Berkman Buzz: Week of May 10, 2010

BERKMAN BUZZ: A look at the past week's online Berkman conversations
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What's being discussed...take your pick or browse below.

* Doc Searls wonders, "What would you do and why?"
* Ethan Zuckerman contemplates the organizational physics of love and money.
* danah boyd on the backlash against Facebook.
* CMLP offers a new section in their Legal Guide on "Dealing with Foreign Legal Threats."
* Andrew McAfee asks if humans are the weak link in decision making.
* David Weinberger live blogs from Tuesday Luncheon Series with Elliot Maxwell.
* Weekly Global Voices: "Hungary: The Story of an Investigative Journalist"

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The full buzz.

"Until her Supreme Court nomination turned Elena Kagan into big-time news fodder, there was not an abundance of great pictures of her to be found on the Web. Among the better ones to be found were a couple I had posted on Flickr a couple years ago, when she was still Dean of Harvard Law School....what prompts this post is a comment under one of the two photos, from an entity called TEA PARTY LEADER. It’s a diatribe that verges on hate speech, but (in my amateur judgment) doesn’t quite cross the line. The question for me, when I saw the comment, was Should I kill it?"
From Doc Searls' blog post Manners vs. Mores

"I’m just back from the Global Voices summit in Santiago, Chile...For the past year, we’ve been considering an interesting problem that confronts media as a whole – the Babel problem. As I’ve written elsewhere, the internet is becoming more multilingual as people, organizations and publications from all over the world come online. If you, like me, are a mostly monolingual English speaker, you can read a smaller percentage of the Internet every day. And if you live in the US, the meltdown of advertising supported journalism means that you’re getting less coverage of international news… which means we might need to find ways to unlock important citizen or professional media coverage in Laotian or Latvian."
From Ethan Zuckerman's blog post Global Voices: Love and money

"As most of you know, Facebook has been struggling to explain its privacy-related decisions for the last month while simultaneously dealing with frightening security issues...The short version… People are cranky. Facebook thinks that it’s just weirdo tech elites like me who are pissed off. They’re standing firm and trying to justify why what they’re doing is good for everyone. Their attitude has triggered the panic button amongst regulators and all sorts of regulators are starting to sniff around."
From danah boyd's blog post, Facebook and “radical transparency” (a rant)

"It's pretty obvious that material placed on the "word wide web" is, indeed, available around the world -- at least most of it. While the ability to make content available worldwide is a great virtue of the Internet, it has the potential to create a legal minefield for citizen journalists, who could face a civil or criminal legal action over online content in any country where the content is available. A new section of the Legal Guide on "Dealing with Foreign Legal Threats" explains the possible legal risks that bloggers and other creators of online content could face outside the United States, and gives some tips and resources for responding to these threats."
From Eric P. Robinson's blog post for the Citizen Media Law Project, New Legal Guide Section on Foreign Risks

"I gave a talk at Palantir Technologies‘ way-cool DC offices on Monday as part of their “Palantir Night Live” series...The next slide just said “Human Intuition vs. Algorithmic Predictions.” I asked the audience whether they thought that this was the good news portion of the talk, or the bad news one. I asked them, in other words, if they thought that human intuition was holding up well against fast, dumb computers applying algorithms to data.
From Andrew McAfee's blog post, The Intuitionists

"Elliot Maxwell is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk called “Openness: How increasing accessibility and responsiveness can transform processes and systems.” H3e says he came to the question by observing the spread and importance of the Net and its effect on institutions. He sees openness as a lens for understanding processes and systems. Openness is a continuum, Elliot says. For example, open source software benefits from openness, but because decisions are made by assigned individuals, it is not itself fully open. Things are open if they’re accessible and can be modified, repurposed, and redistributed. Openness is in part an attitude, he says. E.g., a doctor is more open if s/he is more willing to listen to the patient and to take her/his time. 'Openness is not necessarily a product of IT.'"
From David Weinberger's blog post, Elliot Maxwell on Openness

"The Hungarian media are still covering the developing story of the real estate issue concerning the village of Páty, close to the capital Budapest. An investigative journalist, Tamás Bodoky—who got a Pulitzer Memorial Prize in March 2010—has been writing reports for the Hungarian news site index.hu (HUN), and also worked on the story of real estate investments at Páty. His article (HUN) about the case was published on the website, but later it was re-edited by the editor-in-chief. One paragraph was deleted from the text without any notification to the author. The internal debate among Bodoky and the deputy editor-in-chief appeared on the journalist's blog (HUN). Tamás Bodoky resigned from his job, but his story received special media coverage and generated public conversation on how important the role of investigative journalism is in Hungary, at a time when stories like the Páty case have to be investigated and reported."
From Marietta Le's blog post for Global Voices, Hungary: The Story of an Investigative Journalist

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The Berkman Buzz is curated weekly from the blogs of current Berkman Center directors, fellows, projects: http://cyber.harvard.edu/planet/current/