A Green party candidate in Vancouver resigned after his favorite quote on his facebook profile was revealed. It read:
“If rape is inevitable, lie back and enjoy it!”
Another reminder that nothing you put on the Internet is private. Can you plead the fifth in Canada?
Ron Paul’s reputation in social media networks is bent to a different purpose today. His house went up for sale on the Internet. See it for yourself.
It is interesting to note that USA today’s headline reads, Ron Paul sells his Texas house through Facebook, which is not entirely true. The link was shared on his Facebook page, but the ad has it’s own domain name. Dr. Paul is using Facebook like anyone else would… well, not quite like anyone else. Have you ever put your house up for sale on the Internet?
“Standing at the shore of this overwhelming sea, instead of trying to swallow it all in, the new masters of information skim across it, picking out things from all over, and diving in deep only when necessary. Maybe more importantly, the true masters aren’t the ones who simply accumulate knowledge; they’re those that reconfigure it into something new”.
From The Masters of Data, another good article at the Toronto Standard on life in the digital age.
$2 million – What the networks have spent, on average, to cover each Mid-Eastern uprising
$1.5 million – What one network said it spent covering Japan’s earthquake/tsunami in a single day.
In the first quarter of 2011 alone, the media has been overloaded with “a year’s worth” of coverage, reports The Wrap.
Budget constraints being what they are, if big networks can’t afford to cover everything in a saturated news industry–and they will not if the first quarter of this year tells us anything– people will get their news elsewhere. Perhaps they will read it in a local magazine, or on Twitter (my personal favorite). Maybe they will read it on a blog, or get linked to it from a news aggregator app on their smartphone (second favorite). But they’ll get it from somewhere. (more…)
Score one for transparency. Over the next two years, Georgia Tech researchers will use $1 million from Google’s pocket to develop
‘simple tools to detect Internet throttling, government censorship, and other “transparency” problems.’ (arstechnica)
These tools are essential for true net neutrality, and have yet to be developed. Once again, Google proves their worth by anticipating what people want and stepping in to provide it. Kind of hard to hate even a multi-billion dollar corporation when their projects have transparency and freedom as their goals.
The Guardian reports on a speech Assange gave at Cambridge:
“The internet is the ‘greatest spying machine the world has ever seen’ and is not a technology that necessarily favours the freedom of speech, the WikiLeaks co-founder, Julian Assange, has claimed in a rare public appearance.”
He also mentions the revolts in Egypt and Tunisia and Manning’s arrest by the US government.
NYT personal essay about the March 11 earthquake in Japan by Sandra Barron (@sandrajapandra).
“TOKYO — The first thing I was worried about was where to put my tea. I’d been sitting on the heated carpet in my apartment, working on a blog post about Japanese chewing gum. I stood up few seconds after the room started to sway. The TV was jumping. Buildings outside were swaying. A six-foot tall cabinet full of books was rocking. Things were falling in the kitchen and water was sloshing over the edge of the balcony, spilling from something above. I moved out from under the light fixtures and held onto a small table. I wanted to put down my tea cup, but there were no stable surfaces. Things were sliding around the floor.”
This is a hypertext timeline of the revolution that overthrew Mubarak and his government in Egypt. It begins with the protests on January 25th, 2011 and ends with the resignation of former President Hosni Mubarak on February 11th. —Read on »
“The main thing we’re contributing back is the advancement of the idea of internet culture to more and more people … just the sheer growing acceptance of user submitted content and the fact that we can affect popular culture.”
“You laugh about this but we may be on the forefront of Internet culture becoming most dominant culture in the world … through the power of the internet and through the community.”
(via Technorati)
