’s time to join Noso- the no social network.
Technorati Tags: noso
More fear, more confusion, more attacks on the unknown, the police look at reality through a rearview mirror. And they are supposed to keep us safe? Unfortunately if the way Afghanistan is being handled is any model, the Internet is due for a truckload of dung from these guys.
Internet is the new Afghanistan: NY police commissioner | Technology | Internet | Reuters:
NEW YORK (Reuters) – The Internet is the new battleground against Islamist extremism because it provides ideology that could radicalize Westerners who might then initiate home-grown attacks, New York police commissioner Raymond Kelly said on Wednesday.
“The Internet is the new Afghanistan,” Kelly said, as he released a New York Police Department (NYPD) report on the home-grown threat of attacks by Islamist extremists. “It is the de facto training ground. It’s an area of concern.”
The push and pull of collective intelligence. Not everyone in the hive has the intention of truth or that information should be “free.” Thus the Wikipedia Scanner can tell us who is changing what on Wikipedia, providing a tool for what we say in New Mexico, “look how you are,” to mean that your actions are truer than your words.
See Who’s Editing Wikipedia – Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign:
Wikipedia Scanner — the brainchild of Cal Tech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith — offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses.
Update:
Fox News, NYT personnel cleaning up Wikipedia entries?
One of the biggest gotchas in the Web 2.0 world is getting caught editing Wikipedia entries that you have some relationship with. It seems it happens nearly every day, but it’s still news when big names are discovered doing so.
That’s why analysis suggesting people at Fox News and The New York Times are guilty of making such changes could be embarrassing to both organizations.
According to the political blog DailyKos, someone at Fox News–as identified by usage of a Fox News IP Address–has “scrubbed” a series of entries having to do with several of the service’s personalities, including Brit Hume, Chris Wallace and Bill O’Reilly.
At the same time, The Times has allegedly been mucking with the Wikipedia entry on The Wall Street Journal, as well as about Rep. Tom DeLay, according to Media Bistro. And while the changes allegedly made by someone at The Times don’t directly relate to the publication, they still would most likely be considered outside the boundaries of proper Wikipedia behavior.
Technorati Tags: wikipedia, wikipedia canner
My main man, McLuhan
The PBS site MediaShift is generally an excellent place to read about new media ideas. This week guest columnist Bob Logan, who is a member of the Media Ecology Association, writes a very lucid update about Marshall McLuhan’s ideas as they apply to new media. What follows is a highlight, but I’d read the whole article. I think it’s one of the best explanations of McLuhan’s ideas I’ve seen in plain language.
MediaShift . Extending McLuhan::The 14 Messages of New Media | PBS:
New media today seem to have 14 distinct messages that intertwine and support each other. Digitization makes interoperability, two-way communication, ease of access to information, continuous learning, convergence, aggregation of content, remix culture and the transition from products to services possible. Aggregation of content leads to variety and choice, The Long Tail, community, social collectivity and cooperation. Remix and digitization helps close the gap between user and producer, which in turn builds community, variety and choice. Ease of access and dissemination of information leads to continuous learning; social collectivity and cooperation; remix culture; and the closing of the gap between user and producer.
If McLuhan were around today, I think he would see the impact of new media as an extension of his observations on the impact of the early electronic media. And in fact the effects seem to be even more intense with new media than they were for electronic mass media. Examples of the intensification of effects with new media include McLuhan’s observations that with electronic media:
1. our involvement with each other would increase,
2. social structures and access to information would decentralize,
3. “consumer becomes producer as the public becomes participant role player,”
4. the media become extensions of our psyches,
5. “the entire business of man becomes learning and knowing,”
6. there is a growth of interdisciplinarity,
7. a melting of national borders and the rise of a global village, and
8. “Men are suddenly nomadic gatherers of knowledge, nomadic as never before — but also involved in the total social process as never before; since with electricity we extend our central nervous system globally, instantly interrelating every human experience”
Technorati Tags: McLuhan
:: Douglas Rushkoff – Weblog :::
Sarah Cove: What is crowdsourcing for you?
Douglas Rushkoff: Well, I haven’t used the term crowdsourcing in my own conversations before. Every time I look at, it rubs me the wrong way.
Q: Why is that?
A: I understand crowdsourcing as kind of an industrial age, corporatist framing of a cultural phenomenon. There’s human energy being expended here. A company can look at that as either a threat — to their copyrights and intellectual property or as some unwanted form of competition – or, if they see it positively, then they see it as almost this new affinity group population to be exploited as a resource. And I guess what I’m undecided on and debating internally is whether this is fine. In other words, am I naïve to think this isn’t the death knell for a community-oriented, collaborative, open source ethos? Has corporate America finally figured out the way to arrest this shift in the balance of power? Or do we let them believe they are doing this when actually it is human participation and collaboration going on, the kind of thing I would promote.
Q: So crowdsourcing is a new understanding of collaboration, a new business model, for corporations?
A: Well, on the one hand, crowdsourcing is nothing new at all. It’s the way that the Harry Potter franchise has websites where people write their own Harry Potter stories and expand on that universe. From the franchise stance, as long as none of it is officially sanctioned, then let the users go crazy with it, give more people reason to buy more books. That’s crowdsourcing of a kind, because it’s part of what keeps that brand and that franchise alive. And there’s nothing wrong with people doing that. They are getting more entertainment value out of being amateur producers of this stuff than they would purely as consumers.
Markos Moulitsas Zuniga makes a powerful case for the blogosphere at the DailyKos convention. I think what he says demonstrates that what is happening now is far more significant than what we old-punkers did with zines. Still, I’d do it over again if I had to.
Think Progress » Last night at the YearlyKos convention,:
[Before the blogosphere arose,] people like me could spend hours talking about politics, but it mattered little in the greater scheme of things. Then technology changed everything.
Whether it was blogs, or podcasting, or social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, or MoveOn, or YouTube, people quickly adopted myriad communication technologies emerging from the web and turned them to political purposes. Millions did so.
And while individually we were still nobodies, together, we became … somebody. A very important somebody. And that makes some people very uncomfortable.
Like David Broder. Joe Klein. Robert Novak. Bill O’Reilly
Echoing what so many of his colleagues think, Bill Kristol on Fox News was outraged that anyone would take us seriously. He called me a, ” left-wing blogger who was not respectable three or four years ago.”
And he was right. In their world, I wasn’t “respectable”. None of us were. As our good friend Atrios likes to say, We weren’t “very serious people.”
Technorati Tags: DailyKos, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga
Bloviators of the world, unite! Robert Novak, a cantankerous, professional bloviator whose livelihood is threatened by our grassroots movement of citizen pundits and journalists doesn’t like sharing the stage. I think he just like to say the word “bloviate.” Me too.
‘Prince of Darkness’ Chronicles Novak’s Life in Journalism – July 13, 2007 – The New York Sun:
“The bloggers bloviate. They give their opinions. They don’t try to find things out.”
Technorati Tags: Robert Novak
