Google Buzz: Economic Surveillance - Buzz Off! The Problem of Online Surveillance and the Need for an Alternative Interne I wrote this text for a longer paper about online surveillance that will be included in the collected volume “The Internet & Surveillance” that I am editing together with Kees Boersma, Anders Albrechtslund, and Marisol Sandoval as part of the EU COST Action “Living in Surveillance Societies” (see The book will be published in 2011. In February 2010, Google introduced a new social networking service called Buzz. Buzz is directly connected to GMail, Google’s webmail-platform. Google’s introduction of Buzz is an attempt to gain importance in the social networking sites-market that has been dominated by Facebook and Twitter. In December 2009, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt commented about online privacy: “If you have something that you do not want anyone to know, maybe you should not be doing it in the first place” ( Google Buzz is part of Google’s empire of economic surveillance. Christian Fuchs ( Fuchs, Christian. 2008.
Technology | Pull down the walled gardens Internet law professor Michael Geist says the walled gardens of social networks should be pulled down. Social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace have become part of the daily routine for millions of internet users. The popularity of these networks, however, has resulted in an unfortunate by-product - the mushrooming number of requests that come from dozens of these sites. While not quite spam, the steady stream of requests for Facebook friends, LinkedIn connections, Dopplr travellers, or Plaxo contact updates, highlights the lack of interoperability between social network sites and significantly undermines their usefulness. The interoperability issue is likely to become more prominent in the months ahead as hundreds of specialty social networking sites, covering virtually every area of interest from dogs to cooking, jostle for new users. In fact, services such as Ning now enable anyone to create their own social network site.
Have the Data Wars Begun Robert Scoble reports that Facebook has kicked him off their site, citing that it appears he was running a script. In their letter, Facebook says, In addition, please confirm with us that in the future you will not scrape or otherwise attempt to obtain in any manner information from our website except as permitted by our Terms of Use, and that you will immediately delete and not use in any manner any such information you may have previously obtained. I’d just read the article in Wired about scraping, and the ways companies were building businesses around taking data from a service and building a product around it. But What About PERSONAL Use of Your Own Data? Here’s where I think Scoble’s efforts were. Robert points us to DataPortability.org, and it’s a pretty interesting bit of info. But where will the lines go? Maybe The Data Wars Have Begun I’m not sure my take on this, but wanted to bring it to you for consideration. What’s your take? ChrisBrogan.com runs on the Genesis Framework
Facebook offers up users as marketing tool | Business | guardian Facebook intends to capitalise on the wealth of information it has about its users by offering its 150 million-strong customer base to corporations as a market research tool. The appearance, later this year, of corporate polls targeted at certain parts of the Facebook audience because of the information they have posted on their pages, is likely to infuriate privacy campaigners. Last week Mark Zuckerberg, the company's 24-year-old founder and chief executive, showed the audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos how the social networking site could be used to poll specific groups of users. He asked users in Palestine and then Israel about peace issues before relaying the results back to the audience within minutes. Giving consumer brands the chance to use such a wide audience to get a quick response to targeted questions would do away with, or at least reduce their reliance on, expensive and time-consuming focus groups.
Arts & Culture: Community Connections: Contributions from Ne The nonpartisan Urban Institute publishes studies, reports, and books on timely topics worthy of public consideration. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders. For most people who participate in arts and culture, the experience involves community connections — with particular people or acquaintances in their communities; through community organizations that are important to them; or at places that are familiar, friendly and accessible. These community connections represent "paths of engagement," and a deeper understanding of those everyday connections can open new opportunities for arts and cultural organizations to build participation. This is a key finding from a survey of residents in five places where programs have been working to broaden, deepen, and diversify cultural participation. Connections to community spaces are stronger than connections to traditional arts and cultural venues.
Using BibTeX Create your BibTex-File Just create a plain text file and apply what has been explained in section BibTeX File Format. Example: @misc{ Nobody06, author = "Nobody Jr", title = "My Article", year = "2006" } Create your LaTeX-File \documentclass[11pt]{article} \usepackage{cite} \begin{document} \title{My Article} \author{Nobody Jr.} Compile Most LaTeX Editors make using BibTeX even easier than it already is. $ latex myarticle $ bibtex myarticle $ latex myarticle $ latex myarticle Using BibTeX with MS Word It is possible to use BibTeX outside of a LaTeX-Environment, namely MS Word using the tool Bibshare. The Impact of Social Networking Tools and Guidelines to Use Them "What's your MySpace?" A law librarian unfamiliar with this phrases isn't just out of touch; she may be unaware of an important phenomenon whose impact is reverberating through the online legal landscape. I can hear you now, "I'm a law librarian not a teenager!" Perhaps so, but it can be argued that you should be using MySpace and other social networking tools. At the very least you should be aware of how your attorneys, clients, and employees are using them. Even the most staid librarian has probably typed a personal name in Google to see what can be found. Some background It's not just that MySpace is a major player. Millennials have grown up with the Internet. MySpace reportedly had over 116 million users as of December 2006. The line between public information and private information is rapidly blurring. Why should the law librarian care about these social networking sites? Potential employees use the Internet to get the inside scoop on a future boss. Ethical and legal concerns
Geo-Names About GeoNames The GeoNames geographical database is available for download free of charge under a creative commons attribution license. It contains over 10 million geographical names and consists of over 8 million unique features whereof 2.8 million populated places and 5.5 million alternate names. All features are categorized into one out of nine feature classes and further subcategorized into one out of 645 feature codes. (more statistics ...). GeoNames is integrating geographical data such as names of places in various languages, elevation, population and others from various sources. Figure : GeoNames Feature Density Map Support GeoNames We accept donations : Press Coverage and Quotations Most important sources nga : National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's (NGA) and the U.S. Features for online users Wiki In order to allow users to improve and correct data browser based update possibilities are available. GeoNames Users more users ... GeoNames Messageboard, Mailinglist and Blog
New Illness: Facebook Depression? - ReadWriteWeb This may sound like a joke, but it’s not: researchers at Stony Brook University in New York have found that too much Facebook usage can leave you more prone to anxiety and depression…that is, if you’re a teenage girl. In a study, a group of 13-year old girls were evaluated by psychology professor Dr. Joanne Davila and her colleague, Lisa Starr. A year later, the researchers followed up with the girls, testing them for depressive symptoms. Feeling Down? The results of their tests, recently published in The Journal of Adolescence, showed that the girls who excessively talked with their friends about their issues had significantly higher levels of depression. The problem with these electronic tools du jour is that they allowed the girls to discuss the same problems over and over again. A Couple of Caveats Turning a critical eye to this research, though, we have to wonder: is it really Facebook and IM that’s getting the girls down? Image Credit: Dawn Ashley