Social Informatics

NYU's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World has a new website with their nice collection of digital books.

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."

A former colleague of mine passed this along to me today, and I thought it was interesting in light of our class's discussions on technological trends.

Sherry Turkle is quoted in this article that discusses how social media can induce FOMO: fear of missing out.

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

I have uploaded other pdf documents at the bottom of one of my pages, but not the Times articles because I thought they would be accessible through the link. However, I don't know whether people notice docs at the bottom of the Google page even though I say "attached below" in the citation. The Times articles are now on ecollege in doc sharing and attached to my discussion reply. I hope that the Economist doesn't block users.

I recently also uploaded the Times articles as PDFs to my second page.

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

This section of the AARP site provides articles for seniors with information on buying tips, new tools, privacy & security, social media and other recommendations on using technology. The articles are for the novice as well as the experienced technology user. Specific to our conversation on digital divide are the articles on "Boomers Catching Up in Technology Use"

Does anyone know about this institution? They do interesting work and seem to research the causes of the digital divide.

We have a number of links from the Berkman Center on the Digital Divide Diigo and found it really helpful in our research. You can join the group if you want to post there. Tim Wu, the lawyer who coined the term net neutrality, was a fellow at Berkman, as well as Eszter Hargittai, a scholar discussed in our presentation section, "users: race and income." We also discuss Lawrence Lessig's work, mostly known for creative commons, in the "net neturality" section. He was also a fellow there. They also have really great weekly talks that they post on their youtube page: http://www.youtube.com/user/BerkmanCenter

Here's the official release.

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

wow, and the data persists even when you upgrade the phone! The article says "In some ways, this shouldn't be surprising. Back in June of 2010, Apple updated its privacy policy to include a paragraph that allows Apple and "partners and licensees" to collect and store user location data." But of course hardly anyone reads the fine print.

Here is the open source tool the researchers made with the location data: http://petewarden.github.com/iPhoneTracker/

Some statistics on the use and availability of public library computers.

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."

There is a lot of back and forth about this news in the library world. I have yet to give the Amazon annoncement the fine tooth comb treatment, but there are plenty of questions. Chief among them for me would be: What is a library's financial incentive to promote the Kindle (free or exceeding cheap content to loan would be a fine answer for me). Another issue has come up on public library list serves regarding Harper Collins' policies. It has come out that part of the agreement is that Harper Collins will have access to patron information. Although I have yet to see anyone explain the details of this aspect of Harper Collins' agrrement, would that be something Amazon would want as well?

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

How technology is being incorporated into education (and its costs).

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."

The AAP warns that teens may become depressed from facebook. Also see http://www.aap.org/advocacy/releases/socialmedia2011.htm

As the author says: a bit simplistic? Yes! But...

I liked the link to the pew research statistics.

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

The study is very informative, it was particularly relevant for me, because the study sample comes from Mercer county.