Syndicated feeds

Communities Dominate Brands

  • A philosphers guide to Creative Destruction - Taking the creative destruction out of capitalism is like taking the crucifixion out of Christianity Seems such an appropriate comment in reference to my post Faust Banking and Trust You took home almost half a billion dollars, whilst your company...
  • Lisbon calling - On Wednesday I was asked to give a keynote at the Portuguese Annual Advertising Conference. Their theme this year was Consumer Engagement. I had great fun, and met some great people. And so thank you for everyone that came along...
  • A proud day for all Finns, Martti Ahtisaari wins Nobel Peace Prize - This posting has really nothing to do with our main themes of Communities Dominate. But as Alan is as close as it is possible to being a Finn, I'm sure he joins me in feeling the pride that all Finns...

Henry Jenkins

Smart Mobs

  • Roland’s Sunday Smart Trends #235 - D-Day for RFID-based transit card systems Want to ride the subway for free without having to jump the turnstiles? Well, as of Monday, you’ll be able to do that by making a fake transit card. A scientific paper detailing the security flaws in the Mifare Classic wireless smart card chip used in transit systems around the [...]
  • Can the Internet have a heart? - I attended a conference on “Online Giving Marketplaces” at Stanford University this past week, which was a great gathering of online donation, volunteer, and social matchmaking sites like Kiva.org and GlobalGiving. The kind of organizations that are doing in the social service sector what sites like Prosper.com are doing in the commercial peer to peer [...]
  • Freedom not Fear - It’s quite a weekend ‘Freedom Not Fear 2008′ calls 11. October 2008 for an international action day in as many European capital cities as possible and elsewhere around the world to demonstrate against what they label as ‘the total retention of telecommunication data and other instruments of surveillance‘. Also this collectiv action was spotted [...]

Ideal Government

Centre for Democracy and Technology

  • NSA Spying on Americans in the Green Zone - The National Security Agency is intercepting and retaining communications of innocent Americans in Iraq's so-called "Green Zone"; agency workers even pass around the most titillating conversations, according to explosive allegations made by two NSA whistleblowers in an ABC News segment airing tonight. According to the report, collection of telephone conversations U.S. soldiers and aid workers in Iraq had with their families in the U.S. continued even after NSA analysts knew that the telephone numbers on which they were eavesdropping belonged to Americans who had no ties to terrorism. The report calls into question assurances the NSA and Justice Department repeatedly gave Congress that internally enforced "minimization procedures" are adequate to protect the private conversations of Americans.
  • Justice Department Issues New FBI Guidelines - The Justice Department today issued new guidelines for FBI investigations, weakening the standards that have long been in place to ensure proper targeting of law enforcement and national security investigations. The guidelines represent another step in the creation of a domestic intelligence system in the United States. They permit FBI agents to go undercover to collect information, send in informants and tail citizens, all without suspicion of wrongdoing or connections to a foreign power.
  • CDT Lays Out Rule of Law Agenda for Next President and Congress - In testimony submitted to the Senate Constitution Subcommittee today, CDT called for the next President and Congress to impose checks and balances on governmental national security measures. The testimony, submitted in connection with hearings exploring proposals to restore the rule of law, calls for an update of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and for measures to ensure that intelligence collection complies with FISA and is subject to judicial oversight.

Online Journalism Blog

  • Wiki journalism comes to the UK -   Trinity Mirror have launched a ‘wiki for the North East’ as a result of an internal contest to bring out innovative ideas. Web developer Louise Midgley, from North-East division ncjmedia, received a cash prize and will receive future share of any profits from her idea: wikinortheast.co.uk “an online archive covering all aspects of the North-East [...]
  • How do you react to the threat of a substitute technology? Jettison the fluff. -   Philip Meyer, author of the Vanishing Newspaper, is at it again, making a compelling point for the role of investigative journalism and original research in newspapers’ survival: One of the rules of thumb for coping with substitute technology is to narrow your focus to the area that is the least vulnerable to substitution. Michael Porter included [...]
  • Do comments affect reader perception of bias? - Alfred Hermida reports on research by Michele Jones, a Phd student at the University of North Carolina, on the impact that comments had on credibility and reader perception of bias in the news: What she found was that readers who have strong opinions will perceive bias against their side in a news story. This is called the [...]

Lawrence Lessig Blog

  • The scary context of this election; the decent efforts to calm -

    From CBS:

    Some of the questioners said they were scared of an Obama presidency, and one woman said she couldn’t trust Obama because “he’s an Arab.”

    McCain shook his head. “No ma’am, he’s a decent family man, a citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and that’s what this campaign is all about.”

  • Open Debates: Focusing the Call -

    Now that both campaigns have signed on, we've focused the call for open debates to try to get some real progress. The new letter is below. Meanwhile, please sign up below to support the call for "open debates." (The original letter to McCain and Obama is here.)


    Join The Open Debate Movement - Sign Up Here















  • good news from Japan -

    Ikeda-san reports two bits of very good news from Japan:

    On Sep. 18, the Council of Culture gave up the extension of copyright from 50 years after the death of the author to 70 years. Two years ago, the Council proposed the extension to follow the "global standard", but many people on the Web objected against the legislation.

    Last week the Council of Information and Communication decided to scrap the B-CAS, the notorious conditional access system for free broadcasting. Due to this change, "Dubbing Ten", which forbids copying the programs of digital broadcasting more than ten times, would be abolished, because it is enforced by the encryption of B-CAS.

    Read more on his blog.

Creative Class Group

Buzz Machine

  • New business models for news - Here’s a first draft - sure to change - of a presentation I plan to give to open and set the table for the New Business Models for News Summit at CUNY. I won’t go through it lline-by-line that morning; I added more detail since I’m posting it here for your comment, correction, questions, arguments. [...]
  • Winners and losers in crisis coverage - NPR’s Planet Money podcast and blog is just great, almost as good as Adam Davidson’s and Alex Blumberg’s shows explaining our mess on This American Life. They’re now doing it daily. Highly recommended. (This American Life has another episode with more on the crisis but I can’t listen to it on my iPod until [...]
  • We’re history - The Museum of Financial History is selling bear stickpins for $60. I think I’ll buy one and just keep sticking myself with it. In more flush times (a week ago) I might have been tempted by this money doily for $800 but soon, money will come on rolls.

DavosNewbies

  • On November 5th - British elections are shorter, less money-driven and generally less dramatic than the Wagnerian opera of a US presidential election. But there is one aspect to a British general election that provides an electric theatrical moment. On the Friday morning after an election (British elections are held on Thursdays), the new prime minister and his/her family [...]
  • All over bar the shouting - I know there are four weeks to election day, but that debate really nailed it. I’m feeling very happy about my May prediction of a landslide.
  • The global election - Plenty of people have mentioned this wonderful map from The Economist. I know the US state map is going to look a bit different on November 4, but the way things are trending, it might not be that different.

Here comes Everybody

Wireless Watch

  • Politicians Caught Watching Mobile TV - Economic and fiscal policy minister Kaoru Yosano and Finance Minister Shoichi Nakagawa have apologized to Diet leaders for watching TV on a cell phone during a House of Councilors plenary session. The incident took place on Oct. 3 when Shozaburo Jimi, vice leader of the tiny Kokumin Shinto (People's New Party), was asking questions. The Upper House has banned cell phones from its floor since 1995.
  • CEATEC 2008 - A Peek at the Future - We spent most of last week out at Makuhari Messe running around the CEATEC tradeshow with clients visiting from overseas. While we were considerably distracted, catering to their specific focus, it was certainly interesting - as always - to get a glimpse of the mobile future. Of course while most of the usual players were on-site with their wares and the media was swarming to get the inside skinny, btw: plenty of great material from Tech-On Here, two of the most obvious trends we noticed was a definite move towards green technology along with next-generation networks and handsets.
    This concept model - the Voyage - from KDDI was a prefect example of innovation aimed at solving one of the major challenges, never enough juice, increasingly faced by mobile users. There was not much in the way of details on that unit when we asked at the time however based on past experience with AU Designs it would be reasonable to expect something like this hitting the street a few years from now and we'll be digging for more intell. on this one! Meanwhile, some of the other concepts on display especially the Ply device with it's built-in projector and their Trio design - hint: watch the video demos launched via 'prototype' icons on lower nav. bar - were also attracting the crowds.
  • DoCoMo Does JV for Custom Mobile Video - DoCoMo has announced that it will form a joint venture company with Avex Entertainment Inc. for the production and on-demand distribution of video content packaged for the mobile phone environment. Unlike most mobile-content companies that distribute video works which were originally developed for movie theaters and DVD systems, the new company will produce and distribute content developed specifically for the small screens of mobile phones, giving special consideration to the challenges of delivering video content on a mobile device.

Logic+Emotion

  • Unconventional Marketing - (click image for larger version) As an individual, this blog is one of the most effective manifestations of "marketing" I could have produced for myself. I have a respectable audience that comes back as opposed to visiting it once, never...
  • 5 Things I learned From Dave Gray - I just wrapped up 2 days at the IDEA conference in Chicago and one of the highlights for me was getting to spend some time with Dave Gray, founder of XPLANE and a wonderful advocate for visual thinking. One thing...
  • People, Places + Events - Just a quick update on some events I'll be a part of over the next few weeks: IDEA 2008 I'll be kicking off the IDEA conference next Tuesday morning and joining a great roster including Dave Gray, Jesse James Garret,...

Master News Media

  • A 3D Curve Sketching System For Tablets - dominique_cimafranca writes "The Dynamic Graphics Project of the University of Toronto has released a pretty nifty 3D curve sketching system. Apart from the large drawing area, the tablet software looks very intuitive to artists. From the site: ...
  • 3D Printing On Demand - Iddo Genuth writes "The Netherlands based company Shapeways is beta testing a new service allowing people to print three-dimensional models. Customers can upload designs or use a creation tool hosted at the Shapeways website, then order a printed ...
  • MashLogic: Take Back The Web (By Getting Awesome Links) - Bessemer Venture Partners is launching an incubated startup called MashLogic into private beta today, with the audacious promise of helping people "take back the web." They say (and they're not alone ) that the web today is driven by ...

Creative Commons

  • Netwaves Bytes: Electro?1 - Netwaves Records, a netlabel that focuses on genre-oriented compilations, just released their first album, Electro 1. Focusing on music that ranges from “electro-pop” to “electro-clash”, Electro 1 has been released under a CC BY-NC-SA license. this means it can be freely shared and remixed as long as proper attribution is given, the resulting and original [...]
  • flickrleech - flickrleech is a great tool for those looking to search a large number of flickr photos at once - by utilizing Flickr’s API, flickrleech is able to display 200 images per page rather than the standard 10. As pointed out by Alvin Trusty, it simply “makes scanning for a picture much quicker.”  While flickrleech has been [...]
  • Two MIT OCW Courses Reach Million Visit?Milestone - A long-standing provider of open courseware, MITOpenCourseWare reached a million visit milestone yesterday for two of their online courses: 8.01 Physics I: Classical Mechanics and 18.06 Linear Algebra. The courses are two of MIT’s most popular to date, taught by renowned professors Walter Lewin and Gilbert Strang. From MIT’s media coverage on Lewin: “Professor Lewin is an [...]

Euan Semple