Berkman Buzz: Week of December 13, 2010
What's being discussed...take your pick or browse below.
* Joseph Reagle analyzes Wikipedia's first six weeks
* Harry Lewis explains that the Fourth Amendment now applies to email
* David Weinberger critiques Time's Person of the Year
* John Palfrey downloads his first book-as-iPad app
* Creative Commons celebrates its birthday with videos (CC-licensed, of course)
* Weekly Global Voices: "@MedvedevRussia, Are You Listening? A Story of 6 Months on Twitter"
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The full buzz.
"The reconstruction is not perfect, there are patches that won't apply, manually moved articles, and text encodings that I don't manage to guess at. But it does permit some preliminary browsing, which leaves the following initial impressions:
- There is a lot of silly stuff in there.
- Tim Shell contributed a fair amount of content.
- Popular topics seemingly include philosophy, geography, the Dewey Decimal System, Ernest Hemingway, the United States (and its Constitution), Isaac Asimov, the Japan Constitution, Metallica, statistics, and -- my goodness, true to the Objectvist conspiracy theories -- a huge collection of articles on Atlas Shrugged."
From Joseph Reagle's blog post "Wikipedia 10K redux"
"I'm glad that Time took MZ [Mark Zuckerberg] over Julian Assange. Facebook is truly influential and important. WikiLeak’s importance is primarily symbolic, and it has been given that symbolic importance mainly by forces that want to use it as justification for killing what they don’t like about the Internet — its openness, its bottom-uppity character, its distrust of extrinsic controls...in other words, all that makes it the Internet."
From David Weinberger's blog post "Face of the Year"
"I chose to read NONOBJECT for its form, not so much its substance. I don’t know much about industrial design or the theory related to it, though I learned a bit along the way. (The premise of NONOBJECT is a design principle that focuses not so much on the product or the designer but on the space between them that is altered through design.) I was interested in the experience of reading that the authors would offer up."
From John Palfrey's blog post "NONOBJECT (or, I bought my first book in the form of an iPad app)"
"In 2004, designer and animator Justin Cone created “Building on the Past” as part of our Moving Images Contest and won. Justin originally made the video, which demonstrated Creative Commons’ mission in two minutes, available under CC BY-NC. At the encouragement of Wikieducator’s Wayne Macintosh, Justin decided to re-release “Building on the Past” under the most open CC license, CC Attribution (CC BY) and made a short video explaining why (also under CC BY)."
From Jane Park's blog post for Creative Commons, "Happy Birthday CC! 'Building on the Past' creator re-releases video under CC BY and explains why"
"'Hello everyone! I'm on Twitter, and this is my first tweet,' wrote Dmitry Medvedev during a visit to Twitter headquarters in Silicon Valley on June 23, 2010. The Russian president created two official Twitter accounts - one in Russian and one in English - in a publicity tour that made headlines around the world. With 2010 coming to a close, we take a look back on some of the highlights of the president's first six months on Twitter."
From Yelena Osipova's post for Global Voices Online, "@MedvedevRussia, Are You Listening? A Story of 6 Months on Twitter"
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The weekly Berkman Buzz is selected from the posts of Berkman Center people and projects and sometimes from the Center's wider network
Suggestions and feedback about the Buzz are always welcome and can be emailed to rheacock@cyber.harvard.edu