Links for August 1st 2008
Interesting links for August 1st 2008:
- Malwebolence – The World of Web Trolling [NYTimes.com] – A really fascinating article from Mattathias Schwartz trying to take a serious look at the more extreme edge of trolling culture, searching for meaning behind what at first glance are random acts of online cruelty. Schwartz paints the biggest trolls as quite complicated people, who have their own rationale for what they do, albeit often quite a hard to comprehend one. [Via Christy Dena]
- Rebooting America (Book) [Personal Democracy Forum] – The blurb: “The Personal Democracy Forum presents an anthology of forty-four essays brimming with the hopes of reenergizing, reorganizing, and reorienting our government for the Internet Age. How would completely reorganizing our system of representation work? Is it possible to redesign our government with open doors and see-through walls? How can we leverage the exponential power of many-to-many deliberation for the common good?” The entire collection is available online, for free, as pdfs and features lots of people you know, or should know, like Yochai Benkler, danah boyd, Howard Rheingold and Clay Shirky. The whole thing is released under a Creative Commons license, too! [Via danah]
- Beijing lifts some internet restrictions: IOC [ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)] – “The International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Chinese organisers have agreed to lift all internet restrictions for the Beijing Games, IOC vice-president Gunilla Lindberg says. “The issue has been solved,” Ms Lindberg said. “The IOC Coordination Commission and the Beijing Olympics Organising Committee (BOCOG) met last night and agreed. “Internet use will be just like in any Olympics.” ABC journalists in Beijing said they could access internet content about Tiananmen Square and other previously banned websites. But it was not immediately clear if the restrictions had been lifted outside hubs for foreign media.”
- Oh happy day — the new Delicious is here [delicious blog] – No longer del.icio,us, Delicious had an overhaul, a facelift, and now resides at delicious.com. To see what’s different, check out the video or read What’s New.For readers of this blog, the biggest difference will be that I can now use 1000 characters in teh notes section, so my annotated links posts will often have considerably more annotation! 🙂
- Scrabulous Returns As Wordscraper [All Facebook] – “One of the big news stories this morning is that the Argarwalla brothers who founded Scrabulous have launched a similar application called “Wordscraper”. The application, which is similar in style to Scrabulous, has attracted over 8,000 people so far. It also appears that the brother no longer have an announcement message on Scrabulous and have instead completely pulled down the application.” (That said, using Facebook in Australia I still have perfect access to Scrabulous today!)
- Blocked websites ‘not Olympics related’ [ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)] – “Internet censorship in China is now being allowed during the Olympic period on the basis that the blocked websites are not related to the Games. The stance is a backdown on earlier promises made by the International Olympic Committee (IOC)…”
Links for July 30th 2008
Interesting links for July 28th 2008 through July 30th 2008:
- Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog [Hulu] – Joss Whedon’s 3 Dr Horrible webisodes – availble for one week only – are now back – for 4 months – on Hulu. Only, of course, if you live in the US. Or know how to circumvent Hulu’s region locking.
- Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince – Trailer [Moviefone] – The new trailer for the Harry Potter 6 film looks amazing. The embedded version seems geo-locked to the US, but the HD versions should load anywhere (or, at least, they loaded in Australia). Evil Young Lord V looks very creepy!
- Conroy welcomes ISP filtering [Australian IT] – “The federal Government will embark on the next step of its internet filtering strategy after initial trials proved successful, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said. … today released the findings of a recent … ISP-level internet filtering trial…
- Scrabulous pulled from Facebook in US and Canada [ABC News] – “The creators of online Scrabble knock-off Scrabulous say they have pulled their application from US and Canadian Facebook pages due to a lawsuit filed by game-making giant Hasbro.”
- Google enrolled for schools email deal [The Age] – “Google has snatched what is believed to be its biggest single client in the world – the NSW Department of Education – away from its rival Microsoft to claim up to 1.3 million new users of its free email product.”
- Joss Whedon’s online musical comedy Sing-Along Social Media Blitz [Chief Marketer] – “WWJWD. What Would Joss Whedon Do. Marketers looking to capitalize on the power of social media could do worse than keep that mantra in mind next time they want to launch a campaign.” (A look at the success of Dr Horrible.)
- China becomes biggest net nation [BBC NEWS | Technology] – “China now has the world’s largest net-using population, say official figures. More than 253 million people in the country are now online, according to statistics from the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC).”
- Indiana Jones and the Temple of Absurdly Implausible Excess [NYTimes.com] – Has the phrase “jump the shark” jumped the shark? Or, more to the point, should we be saying that it has “nuked the fridge”? …which emerged from a 1980s dorm-room discussion of a particularly ridiculous episode of the TV show “Happy Days”…
An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube
Michael Wesch, an anthropologist focused on digital culture and YouTube (famous for the the videos The Machine is Us/Ing Us and A Vision of Students Today) has released (on YouTube) an excellent presentation he gave about YouTube’s history and cultural impact called An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube:
While much of the story Wesch presents will be familiar, this 55 minute package is an excellent overview and will no doubt prove an excellent resource for getting students thinking about the place of YouTube in digital culture. Beside which, it features a whole bunch of old favourites which should make it enjoyable viewing for almost everyone. (If a 55 minute YouTube clip is a bit much, Wesch has posted a timeline for the video in his blog, so pick up the story wherever you’re most interested.)
Links for July 26th 2008
Interesting links for July 25th 2008 through July 26th 2008:
- Last Lecture Professor Randy Pausch, 47, Dies [NYTimes Blog] – The sad loss of a truly inspirational educator. If you’ve not listened to Pausch’s Last Lecture, go watch it now.
- GetUp! for what? Issues Driven Democracy in a Transforming Public Sphere By Henk Huijser & Janine Little [Transformations, 16, 2008] – Article exploring the impact of Getup! on Australian politics and democracy, concluding that GetUp! is an exemplar of ‘issues-based’ democracy, where political action is organised on around issues, not via a stable political group.
- The Guts Of Dr Horrible [Warren Ellis] – Warren Ellis sings songs or praise for Joss Whedon’s business model with Dr Horrible. Also: “And if you can get an evil horse in there, that’d be good, too.”
Links for July 23rd 2008
Interesting links for July 23rd 2008:
- WarGames: A Look Back at the Film That Turned Geeks and Phreaks Into Stars [Wired Magazine 16.08] – To celebrate it’s twenty-fifth anniversary, Wired has a good overview of the place of WarGames in videogame and geek history.
- What’s In It For Doogie Howser? [Jeffrey McManus] – McManus takes an educated stab at the economics of Joss Whedon’s Dr Horrible web experiment. (Joss himself notes that these figures aren’t that far off.)
- Xbox 360 users to build and sell own games [The Age] – It’ll be interesting to see how well the coming “Xbox Live Community Games” take off and, most importantly, what terms and conditions Microsoft force game creators to accept in order to sell their work to other Xboxers.
Creative Commons Australia – 3.0 License Drafts and more…
I’ve been meaning to post about all the exciting things Creative Commons Australia have been up to since I returned from the fabulous Building an Australasian Commons national conference (and the linked Creating Value: Between Commerce and Commons international conference), but it’s taken a few weeks so first off I want to draw your attention to the Creative Commons Australia 3.0 draft licenses which have been ported to Australia, bringing CCau up to date with the global 3.0 releases. The licenses are in draft form and open for comment now, so I’d encourage you to take a look and leave comments if any come to mind. This version is more directly based on the CCNZ 3.0 licenses which are considerably more understandable for the layperson (ie non-lawyer, like me). The public comment phase has been going for a while, and for comments to be addressed before the official release they need to be made by 1 August 2008 (yes, I should have mentioned this earlier, but go look now, you’ve still got a couple of weeks).
Equally exciting, a global project spearheaded by Creative Commons Australia has been released: the Creative Commons Case Studies project. One of the biggest challenges when explaining Creative Commons licenses to other people was the lack of examples. Sure, we can all talk about Cory Doctorow’s exemplary book licensing, but there are so many other projects out there using CC licenses to share, publicise and allow others to build upon and remix their work. Well, the Case Studies project makes life a whole lot easier, collating a wealth of examples from across the globe when groups, bands, corporations, universities and more have used CC licenses. Each case study features an overview, how the CC license is used, and the motivations for choosing a CC license; this structure ensures that we understand what CC licenses can achieve and the various philosophies behind their use (from philanthropic to purely promotional). The best part, though, is that the Case Studies project is wiki-based, meaning anyone who wants to can add an example either of their own use, or of someone else’s exemplary work under CC. I’ve got a couple of examples of past work with my students I’ll by adding soon, and I hope if you’ve been using CC licenses either in education or anywhere else, you might want to consider documenting your best examples to share with the world, too.
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