Citizen-Generated Media (CGM)

Blame Canada

Damn Interesting reports on a secret plan to invade Canada if our northern neighbors ever acted up.  It was formulated in 1934-35 and can be read here. 

Canada apparently formulated a plan of its own in 1921, but put far less resources into it. 

The Ingenuity of the Hacker Class

Andreas Bovens has been fooling around with the “View as HTML” functionality on Google’s Gmail.  Apparently Google made a bad design decision, such that, if you send yourself a PDF file to your Gmail account, you can convert it into a file that will allow you to enter in word changes, something Adobe normally does not allow.

There Oughta Be a Law

How often have you been told, “If you don’t like the law, change it.”  Usually, that was a meaningless comment.  Legislatures change laws, and they don’t usually listen to the average netizen. But the idea of an evolving wiki is changing our perceptions of what we’re allowed to participate in and from what we’re prohibited. Wikocracy offers you the chance to change your favorite unjust law, any way you’d like.

Disproportionately Large Influence

“Ignore Bloggers at Your Peril” warns the U.K. Guardian yesterday.  While this article primarily deals with blogging in Europe, the same points could be made about the American blogosphere as well.  The Wall Street Journal debates whether blogging can turn a profit or not, unleashing Alan Meckler of Jupiter Research and Jason Calcanis of Weblogs Inc. as point-counterpoint.  Delicate Genius has his ideas on the commercial viability of blogging too.  David Sifry issued another of his quarterly “State of the Blogosphere” reports recently as well.

Just Asking

Is Informed Comment blogger Juan Cole moving from Michigan to Yale? The New York Sun seems to think so, and doesn’t like the idea.

Blog-Tracking

The National Journal has an ongoing feature that tracks the buzz in the political blogosphere.  The Blogometer is a good place to find new blogs you had never heard of before, as is the blog directory Blogarama.  Blogarama also has a page that archives articles on how to blog and who should, and yet another page that lists the 165 books (as of today) that have been published on the blog phenomenon.

Was That the Sound of a Fatwa I Heard?

Two Westernized Muslim women have thrown down the gauntlet to their co-religionists in unmistakable terms.  Irshad Manji is a visiting fellow at Yale in the International Security Studies program and runs a website she calls Muslim Refusenik. She has issued an audio call for a Muslim Renaissance featuring the kind of independent thinking that gave the world algebra during Islam’s early days.  Wafa Sultan is a Syrian psychiatrist now living in Southern California who challenged the Muslim powers-that-be on al- Jazeera in late February, in a video interview that has made the rounds of the blogosphere.  She was the subject of an admiring profile in the International Herald Tribune in mid-March and a more critical article in Muslim Wakeup! a couple of weeks later.  By the way, an exhaustive article on al-Jazeera International appeared in the New York Times on March 26, 2006.

Digital Rights Management and Intellectual Property

Regular readers of this blog know I have been following the Sony rootkit story and its implications for intellectual property law. A couple of days ago, I posted a link to the Cato Institute in which the right wing rails against DRM technology.  Here’s another link from the left wing Mother Jones, giving the historical lowlights of “Intellectual Property Run Amok.”  When the right and the left both agree, something rotten must be emanating from the center.  Once again, I offer a tip o’ the hat to Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing, who has been a bulldog on this issue.  Meanwhile, the open source movers and shakers have launched an initiative to “develop open Digital Rights Management (DRM) solution[s] for multiple domains (media, documents, enterprise, personal, etc.).”

And She Said...

Remember the study that claimed that Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica had roughly the same error rates, and the detailed refutation that Britannica published in response?  Well, Nature has decided to fight back.  That science journal published the original study, and has now revealed that it was a blinded study – reviewers did not know which entries came from Britannica and which from Wikipedia.  Perhaps Britannica’s wisest response might have been none at all.

For this Weekend…Cocktail Party Knowledge

Are you seeking obscure facts to impress your geek friends?  Did you ever want to check a seemingly outrageous fact that was so off the wall it wouldn’t even be in Wikipedia?  Never fear.  Gullible Info is here.