Berkman Buzz: Week of August 30, 2010

BERKMAN BUZZ: A look at the past week's online Berkman conversations
If you would like to receive the Buzz weekly via email, please sign up here.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

What's being discussed...take your pick or browse below.

* Kimberley Isbell asks, "Who's Afraid of the News Aggregators?"
* Jonathan Zittrain considers the FTC's fake iTunes reviews case.
* Doc Searls invites us beyond caveat emptor.
* David Weinberger utopianizes upon the shoulders of William Gibson.
* Christian Sandvig asks for help with an Internet & Innovation Reading List.
* Ethan Zuckerman, puzzling out Crisis Commons' terrain.
* Weekly Global Voices: "Armenia-Azerbaijan: More dialogue through film"
* A year ago in the Buzz: "Objections to the Google Book Settlement"

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The full buzz.

"As anyone who has been following the debate regarding the "future of journalism" knows, there have been a lot of ink (and bytes) spilled arguing over the role news aggregators are playing in the "decline" of traditional journalistic models. Rupert Murdoch has labeled the practice of news aggregation by entities like Google News "theft," and a professor from the Wharton Business School recently called on lawmakers to amend the copyright laws to prevent aggregators from posting any portion of news stories for a full 24 hours after their initial publication. Even the FTC has gotten in on the act, listing "Additional Intellectual Property Rights to Support Claims against News Aggregators" as the first policy proposal in the Staff Discussion Draft recently released in connection with its workshop series on "How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?""
From Kimberley Isbell's blog post for CMLP, Who's Afraid of the News Aggregators?

"There was some handwringing over this — would the government be going after any blogger who says something good about something and might have a financial interest in it? It is not particularly easy to predict, especially since the FTC, unlike other Federal agencies, does not do formal rulemakings — it can only announce guidelines and then bring one enforcement action at a time under its general charter to combat unfair or deceptive trade practices. The Reverb case provides a good example of how the FTC is thinking about applying its limited staff power: to professional organizations working to subvert ratings schemes."
From Jonathan Zittrain's blog post FTC goes after astroturfing

"Today advertising on the Web is also normative to an extreme that is beginning to feel metastatic. In efforts to improve advertising, “beacons” and flash cookies have been added to the HTTP variety, and all are now also used to track users on the Web. The Wall Street Journal has been following this in its What They Know series, and you can find out more there. Improvement, in the new advertising business, is now about personalization. “It is a sea change in the way the industry works,” Omar Tawakol, CEO of BlueKai, told the Wall Street Journal. “Advertisers want to buy access to people, not Web pages.” Talk about asymmetry. You are no longer just a client to a server. You are a target with crosshairs on your wallet."
From Doc Searls' blog post Beyond caveat emptor

(Bonus: Doc rounds up the roundups of CRM+VRM 2010.)

"William Gibson has an brilliant op-ed in the NYT about our inability to make sense of an entity like Google. “Google is not ours. Which feels confusing…,” he says. Exactly. But then I think Gibson misidentifies the cause of the confusion. He continues: “Which feels confusing, because we are its unpaid content-providers, in one way or another.” He says our “every search” is “a miniscule contribution.” But, that’s not why were confused. I’d venture that very few people realize that Google uses our searches to refine future results. And if they did know, I doubt they’d care. Who would expect to be paid for that, any more than we expect any company to pay us for learning from its logs?"
From David Weinberger's blog post What’s ours in the Age of Google?

"(...An Internet and Innovation Reading List for You.) Recently I’ve been ginning up a reading list about the title given in this blog post, and I wondered if I could try to crowdsource some of this bad boy. If you had a semester and you wanted a graduate-level someone to learn all of the basics and some of the more advanced and interesting stuff about the broad topic “the Internet and innovation,” what would you tell them to read? My interest here is public policy and not so much on other areas (economics, law — though they’re in here)..."
From Christian Sandvig's blog post Internet Innovation: The Big Read

"Perhaps the most impressive collaboration to come from the Crisis Camps was work on OpenStreetMap for Port au Prince. Using satellite imagery released by the UN, a team created a highly detailed map, leveraging the work of non-programmers to trace roads on the satellite images and diasporans to identify and name landmarks and streets. As the map improved in quality, the volunteers were eventually able to offer routing information for relief trucks, based on road damage that was visible on the satellite imagery. A convoy would request a route for a 4-ton water truck, and volunteers would use their bird’s eye view of the situation – from half a continent away – to suggest the safest route. Ultimately, the government of Haiti requested access to the information, and Crisis Camps provided not only the data, but training in using it."
From Ethan Zuckerman's blog post Crisis Commons, and the challenges of distributed disaster response

"With national television in Armenia and Azerbaijan controlled directly or indirectly by the authorities or government-linked individuals, there is little opportunity for independent reporting. This is especially true in the case of the simmering conflict over the disputed territory of Nagorno Karabakh. The war, fought in the early 1990s, left 25,000 dead and forced a million to flee their homes. Few ethnic Armenians remain in Azerbaijan, and ethnic Azeris also left Armenia, while attempts to negotiate a lasting peace continue to falter. Skirmishes, however, still occur on the front line despite a 1994 ceasefire agreement. Communication between the two sides is also discouraged and, for most citizens, impossible. Even so, new and social media is slowly starting to fill the information void and circumvent official or self-imposed restrictions in place on objective reporting free from negative stereotyping, propaganda and occasional misinformation."
From Onnik Krikorian's blog post for Global Voices, Armenia-Azerbaijan: More dialogue through film

"As an author I am also a reader, a user of libraries, and a beneficiary of the public domain. I say this because I believe that the settlement in question amounts to a major intervention in our national cultural policy, one that will affect the U.S. knowledge ecology for generations to come. It therefore should not be adjudicated upon the assumption that we authors (and our publishers) are rights holders only. We are cultural citizens as well; our copyrights matter to us, but so do larger questions of how literature and knowledge circulate among us."
Lewis Hyde, from Harry Lewis' blog post Objections to the Google Book Settlement [originally included in the Berkman Buzz in August 2009]

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

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