Social Informatics

Awarding the self in Wikipedia: Identity work and the disclosure of knowledge Ashton, Daniel. "Awarding the self in Wikipedia: Identity work and the disclosure of knowledge" First Monday [Online], Volume 16 Number 1 (18 December 2010)

ooooh. I forgot about this one. Thanks for unearthing it.

Is Someone Keeping Secrets from You? Reveal All with the Worlds Most Powerful Spyphone

I dunno if you guys have seen this yet today but this is interesting in terms of Google's position that digitizing all books will open-up access to millions of books worldwide.

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.

Sherry Turkle is quoted in this article that discusses how young people especially increasingly quantify everything.

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

Really great talk on the Brian Lehrer show from two days ago about content curation. The angle has a lot to do with what journalists/bloggers are doing, there even was talk about a Pulitzer Prize for curation. The featured author talks about how "search is broken." There was a caller (with whom I once worked at People magazine!), who has a site that curates human interest content about the developing world, filling a niche that she says has been greatly under-served. I'll also post a link to her Web site.

Here's a link to a Web site described as a "global humanitarian internet portal to feature engaging stories about the lives of real people in even the most remote parts of the developing world." The creator saw a gap in all content aggregator-type sites, which tend to cover breaking news, and launched something aimed at human interest stories from the developing world.

"The boundary between 'real life' and 'online' has disappeared"

People meet spouses and make other connections on World of Warcraft, as discusses in Turkle's book.

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

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.

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

Started looking at this after reading Andrew's post earlier. Yours, mine, ours thinking. (What is the opposite? Independent anti-consumerism? )

Worst news: The New York Times rolled out a plan on Thursday to begin charging the most frequent users of its Web site $15 a month in a bet that readers would pay for news they have grown accustomed to getting free.

How depressing.

update: I found in the comments section a comment from a NYTimes spokesperson who said that it will be free for students. I haven't been able to find that in the subscription section.

Professor Wu traces the history of communications systems. He describes similarities between radio and the Internet, such as the tendency to consolidate.

It's a smaller and smaller world after all

Photos taken with smart phones and gps enabled cameras pinpoint your location...

Interesting roundup of the South by Southwest Festival and the proliferation of movies and panels about the effects of technology.

This book was mentioned in the NYT article on SXSW that I just posted. Instead of arguing whether technology makes us dumber or smarter, the author provides insight on how we can better adopt technology into our lives, which involves periods of disconnectedness.

Thanks for sharing this, this is very useful for my term project. Making tools work for us, rather than ever feeling the other way is key.