Today, we at the Berkman Center have released a new report on the changes in the news media landscape. For several years, we have been puzzling over the relationship between online and legacy media, dating back to the first BloggerCons; Dave Winer’s setting up a blog server on the Harvard campus; the first series of podcasts; our … Read more
I’m at a wonderful summer program hosted by the Kauffman Foundation on Law, Innovation, and Growth. They’ve convened a truly interdisciplinary crowd interested in how law can affect rates of innovation and growth. Many, though by no means all, of the conversations are about innovation in technology-related fields. All the papers presented will be posted … Read more
For the past few years, Urs Gasser and I have been working on a book project together about a phenomenon that we have become obsessed with: how some young people, including our kids, use technologies in ways that are different that what we’ve seen before. The book is called Born Digital (Amazon seems not yet … Read more
There’s enormous promise in the Open Library project, which we’re hearing about today at Berkman’s lunch event from Aaron Swartz. The idea is wonderfully simple: to create a single web page per book. That web page can aggregate lots of data and metadata about each book. In turn, the database can be structured to indicate … Read more
I am curious to see how long Facebook leaves this app up after this WSJ article. Scrabulous, a Facebook app made by third-party developers, is an obvious knock-off of Scrabble. One might reasonably raise copyright and trademark issues related to it (perhaps the Scrabulous developers could withstand these complaints; query as to Facebook’s willingness to … Read more
Total blue sky, inspired in part by a wonderful gathering pulled together by Jake Shapiro at PRX and Vince Stehle at the Surdna Foundation, picking up on thoughts from various contexts: If I could start (or otherwise will into existence) any non-profit right now, what it would do is to develop and apply code for … Read more
On the long flight from Boston to Shanghai, I read R. Keith Sawyer‘s recent book, Group Genius. It’s definitely a worthwhile read for anyone who cares about how innovation really works as a functional matter; anyone who runs any kind of an organization; and anyone who ever struggles with trying to do something creative, whether … Read more
Charlie Frentz, Harvard College student and Berkman intern as well, recapped his summer with BzzAgent with his “first ever blog post.” Read also the great comments his post generated. Charlie’s clearly a natural born blogger, as well as entrepreneur. I read his inaugural post from Shanghai, a city buzzing with entrepreneurship, where Charlie would no … Read more
My good friends at StyleFeeder (in which I have equity; see my disclosures) have today released their Personal Shopper. As seen on Mashable. It’s very cool; I love it; it is social shopping brought to IM. Imagine shopping with your friends in real-space, only together online. And, in related news, big competitor Kaboodle just got … Read more
It’s extraordinary to me that, several years into the blogging-and-RSS phenomenon, we still have the issue of a lack of clarity around the permissible re-use of user-generated content, as reported by CNET’s Elinor Mills (“Please don’t steal this Web content“). Fair use is part of the answer; Creative Commons licenses are another part of the … Read more