Berkman Buzz: Week of July 19, 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.

* Radio Berkman 159: "Spare a Cycle?"
* Doc Searls gets literal with consumption.
* Ethan Zuckerman reports in from Nigeria.
* David Weinberger weighs the pros/cons of "web-form writing."
* danah boyd challenges us to think about race and class online.
* Herdict has the word on Pirate Bay (non)blocking in the Netherlands.
* OpenNet Initiative on Chinese Internet deanonymization.
* CMLP on Net anonymity and the Ninth Circuit.
* ProjectVRM on progress "toward free and open markets."
* Weekly Global Voices: "Kazakhstan: Bloggers see China’s 'weaponless invasion'"

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The full buzz.

This week on Radio Berkman: This week on Radio Berkman: Luis von Ahn separates the humans from the robots, with Dan Jones…
Radio Berkman 158: Spare a Cycle?
More episodes of Radio Berkman

"Eating isn’t a bad metaphor for what we do with the products we buy. But it’s not all we do. For example, I’m writing this on a computer. Is “consuming” all I did with that computer when I bought it? And what about the writing I’m doing now? Writing is production, not consumption. In fact, much of what we do with our electronic devices involves producing information rather than consuming it. And is information something we consume? Or is it something else?"
From Doc Searls' blog post We are more than what we eat

"Our little gathering has managed to attract some big names, including Donald Duke, former two-term governor of Cross Rivers State (who, everyone in the room assumes, is now a candidate for president.) Duke speaks briefly to the audience and notes that Nigeria is looking abroad, and especially to Ghana, to see how elections can run smoothly. (We crypto-Ghanaians in the crowd appreciated the shoutout.) While it would be great to learn from Ghana, “Nigeria is unique. We could learn how to do it elsewhere, but there’s a gene in us that means we…” He stops and makes a vague, uncertain hand gesture that sends the crowd into laughter. “I can’t find a word for it, I need to use my hands. And I hope we can use technology to undo some of this.”"
From Ethan Zuckerman's blog post Highlights of our workshop on ICT and Elections in Nigeria

"I just re-read Jay Rosen’s piece on objectivity as persuasion more slowly than I did the first time. It’s like watching a master carpenter bang nails. Beautiful. Jay’s post is #6 in a series. Jay tells me he has at least one more. So far, he’s written 15,000 words … and his commenters have written 96,000. (That second number seems way too high, but it’s based on my copying and pasting the comments (plus Jay’s integrated roundups) into a text editor. My clerical skills are poor, however.) For Too Big to Know, I’ve written a section (which means I’ll probably be unwriting it tomorrow) taking these six pieces as an example of one type of long-form writing on the Web … or, more exactly, web-form writing. At the end of the discussion, I list advantages and disadvantages of Jay’s webby version of long-form argument versus standard, book-length, printed long-form arguments."
From David Weinberger's blog post Long-form and web-form arguments

Every time I dare to talk about race or class and MySpace & Facebook in the same breath, a public explosion happens. This is the current state of things.  Unfortunately, most folks who enter the fray prefer to reject the notion that race/class shape social media or that social media reflects bigoted attitudes than seriously address what’s at stake.  Yet, look around. Twitter is flush with racist language in response to the active participation of blacks on the site. Comments on YouTube expose deep-seated bigotry in uncountable ways. The n-word is everyday vernacular in MMORPGs. In short, racism and classism permeates every genre of social media out there, reflecting the everyday attitudes of people that go well beyond social media. So why can’t we talk about it?"
From danah boyd's blog post MySpace and Facebook: How Racist Language Frames Social Media (and Why You Should Care)

"In October 2009, a Dutch court had already ordered the Pirate Bay to stop offering its torrent downloads to people in the Netherlands. The torrent website, however, never complied with that Dutch court ruling. Unable to stop the Pirate Bay at the source, BREIN then set sights on Dutch ISP Ziggo."
From Stefan Kulk's blog post for Herdict, Dutch ISP has no obligation to block access to the Pirate Bay

"In a speech given by Wang Chen (Deputy Director of the Propaganda Department in the Communist Party of China), he briefly outlined a new drive to register cellphone users with identifiable information, and force commentators on message boards to use real names; a deep and measurable attack on anonymity. The press has dwelled on the privacy side of this new issue, but they have thus failed to show how a policy like this can damage free-speech in a way that ultimately attacks open Internet practices as well."
From Alex Fayette's blog post for ONI, Chinese Plans To Deanonymize The Internet

"The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision last Monday in Inre: Anonymous Online Speakers, No. 09-71265 (9th Cir. July 12, 2010), a case that could be influential for future courts deciding whether to order the identification of anonymous or pseudonymous Internet speakers.  In the course of a primarily procedural ruling, the appellate court suggested in dicta that an expansive category of "commercial speech" is entitled to reduced protection in anonymity cases.  ...the decision could have negative consequences for consumers' ability to remain anonymous while speaking critically about products and services online."
From the CMLP's blog post Ninth Circuit Weighs In On Internet Anonymity, Consumer Griping At Risk

"I just posted three long VRM pieces on my blog: 1. R-buttons and the Open Marketplace / 2. ListenLog / 3. EmanciPay / They’re really one long post in three parts. Together they unpack the thinking behind my own development work at ProjectVRM here at the Berkman Center, and the three different components of that work. (It’s been a fun four-year-long learning by doing process.) All this has been going on, of course, in the midst of a growing and active development community that’s also working on many other things, most of which overlap with these three."
From Doc Searls' blog post for ProjectVRM, Work toward free and open markets

"Posts about China-related topics are quite frequent in the Kazakh language blogs. Here are some of them, the most recent ones. Some time ago, Akzere published a post titled “China – place of grooms”. The post tells the interesting story of Chinese men eager to have a family. A girl who is a university student posted an advertisement hoping to meet a young man. However, she didn’t expect to see almost 2000 men in front of her dormitory!"
From Rebekah Heacock's blog post for Global Voices, Kazakhstan: Bloggers see China’s "weaponless invasion"

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The weekly Berkman Buzz is selected from the posts of Berkman Center people and projects: http://cyber.harvard.edu/planet/current/

Suggestions and feedback about the Buzz are always welcome and can be emailed to syoung@cyber.harvard.edu