Hey, everybody, it’s World Information Society Day! On 27 March 2006, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution A/RES/60/252 proclaiming 17 May as annual World Information Society Day. According to the ITU, the commemorative day will "help raise awareness of the possibilities that the use of the Internet and other information communications technologies (ICTs) can…
If it’s not neutral, its not the net
Dan Berninger, senior analyst at Tier1 Research, has an interesting take on the Net Neutrality debate. He notes that the Bells are free to limit people’s access to content via discriminatory throttling of traffic from less-privileged providers (i.e. tiny bloggers like me) in favor of large corporate providers willing pay the toll. But the Bells…
My mad moves in Second Life (videos)
People were asking me about what kinds of dancing goes on in Second Life. I uploaded a couple of quicktime videos of me doing some new steps I acquired, including the "butt dance," the "flapper," the "kata" (my favorite) and the "kick dance" (large-ish file.) Footage taken at the "Baby Dolls" club in virtual Amsterdam. …
Dancing with myself… with other people
Lots of the social activity in Second Life takes place at parties, with the usual things that go on at parties — drinking, chatting, people being silly. The thing that usually signals that a party is going on is music and dancing. I recently have been to a number of different Second Life clubs, live…
Beyond Broadcast towards Citizen Empowerment
Returning to my little universe after the Beyond Broadcast conference in Harvard this weekend, my take-away is that we all face the daunting challenge is how to re-invent our institutions in a digital age. For public broadcasting, this means incorporating new technologies to better serve their communities with relevant content and to better invite them…
Activist Tech: from listservs to virtual worlds
I went to a workshop on “Technology and Social Activism” at the Beyond Broadcast conference this weekend. I suppose it was ambitious to expect anything other than a quick fly-over of interesting initiatives in using technology for activism, since this could have easily been the subject of a three-day conference. As one participant Sean Coon…
Virtual Darfur: Civic Engagement or Fake Activism?
There has been an interesting debate going on between Ethan Zuckerman of Global Voices and Hamlet at New World Notes. It’s a discussion centered around the Second Life virtual Darfur Camp built by several activists to highlight the plight of refugees from the conflict in the Sudan. Ethan’s contention is essentially that while it might…
Charles Nesson’s closing remarks at Beyond Broadcast
Charles Nesson, Weld Professor of Law and Co-founder and Faculty Director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School gave some closing remarks to today’s panels at the Beyond Broadcast conference. Here’s some flavor of it: We face large questions. We have the net in our hands. We are all capable…
Mark Cooper: “You can’t speak truth to power on Power’s nickel”
Mark Cooper, Consumer Federation of America, spoke this afternoon at Beyond Broadcast about creating new business models to support social media. He noted that everyone is presenting a business model based on charity or advertising. Mark contended that social media has to be based on civil society. Distribution is not the problem, attention is the…
Pathfinder Linden speaking on Second Life
Notes from presentation on High Order Bit: Second Life and Collaborative Drama at Beyond Broadcast conference. John Lester (aka Pathfinder Linden) of Linden Lab gave an overview of Second Life as a virtual world space. He noted that the fictional analogs to SL are Neal Stephenson’s metaverse and Vernor Vinge’s otherverse from “True Names.” He…