Skip to the main content

Berkman Buzz: June 3, 2011

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.

* Media Cloud maps the US popular blogosphere
* Ethan Zuckerman reflects on the quantified self
* The Library Lab interviews open access advocate Peter Suber
* Dan Gillmor discusses hacking, PBS, and Tupac Shakur
* Creative Commons announces that YouTube will now support CC BY videos
* Weekly Global Voices: "Bolivia: Tweeting with Senator Centa Rek"

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

The full buzz.

"This map tells us that this U.S. popular blogs (to the degree they are represented by the particular Bloglines sample) can be grouped into three big meta clusters: Crafts, News, and Technology. Of these, the Craft meta-cluster is the biggest, and the biggest single cluster with 137 blogs is the big ‘love’ cluster (cluster labels are automatically generated as the most common word within the cluster’s member blogs)."
From Hal Robert's blog post for Media Cloud, "Mapping the U.S. Popular Blogosphere"

"I’m convinced that what’s going on with quantified self experiments is helpful for the folks who are currently undertaking experiments. I’m less sure that this movement is going to become mainstream or change principles of scientific and medical discovery."
From Ethan Zuckerman's blog post, "Reflections on the 2011 Quantified Self conference"

"Peter Suber — a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society — is a leading policy strategist working for Open Access models. The Harvard Library Innovation Lab’s very own David Weinberger caught up with Peter for this week’s podcast to talk about Open Access, and the new challenges librarians face with making a growing body of digital scholarship actually usable and sortable."
From the "Library Lab/The Podcast 002: Free Knowledge"

"Last week, the website of America's Public Broadcasting Service featured an incredible story: the rap artist Tupac Shakur, killed a decade and a half ago, was actually not dead; rather, the story said, he was alive and living peacefully in New Zealand."
From Dan Gillmor's post for Comment is Free, "A lesson of PBS's Tupac Shakur 'story'"

"You may have already heard the great news—YouTube has added the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY) as a licensing option for users! Now when users upload video, they can choose to license it under CC BY or to remain with the default “Standard YouTube License.” Users may also change the license on existing videos by editing each video individually."
From Creative Commons, "YouTube launches support for CC BY and a CC library featuring 10,000 videos"

"Bolivian blogger Pablo Andrés Rivero recently wrote a post [es] that analyzed how social media may help public officials be more responsive to the needs of citizens. He asked “whether Twitter is a tool that helps bring politicians closer to citizens or an elitist and restrictive trend?” Little did he know that two weeks later, a real-life scenario of interaction between a Bolivian Senator and hundreds of members of the Bolivian Twitter community would help demonstrate that many public officials have a long way to go in understanding how social media works."
From Eduardo Avila's post for Global Voices Online, "Bolivia: Tweeting with Senator Centa Rek"

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

Compiled by Rebekah Heacock.

The Berkman Buzz is selected weekly 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 buzz@cyber.harvard.edu.