The computing cloud run by Amazon suffered an outage last week. Could this inspire a lack of confidence in the technology? Our Professor may have some feelings about it.

Here's the official release.

This is data that will cause some privacy issues. Now one can really be connected.

Robert Darnton, a university librarian at Harvard, tries to dispell some of the hype regarding the "Information Age".

Did anyone else notice this link from the previous week? Left wing gad about Douglas Rushkoff starts to question the unintended consequences for the user of social media. Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, etc. may have created exciting new ways for us to interact "virtually", but we pay for it, even when it's free.

The director of Harvard University Library argues that the best digital library would be a non-commercial public digital library. Here, here!

The NY Times examines how China has exerted control on the Internet and cell phones in the wake of the turmoil in the Mideast.

NY Times article on how using a game life like virtual reality aids in the teaching of literature.

This strikes me as an incredibly uncritical and self serving article. Maybe this is just because every time one "moves" to the next page a Dell ad pops up. With the decrease of school funding and the increase of connection costs and databases, I would hate to have to rely on only online resources.

And here's the report itself. I look forward to reading this with a critical eye.

The people that bring you Sesame Street now bring you some pretty incredible statistics on internet use by the five and under set. Doesn't Sesame Street have an on-line presence?

A fascinating look "under the hood" of the technology used to collect the massive amounts of personal data that is created via social media. After givng an overview of the companies involved and how they achieve this, the article examines some of the ethical issues involved.

An interesting article on how Google's search results can be manipulated from the Feb 13, 2011 NY Times Business section. Is our search engine research being manipulated in other ways as well?

An article from "Teaching Tolerance" magazine that deals with how social media can be, perhaps, used in the classroom to engender community based learning and social justice.

This is a NY Times article on how co-operative programs (like bike-sharing) are getting a boost from the spirit of collaboration on the web. The piece tries to trend spot "collaborative consumption", a "new" business model. We will have to see what happens.

Adam Gopnik wrote on overview on many of the issues we are discussing this week in last Monday's New Yorker. I haven't read the article as closely as I would like yet, but I noticed many familiar names.

Many of the ideas that we are discussing are not so new and even predate the Internet. Marshall McLuhan made a name for himself dealing with these issues in the 1950's and 60's. Although some of his ideas have perhaps not proved true his basic concepts were on the money. From a CBC broadcast May 18, 1960.

My favorite is "The Mechanical Bride" - a great critique of new (at the time) electronic media, consumerism, marketing and how they could affect the way we perceive ourselves. "The Media is the Massage" is a fun and relatively quick read and covers many of McLuhan's key concepts.

A very simple and rudimentary explanation (via a PP presentation) of how learning is culturally informed. These ideas are probably elementary to Social Informatics. However, these are concepts that are very easy to forget and don't seem to be very firmly implanted in America's collective conscious.

In many ways, this is just one more pundit (and we know how much attention they can get by being contrary), but he does provide a counterpoint to much of the enthusiasm over the democratizing effects of social media.