Some people in the class were asking about Friendster a few weeks ago. They are going to delete al of the old information (graveyards of old digital selves) and start over

dana boyd is quoted: "We want to forget our misdeeds and bad choices, but we also kind of want to remember them," said Danah Boyd, a social media researcher at Microsoft and a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. "These old networks are our memories."

This center explores how ICTs foster/hinder freedom, democracy, human rights & development.

This google video showing its datacenter and security, is probably in response to the amazon outage last week

Ok, this is exciting, however, we don't know the details yet: "The company did not say how long the lending period for Kindle e-books would be, or if there were any restrictions on the number of checkouts for any books."

This is a few years old but it's a slide presentation from Paul Adams, ex-Googler, currently Facebook product manager. His work was influential in the new Facebook "groups," and the rumored Google product "circles."

Yahoo changes its policy on search queries from 90 days to 18 months.

This article also references the incident in 2006 when AOL released its search query data: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/09/technology/09aol.html?gwh=300ED81FDF596D5587EF12FC33E8FE03

From the article: "Still, books are one of the last ad-free zones, and by showing ads on an e-reader, Amazon risks alienating some users, he said. " Libraries too are one of the last ad-free zones.

This article is on the editorial process of putting together David Foster Wallace's unfinished novel, which was several hundred pages of manuscript without a clear order. I thought this was interesting: ___ "It's my version of the novel," [Michael Pietsch, editor of the novel] admitted, adding that he talked to Little Brown's e-book staff about creating a version that would enable the reader to arrange the chapters in any order, but was told that was technically unfeasible. __ This is surprising to me - is the ebook form that inflexible? Or did the publisher not want to deal with the idea of so many versions circulating?

Is the internet an addiction or a passion?

"In general, if a pastime is not classy, those who love it are 'addicted.' Opera and poetry buffs are 'passionate.'"

How has the distribution and viewing experience of watching a movie changed in the instant netflix age? "There are moviegoers and probably critics who don't care about the kind of box that images come in, how those images were created and how they are consumed, though it seems important to mark these changes and how they are affecting our modern or postmodern selves. Television and home video shrank movies, turning them into more easily obtainable images that are perhaps no longer (as) sacred. The new 24-hour movie, meanwhile, has brought other changes, filling our eyes and sometimes flooding our heads with an unending stream of visions. "

Review of Kevin Kelly's new book. At the end of the review, there is a comparison of Kelly's optimist view of technology with the dark vision as laid out in Jaron Lanier's "You are not a gadget."

Jane McGonigal's new book - Reality is Broken - is out. This is an interview with her and some of the users of her games.

So far, it's mostly being used for students who fail courses, and retake it as "online credit recovery."

The Room for Debate section of the NYT looks at this question. Are schools looking to spend less on teachers, or do online classes provide new skills and opportunities?

Article looks at the ebooks business in Europe, where it is still in its infancy. Not many readers available, and very little content in other languages besides English. There are legal and economic issues for pricing and licensing of ebooks.

A nice overview of how DPL differs from other mass-digitization projects such as Europeana and Google Books

You can upload it to your google site page too. In the editing view, tere's a file uploaded at the bottom of each page

Online censorship is the norm thorough most of the Middle East and North Africa. These governments are using software developed in the US and Canada. Report from the OpenNet Initiative, part of the Berkman Center for Internet and Societ

This is the direct link the National Digital Literacy Corps as proposed by the FCC in their 2010 "National Broadband Plan." If Congress decides to adopt and fund the recommendations, the corps will be modeled after Americorps. The program would target non-adopters, users who are new to ICT and the internet. "The Corps should target segments of the population that are less likely to have broadband at home, including low-income individuals, racial and ethnic minorities, senior citizens, people with disabilities, those with lower education levels, people in rural communities, those on Tribal lands and people whose primary or only language is not English." It is recommended that the corps recruit people with language skills so the classes and instruction would be provided in user's primary language.

"The Atavist has captured new ways to present long-form content for the digital age, mixing multimedia presentations and deep, engrossing articles." Article written by David Carr, although Nick Carr might like this because it understands that "The Web is good at creating short and snappy bits of information, but not so much when it comes to long-form, edited, fact-and-spell-checked work."

reminder to everyone - today the NYTimes goes behind a paywall, and you will only be able to read 20 articles a month for free. But if you click on this article through diigo, it shouldn't count against your 20. I've heard conflicting reports whether NYTimes digital will remain free for students, or if they will get discount on the $15/month rate. I can't find anything official on the web right now. Has anyone else heard anything?

Great article on some digital humanities projects and how they relate to undergraduate teaching. Many of the projects involve digital archives, libraries or databases. I think this is the kind of work future academic libraries can help facilitate