Wikipeding on Facebook Chat

I’m sure many of you where taken aback by Facebook’s newest feature, Chat. It will be interesting to see how successful this is. I for one think the way Facebook releases new features is a bit curious. They release the new feature and then a few days later put a post in the mini-feed about. I think they would have less backlash against change if they gave more of a warning about their features before they released them.

But regardless I thought Wikipedia should know about this new feature. So I did this and this. It will be interesting to see how the community takes my changes. I might add footnotes later, but I couldn’t find any news articles on Facebook chat yet.

I also made a change on the blogger, Andrew Sullivan’s page.

Reading responses for 4/8

The bulk of Benkler’s book for this week focuses on how network culture impacts our political processes. What issues and arguments seem particularly relevant to you, especially in light of the ongoing campaign that many people are referring to as the “YouTube Election”? Do you see evidence of increased autonomy and freedom emerging around politics in the networked ecology?

Government Search Engine Blocks the Term “Abortion”

Hi everyone,

Here’s a Wired.com article that I think has some relevance in relation to Benkler’s work and larger issues running through the course. A health service search engine (known as Popline) run by USAID, the office of the federal government in charge of health care aid for developing nations, brings up no results after a search for “abortion” – despite the fact that the database contains several journal articles and health literature with the word “abortion” right in the title. Popline is hosted at Johns Hopkins University, and a representative there reported that because the project is federally funded, “abortion” is one of the so-called “stop words.”

Even setting aside the undoubtedly contentious issue of abortion, this seems to raise several questions. The search engine’s policy of disabling searches for “abortion” does not simply block articles touting the beneficial if ethically controversial effects of increased access to abortion in developing nations; it blocks any and all information on abortion, period. This attitude toward encouraging a specific platform of the Bush administration seems quite similar to the attitude of Hollywood and the music industry with regard to content ownership and copyright. It’s a blanket restriction of information, regardless of the actual effects of that information. Some of the literature in the database might show the detrimental effects of abortion in the same developing nations. In any case, the underlying assumption on the part of the top-down industrial-information model at work here seems to be that information about abortion, just like information about birth control (which the engine does allow searching for) will lead to only one result: the unacceptable (according to social conservatives) increase in abortions and sex before marriage.

Do you guys know of any other examples of government-imposed censorship on the internet?

South Park

Did anyone see last night’s episode of South Park? It was amazing. It talks a lot about digital media and parodies many of the “viral videos” we have all seen on youtube. While the episode is hilarious on the whole, the last few minutes are the big pay off as it relates to our class.
http://www.southparkstudios.com/
click on the episode called “canada on strike” which is currently on the right side of the homepage, but it can also be found by going to “full episodes”-> “season 12”-> “Canada on strike”

Here is the clip of the last 30 seconds.
http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/165199/

It should be noted that the South Park creators are NOT members of the Writers Guild of America, and continued to produce new episodes throughout the writers strike. Also, the episode is dripping with irony as every South Park episode is available free online, distributed by the show’s creators.

Responses for 4/3

Sorry for the delay in posting this…

Benkler offers a new vision of economics to account for the internet era. What strikes you as particularly compelling about this approach to economic and social relations? Are there specific examples from your own experience that speak to the redefinition of markets, production, and consumption that he lays out?

Not Social Networking… but Social Gaming

I came across this article about a new multiplayer online game that involves the territorial conquest of colleges and universities. Students make teams and recruit people in the real world, in order to play in the virtual world. It is a new way for networking between students around campus and is apparently going to grow into a huge phenomenon around every campus… maybe even Middlebury.

A quote from the article about social networking:
“No one is claiming this is the next Facebook, the social networking phenomenon that began on the Harvard campus. But GoCrossCampus represents the new kind of online games that unite the participants of real-world communities in a common online cause.”

Here’s the link to the article:

“Storming the Campuses”

Meta Media

Hey Guys, I was directed to this online and I watched nearly every single one of them. They are really cool “text” pieces that transcribe the dialogue from famous movies. It’s really interesting to see how they are each put together. Check a few out. You’ll notice it starts with the dialogue Robyn and I used for our Pulp Fiction remix. Enjoy. I’ll embed the first one, but click the link to see a whole bunch more.
[youtube syf8olcM0z4&eurl=http://www.alwayswatching.org/features/great-scenes-television-and-film-told-using-only-typography]

http://www.alwayswatching.org/features/great-scenes-television-and-film-told-using-only-typography

AI

Hey guys,

I posted this link on one of my comments to the readings, but didn’t think anyone would find it there, so I’m reposting it here out in the open. It’s a really interesting online simulation experience, rather than a game. Check it out:

A.L.I.C.E.

Oh, and by the way, feel free to write or ask her anything, because you get really funny and/or interesting responses that will either make sense, or will seem  a little ridiculous…

Speaking of Interface…

In light of our interface discussion\testing, I thought I’d post this clip from Apple’s press conference a few weeks ago unveiling the iPhone SDK (software development kit). They demonstrate simple game (they wrote it in two weeks) that takes advantage of the iPhone’s graphics capabilities, touch screen, and Wiimote-esque accelerometer…

[youtube jn83wizEMAw]

Predator Rap

I stumbled across this a week ago and I think it’s a nice example of combining “found” media with artistic creativity. It goes beyond combining multiple forms of media—it combines the creative (the rap) with the lines from the film. I’m very impressed by this, and if I had more time I would like to attempt this with another movie. (I know the clip is a little long, but you’ll get the gist of it after about a minute or two so don’t fee like you need to watch the entire clip).
[youtube ovi-djkUgd0]