NPR.org profiles the hosts of Snopes.com in “Mom-And-Pop Site Busts The Web’s Biggest Myths”.
Tag Archives: internet
“So what will it mean to bear witness in the future?”
They say that history is written by the victors. But now, before the victors win, there is a chance to scream out with a text message that will not vanish. What would we know about what passed between Turks and Armenians, between Germans and Jews, if every one of them had had the chance, before the darkness, to declare for all time: “I was here, and this is what happened to me”?
– Anand Giridharadas in the NYTimes in “Africa’s Gift to Silicon Valley: How to Track a Crisis”.
Ushahidi sounds inspiring.
The project is on Github.
Using your Google Spreadsheet as your Twitter Client?
Vivek Haldar explains the significance of Google Apps Script.
Wow!
Educational video on ‘Quants’ and their role in the financial crisis
YouTube: “Quants: The Alchemists of Wall Street (Marije Meerman, VPRO Backlight 2010)”
Related: “The Modelers’ Hippocratic Oath”: I will never sacrifice reality for elegance without explaining why I have done so….I understand that my work may have enormous effects on society and the economy, many of them beyond my comprehension.
Don’t look now but..
Google is still censoring in China.
Seth Finkelstein’s Pew Research answers
Seth Finkelstein has posted his answers to a Pew survey on the future of the Internet, and Google making us stupid (or not) in a thought provoking yet grounded (which is rare on the Web – admit it!) post.
Seth – if you’re reading – I miss your blogging.
10 years of weblogging
I’ve been trying to write a riff on Garret’s 10 year anniversary piece on blogging for a while now. But every time I start, it ends up way too long. So just read his piece and come back.
Okay, did that? Because as is old fashioned blogger custom I expect you to derive context for my following thoughts from my links (did you read Garret’s piece yet?) and from what I usually talk about here.
The march towards a plethora of walled-garden-social-networks has been a drag. And maybe it will be standards that will provide us a way out of the counter-personal-ownership of data mess we’re in right now. I’m hopeful. And I hope to do some hacking along the way to try and put together some duck tape of my own.
But the important thing is here we are.
Flashback to 1999. Conservatives were accusing Clinton of ‘wagging the dog’.
We were about to intervene in the Kosovo conflict. I felt our intervention in the Kosovo crisis was misguided for different reasons than those on the RIght. I felt that bombs couldn’t be the answer.
Yes, I was (and am counting who you talk to) a peace loving hippie.
I wanted to share my view, but I realized my voice held little weight, so I collected stories that supported my opinion and added them to a headline feed.
I ran that feed of headlines into My.Netscape and My.Userland so that people who might be interested could follow.
The feed reached people around the world even though I believe there were only a few hundred subscribers. People from Russia and Kosovo sent me emails to comment.
Let me repeat that again “People from Russia and Kosovo sent me emails to comment”.
I had made some kind of connection, with people from different countries, talking about war.
Me.
All it required was a text editor, searching for interesting stories that reflected my view, and manually writing out the RSS XML and storing it on a Web host. I registered the feed with My.Netscape and My.Userland and away it went.
Today, any of us can open an account at WordPress.com or TypePad and do that and so much more. Everything we post to Facebook, Twitter, our blogs, our forums generates RSS and Atom. These common communication formats helped lay down what is becoming the foundation of the real-time web. Where any of us have the potential to reach anyone else, anywhere.
This very post, when it goes live, will appear in Twitter, and Facebook, and even more amazingly, Google and Yahoo! in the order hours if not minutes.
What Tim O’Reilly had called the “Architecture of Participation” and Dave Winer called the “Read-Write Web”, way back when, continues to evolve and grow.
There is still much to do for it to reach its full promise. It has never lived up to its potential to enable those who need to be heard to be heard. Human nature is human nature after all and we tend to tune into voices that resemble our own. But the potential still is there to make a connection across our own biases and our own filters. The potential and capability.
For all the negatives that still abound, all the opportunities left to explore, the challenges left to solve, blogging has helped me connect with Garret, and many other terrific online travelers across the world and here in my home town. People who I consider teachers. Thought provokers. Inspiration. Friends.
You know who you are.
Thank you to all the folks who laid down this architecture for all of us to participate, twist, turn, innovate on, and completely take for granted. And thank you to all those who have made that connection with me and enlarged my heart, my mind and world.
Two from the Boston Globe on the Need for Better Filters
Boston Globe: Joe Keohane: Imaginary fiends: In 2009, crime went down. In fact it’s been going down for a decade. But more and more Americans believe it’s getting worse. Why do we refuse to believe the good news?
Boston Globe: Easy = True: How ‘cognitive fluency’ shapes what we believe, how we invest, and who will become a supermodel
Shirky confirms Shenk
Clay Shirky, in a recent talk at Web 2.0 Expo New York, challenged us to stop talking about information overload as an excuse, recognize it as a fact (one that’s existed for a long time and will not diminish in the future), and to work on building better filters.
Watch Clay Shirky on information overload versus filter failure:
Titles like the Boing Boing one are kinda unfortunate because they frame Shirky’s view to be one that would be in opposition to lets say, David Shenk’s from his book “Data Smog”.
Far from it.
David Shenk attempted to identify the information landscape we are living in now way back in 1997. In a 2007 piece in Slate he took a critical look back.
As with any look forward, the book wildly missed the mark with some of its more grim predictions, but in many ways still has much to offer and think about.
In particular, towards the end of the book Shenk proposed a personal call to action for building better filters (learning to be our own for example) and to be better information producing citizens (being our own editors). Big foreshadowing of Shirky’s talk there.
Most reviews of the book focussed on Shenk’s definition of the problem and pooh-poohed his suggestions. So here we are, many years down the line, and most of the focus is *still* grousing about ‘information overload’.
Clay Shirky’s point is its high time to stop doing that and get busy building the tools, protocols, customs and businesses that will help us not only deal with it, but thrive from it.
A few recent thought provokers on living the linked life
Bruce Schneier: Privacy in the Age of Persistence: We must, all of us together, start discussing this major societal change and what it means. And we must work out a way to create a future that our grandchildren will be proud of.
Nick Bilton: NYTimes: ‘Controlled Serendipity’ Liberates the Web: We are no longer just consumers of content, we have become curators of it too.
Anil Dash: CNN: Don’t let Twitter, Facebook, Google be the only game in town: There’s no reason that organizations or individuals who want to use the Web to relay critical information have to rely on Twitter or Facebook or Google or any other giant of the technology industry in the first place. We’ve just forgotten a bit about how the Internet was supposed to work.
Roger Ebert who is living with what his fight against thyroid cancer has dealt him and how the Internet helps him connect: Nil by mouth: So that’s what’s sad about not eating. The loss of dining, not the loss of food. It may be personal, but for, unless I’m alone, it doesn’t involve dinner if it doesn’t involve talking. The food and drink I can do without easily. The jokes, gossip, laughs, arguments and shared memories I miss. Sentences beginning with the words, “Remember that time?” I ran in crowds where anyone was likely to break out in a poetry recitation at any time. Me too. But not me anymore. So yes, it’s sad. Maybe that’s why I enjoy this blog. You don’t realize it, but we’re at dinner right now. (bonus link read his piece on making out.