Category — Internet Research

http://www.amazon.com/International-Handbook-Internet-Research-Hunsinger/dp/1402097883/

512 pages, less than 1 dollar per page.

The Universe of Discourse : The Lake Wobegon Distribution is a tight little explanation using baseball that also maps well into the way i think of most of the blather about power laws and related seeming web 2.0 statistic, which is that if you really analyze what is going, you find out that really it isn’t quite what you think. My critique of the power law people is to generally say, if you arrive at a power law, you are likely asking the wrong questions and that if you asked the same question in a different population, you’d likely find the same thing which would in the end, show your power law as insignificant. This article makes a different argument about how most people think normal curves are normal, but it shows pretty clearly that most places we’d expect a normal curve we find abnormal variation especially outside of the center bell.

Since Tuesday I have been in Milwaukee visiting SOIS and CIPR as part of my Information Ethics fellowship. I attended a discussion about a possible future conference on translating intercultural information ethics across the situated understandings that term implies across a plurality of contexts. That seems like a great project, I’m happy to help out there. For the rest of the time, I attended the conference Thinking Critically:Alternative Perspectives and Methods in Information Studies. It was an excellent conference and I met many interesting people in the field of information studies, most of which are leaders in their field or soon to be so. I also attended the 2008 Samore Lecture: “Interpreting the Digital Human,” by Professor Rafael Capurro, at the Allis Museum, which provided an excellent end to the conference. I had excellent dinners and conversation with colleagues that I’ve not seen for some time, and with new friends and colleagues. I suspect that I’ll be seeing many of these people again over the years. It was a great experience all around, though I did not get enough writing done on a promised paper that is overdue. It really looks like the CIPR and SOIS are up to some great things and I’m happy to be affiliated with them as an Ethics Fellow for another year.
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Unrelated to the conference and my fellowship, I had the opportunity to meet and talk with Thomas Malaby who has a book forthcoming on Linden Lab. We spoke at length about problems of research, computer game studies, his work with Linden Lab and his related work. It was a fantastic conversation and I hope to have similar conversations in relation to my work in Second Life in the future.
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All in all the problem of alternative methods and the communities that support them is an important issue in my career. I have been affiliated with many groups on this topic from Phil Graham’s old NewMediaResearch, heterodox economics, and the political science perestroika movement list, to my current work with InterpretationandMethods and Theory, Policy and Society, not to mention my work with the Association of Internet Researchers. The work that I perform is primarily interpretive methods, from ethnography to textual analysis, though I’ve been known to use quantitative when it adds to the argument. The key to me though is to come to notion of understanding and being able to communicate what actually leads to certain understandings of the world. It concerns me that there are so many people with so many of the same issues across so many different disciplines and there is so little conversations amongst them. Though there are broad interdisciplinary efforts and efforts toward inclusion.

Report: The future of scholarly communication: building the infastructure for cyberscholarship:
The future of scholarly communication: building the infastructure for cyberscholarship link

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From craigbellamy.net

WSIS Golden Book Publication:
More than 375 submissions were made to the Golden Book by governments, international organizations, NGOs, companies and individuals, describing their work towards promoting ICT activities. ITU estimates that the activities announced during the Tunis Phase to promote WSIS goals represented a total value of at least € 3.2 billion (US$ 3.9 billion). Governments committed to implement projects for some € 1.9 billion, representing nearly two-thirds of estimated total value of all commitments, while international organizations pledged to carry out activities for around half that amount, i.e. 0.83 billion Euros. Business entities announced plans to realize projects for around 0.35 billion Euros and civil society projects amount to least 0.13 billion Euros.

http://www.itu.int/wsis/goldenbook/Publication/GB-final.pdf

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a handy reference.

Public access group challenges Smithsonian over copyrights:
Grabbing pictures of iconic Smithsonian Institution artifacts just got a whole lot easier.

Before, if you wanted to get a picture of the Wright Brothers’ plane, you could go to the Smithsonian Images Web site and pay for a print or high-resolution image after clicking through several warnings about copyrights and other restrictions — and only if you were a student, teacher or someone pledging not to use it to make money.

Now, you can just go to the free photo-sharing Web site flickr.com.

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Carl Malamud and his group are doing some good work on freeing and sustaining the freedom of access to public resources

Spy Chips:
This book will make you look at every store-bought item you own or debate owning with a curious skepticism that — after reading the book — won’t seem too unwarranted. It was published two years ago (a cheap paperback came out in the fall), but if you’ve yet to explore the fascinating, potentially paranoia-inducing, world of RFID and you want the cautionary, consumer-advocate perspective about the Radio Frequency Identification tracking being proposed — and used! — by certain companies (for instance, Gillette, Procter & Gamble and Wal-Mart)

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this could be an interesting book.

“New” Internet to Be Built by Original Designer:
Arguably, BBN has more Internet experience than any other company. In 1969 it led the effort to connect computers at four universities, a linkage that became ARPAnet, the original backbone of today’s Internet.
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yes.. and then bill joy fixed it so it actually worked fairly quickly.

Articles:
The Best and Worst Internet Laws
Date: Apr 20, 2007 By Eric Goldman.
Over the past dozen years, the lure of regulating the Internet has proven irresistible to legislators. For example, in the 109th Congress, almost 1,100 introduced bills referenced the word Internet, and hundreds of Internet laws have been passed by Congress and the states. This legislative activity is now large enough to identify some winners and losers. In the spirit of good fun, Eric Goldman offers an opinionated list of personal votes for the best and worst Internet statutes in the United States.

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this is a good read… it covers in a U.S.-centric way some of the most important internet issues of our day.

CRACKED.com – From N00B to Nerd: The 4 Stages of Life on the Internet:
Internet Old Age is different, as we’re capable of remembering things that actually used to be better: like the glory days of Napster, where it went around teaching people how fun and easy it could be to steal things in a relatively anonymous, consequence-free environment. This epic revelation led directly to the ongoing titanic Caged Deathmatch Litigation Battle Extreme, “the RIAA vs Sanity and Progress.”

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ahhh old age…..