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Kind of an odd connection, I know, but it's really important for social media users to recognize what "sock puppets" are and how they can be used outside of arguments between high school kids.

Rapleaf: a way of gathering/pulling and managing user reputation. Targeted to websites that want to gather information about customer demographics, it's one example of how profiling works integrally to web 2.0.

From about page: "We make it easy and attractive for the web generation to give back through our Fellowship, which connects technologists with cities to work together to innovate; our Accelerator, which will support disruptive civic startups; and our Brigade, which helps local, community groups reuse civic software."

Below you'll see a link to Code for America. Here is a related TED talk.

Lovink's latest book is all about social media. It addresses a number of the critiques we offered in class - which is not to say it answers or does away with them - but also reinforces that he offers less a theory than a report or journalistic take. (One example is the way he looks at the uneven use of blogging world wide, so that blogging becomes much less monolithic in this account.)

This is a google book that discusses some of the same things I mentioned in my post regarding the use of wikipedia and other networks and how that shapes our ideas of freedom.

Considering how often we look at TED talks, I thought it might be worth including this fake TED talk used as a clip for the new Ridley Scott movie, Prometheus. I know this probably looks a little like getting off track, but I thought it was interesting that the author claims that humans have become gods through their acts of technological creation (in his case, "cyberkinetic individuals). Science fiction often does a great job extrapolating certain ideas or issues, and I think in some ways we can find links to the issue and use of Wikipedia in which we can freely take place in the act of creation or manipulation of a text and even the meaning behind the entries we change. Obviously this is not necessarily created in our own image the way a cyborg would be, but it is still using McLuhan's idea of the extension of man into the cyber world. The question we're left with here though, is whether or not we deserve the moniker of "creator" if we create anonymously.

After class I was looking to find some background information on Julian Assange, mainly because I know very little about his negative reputation. Here is an interesting blog emphasizing the impact of reputational crisis, which is really interesting, especially considering that this information is even available from this university to the public.

This short article begins the discussion of what role the Digital Humanities will play when Google comes out with glasses that have cameras built in that will enable "real-time geolocation, facial recognition software, the journaling and storing in the cache and third-party's servers of everywhere you go and see whilst wearing the glasses." He questions how we can use these gadgets to our benefit while still protecting human rights and freedom of speech.

I really like the black-and-white photo in this article that shows the group of people wearing 3D glasses--that's exactly the visual I had in my head while reading this article. It's kind of unsettling to think that that image could become an everyday reality in the not-so-distant future.

This is an interesting article about how "the digital humanities is really an insurgent humanities," and how this is a revolution of sharing ideas that, "affirms the value of the open, the infinite, the expansive [and] the democratization of culture and scholarship.""

Already in 2008, China had more users than any other country; now they have more users than the population of the use. About 50% of the world's web users are now in Asia.

Some of the ins and outs of copyright law and DMCA.

Red Hat, the world's largest, most successful open source software company and one I'd like to work for in the very near future, submitted this blog post last month about SOPA and PIPA. It explains how such bills could devastate online collaboration, innovation, and the sharing of ideas and technology.

This guest post by Richard Price (founder and CEO of Academia.edu) addresses a bill called "The Research Works Act" intended to "restrict public access to publicly-funded research." Price points out that over 5,500 academics have signed a boycott of Elsevier, the largest academic publisher and one of the main sponsors. Several companies in the journal industry, however, argue that they've historically supported themselves by charging for access to research papers and that the government's open access mandate threatens their industry's sustainability by encouraging research institutions to stop subscribing to the journals and just wait to get the research for free.

This title made me think, "Duh," but apparently 8% of survey participants thought that posting photos or videos of other people without consent should be illegal. One person said the issue "should be regarded the same as it is for printed materials." Another person pointed out that it's actually illegal to record people without their permission, but that photos/video taken in a public setting tend to fall under public domain. I usually create a private folder and then let the people in the photos review them and consent to my publishing them first. What do you think?

This is a pretty straightforward, simplistic article (it is How Stuff Works ... I mean, come on) that deals with tracking computer use in the workplace. While not directly related to the Kirschenbaum, I thought it connected enough to post. It seemed like a potential point to launch into discussions on the permanence of data, and it reminded me of a year or two ago when Michelle sent out an e-mail asking people to stop using the resource room computers to look at porn. 

This short article has a unique commentary on the "blog bubble" from a business perspective, hinting that corporate blogging is on the rise and that social media will burst long before blogs. It's something to go along with our reading this week.