Dr. Danah Boyd gave a keynote at the WWW Conference in Raleigh, North Carolina.
She spoke about methodological and ethical issues involved in the study of Big Data, focusing heavily on privacy issues in light of public data. The first third focuses on four important arguments:
Bigger Data are Not Always Better Data;
Not All Data are Created Equal;
What and Why are Different Questions;
Be Careful of Your Interpretations.
She argues : “Just because data is accessible doesn’t mean that using it is ethical,” providing a series of different ways of looking at how people think about privacy and publicity. I conclude by critiquing Facebook’s approach to privacy, from News Feed to Social Plugins/Instant Personalizer.
MusikPitch is a new service which brings together songwriters and consumers together.
Finding that perfect track has never been easier. At MusikPitch, talented songwriters from all backgrounds compete for your specific project. To begin, launch a music contest, describe the music you are looking for, and set your price. Soon you’ll start receiving complete tracks from artists around the world. And there are no worries with our 100% money back guarantee.
community-roundtable.com – a peer network for community managers and social media practitioners has come up with this great community maturity model . According to the post this model does two things. First, it defines the eight competencies we think are required for successful community management. Second, it attempts – at a high level – to articulate how these competencies progress from organizations without community management that are still highly hierarchical to those that have embraced a networked business ecosystem approach to their entire organization. Read the full intro post here.
A panel of journalists at Logan Symposium by Berkley Graduate School of Journalism discusses the benefits of collaboration in investigative journalism. They discuss their experiences collaborating with other news organizations, and explore what makes a partnership work, and what can potentially kill a working relationship.
“Crowdsourcing is a neologistic compound of "crowd" and "outsourcing" for the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor to a large group of people or community (a crowd), through an open call.For example, the public may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task, refine or carry out the steps of an algorithm (, or help capture, systematize or analyze large amounts of data.The term has become popular with businesses, authors, and journalists as shorthand for the trend of leveraging the mass collaboration enabled by Web 2.0 technologies to achieve business goals. However, both the term and its underlying business models have attracted controversy and criticisms” - Wikipedia
SmartMob reports : A study from the International Center for Media & the Public Agenda (ICMPA) at the University of Maryland, concludes that most college students are not just unwilling, but functionally unable to be without their media links to the world.
Researchers asked 200 students at the College Park campus to give up all media for 24 hours. After their 24 hours of abstinence, the students were then asked to blog on private class websites about their experiences: to report their successes and admit to any failures. The 200 students wrote more than 110,000 words: in aggregate, about the same number of words as a 400-page novel. “Texting and IM-ing my friends gives me a constant feeling of comfort,” wrote one student. “When I did not have those two luxuries, I felt quite alone and secluded from my life. Although I go to a school with thousands of students, the fact that I was not able to communicate with anyone via technology was almost unbearable.”
Pew Internet informs: Director Lee Rainie discusses the Pew Internet Project’s latest research findings on people’s use of social media (social networking sites, blogs, Twitter, YouTube, and, yes, even email) and how technology has affected some of the ways people learn, make decisions, and seek and offer social support to others.
Freedom fone is an interactive voice response system that allows callers to access audio information on their mobile phones. It is aimed at organizations who want to set interactive up audio news services for their audiences. Freedom Fone is now out in version 1.5 and available for public testing and use.
About Orbot:
Tor is available for Android by installing our package named Orbot.
Orbot is an application that allows mobile phone users to access the web, instant messaging and email without being monitored or blocked by their mobile internet service provider. Orbot brings the features and functionality of Tor to the Android mobile operating system.
Orbot contains Tor, libevent and privoxy. Orbot provides a local HTTP proxy and the standard SOCKS4A/SOCKS5 proxy interfaces into the Tor network. Orbot has the ability to transparently torify all of the TCP traffic on your Android device when it has the correct permissions.
Ericsson’s 2020 Shaping Ideas are series of great video talks by some great thinkers on their views on the drivers of the future and how connectivity is changing the world.
From the site: Broadband connectivity and mobility are changing the way we live, the way we work, the way markets function, and the way societies operate. At Ericsson, we need to collaborate and get inspiration from people outside our business in order to adapt to these changes – people that take a stand, and that want to share and work together.
In 2020 – Shaping Ideas, we ask 20 thinkers to share their view on the drivers of the future and how connectivity is changing the world.
They describe a future where a growing population faces never before seen challenges and opportunities; where digital natives will shape their lives and the enterprises they work for, and where technology could create a global golden age.
We believe it is important to share our knowledge about the future. If we do, the future might not be a place we are going to, but a place we create.
Dr. Danah Boyd gave a keynote at the WWW Conference in Raleigh, North Carolina. 
