Social Informatics

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

I mentioned this video in a comment I made in this week's discussion. It highlights several reasons why school librarians are so essential now more than ever.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Review of a new book about the Turing Test, which Nick Carr discusses briefly at the end of The Shallows. The author Brian Christianson sets out to win the Turing Test.

Savvy techies are finding ways to circumvent politically motivated shutdowns of the internet. Dissidents get around government shutdowns of the Internet via range-extending antennae, satellites, microwave ovens' radio waves, short-range radio stations, and converting digital computer data to analogue radio signals and back to computer data again.

A proposed privacy law could help as well as hurt America's web companies. A "privacy bill of rights" was introduced on March 16 by Obama, which will outline internet privacy rights. Internet Explorer and Firefox will have more do-not -track features in their new versions. Privacy laws are stricter in the EU.

Jane McGonigal applied psychology book on the life lessons in gaming is reviewed in the Economist. "Frustratingly, few of the book's other examples are as convincingly argued as World of Warcraft." The review will also state that it will be a while before a game designer wins the Nobel peace prize. Her frequent mentions of her own games also "lend the book an air of self-promotion."

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

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

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.

Note: this is a rumor, but it's interesting if this service will be lauched: "With Circles, I believe that Google will attempt to accomplish something critics from the blogosphere, academia, SXSW 2010 keynoter danah boyd, privacy watchdogs and others have all called on the social networking world to do: to allow our online communication to respect the same boundaries that our offline social lives do."

nothing has been announced yet. it is interesting that google is so visited and has so many users, but has yet to effectively incorporate social networking... i.e. buzz and wave had huge hyped, but it quickly burned away.

Has anyone read this? I think I will have to get this book. His lecture in the early weeks stuck with me and I keep poking around on his "kk.org" site.

No I havent read it but am thinking of dowloading it if it is available.

I am really skeptical of Kevin Kelly even since we viewed that TED lecture, but I have been going to his blog weekly anyway. He had a post earlier this week about the price of e-books - he thinks they will inevitably fall to $0.99 per book and nick carr responded and tore apart his logic.

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

This Newsweek cover story from March 7 gets into how information overload is hindering our ability to make clear decisions.

While attempting to read this article, I found myself constantly distracted, not by interruptions, but by the completely goofy banner ads on the right side of the page and bottom. Maybe someone could invent and app for that? Or in the meantime I should use a piece of cardboard to cover the nonsense on the screen. A low budget app!