WikiLeaks “ … could become as important a journalistic tool as the Freedom of Information Act. „ — Time Magazine
WikiLeaks says about itself : “We open governments”
For a general introduction on WikiLeaks check the Wikipedia info and watch Wikileaks’ Julian Assange discussing the ethics of [...]
CNN 11/25 : Web site posts what it says are half million text messages from 9/11
Newly released text messages reportedly from the morning of September 11, 2001, show panicked family members trying to contact loved ones and officials frantically trying to grasp what was happening.
More than half [...]
SmartMobs is about the networking of people that has been made possible by the new era of connectivity. In the spirit of the history of Thanksgiving, this post is a tip of the tall pilgrim hat to the mobbing of ancestries online.
An extensive, mature example of the [...]
The UK government recently unveiled the Digital Economy Bill, which has prompted Alan Moore to engage in a retrospective regarding 20th Century [old school] politicians, ethics, culture, commerce and copyright law. Moore’s thoughts inspire reflection on how networked [digital] economics is fundamentally different to the “straight lines of a [...]
A FT.com article titled “Microsoft and News Corp eye web pact” describes early discussions of “the media company being paid to ‘de-index’ its news websites from Google.” This one will be fascinating to watch because it would be the software titan (Microsoft) attempting to dethrone the network gorilla (Google) [...]
I have persuaded Jim Fishkin to put the introductory chapter of his important new book, “When The People Speak: Deliberative Democracy & Public Consultation” online. For those who think that the idea of improving the publish sphere by putting together citizens with varying political views in the presence of [...]
A MacArthur Foundation article titled Selling Museums to a Tough Audience: Teens describes a meeting where 23 leading museum people commiserated about the rejection of museums by the youth:
Even though this group was hardly the ostriches, they all grappled with the constraints of the current system—from physical structures to [...]
A New York Times Technology report today titled Library in a Pocket takes a look at the how smartphones are being used to read books. This trend is so strong that one out of every five new iPhone apps released last month was a book. From the article:
Many [...]
I’ve been interested in the public sphere for a long time, and I’m increasingly concerned about the amount of misinformation, disinformation, sloganeering, and brutal polarization among citizens. I grew interested in Jim Fishkin’s work long before I started teaching in the Communication Department at Stanford (Fishkin is dept [...]
Last week Howard Rheingold was in New York City to participate in The Internet as a Playground and Factory conference at the New School. I attended the session on Participation Literacy and Digital Labor in which Howard and Smart Mobber Paul Hartzog were panelists, and [...]
“Mr. Hu Jintao, Tear Down the Great Firewall!” from China Digital Times on Vimeo.
China Digital Times reports on the twitter mobbing of a virtual wall set up on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the coming down of the Berlin Wall. The CDT report includes [...]
Observers are talking about the Iranian uprisings of 2009 in smartmobbing terms. Here is part of such an analysis by Michael Ledeen:
Several thoughtful people have commented on an unusual element in the Iranian revolutionary movement, aka “The Green Path of Hope.” Although there is a troika (Mousavi, Karroubi and [...]
Students in my Stanford social media course are conducting a survey on social media marketing - any participation on the part of Smart Mobs readers will be appreciated.
[...]
Conference convener and New School faculty Trebor Scholz wrote me today saying that “One of the highlights of this conference will definitely be Howard Rheingold’s session.” That session will be on Saturday morning. Howard will also be one of the panelists in the Closing Plenary Discussion [...]
Andy Carvin says, in regard to a potential emergent collective disaster response:
So it looks like we’re going to get a hurricane after all this season. Ida is expected to make landfall on the Gulf Coast near the Alabama/Florida border late Monday or early Tuesday. I’ve already started updating the [...]
Next weekend I will be attending two conferences in New York City. One of them is WordCampNYC which is a major WordPress event. It has top guys from the tech and design crowds who have brought this open source software to global leadership. There will [...]
Normal false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 The CIA Factbook estimates Afghan literacy above the age of 15 at 28.1% (43.1% of males, 12.6% of females) — so it’s worth noting that the Taliban (Mullah Omar’s outfit, aka the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan) is now using social bookmarking on its [...]
The new Personal Networks and Community Survey, sponsored by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, takes issue with previous research that suggested social ties supported by internet and mobile phone are weak and dispersed:
This Pew Internet Personal Networks and Community survey finds that Americans are not as isolated [...]
At its moment of inception, the Internet began with a crash in a network, as SEED Magazine describes:
Forty years ago today, a team led by Leonard Kleinrock typed the “Lo” of “Login” into a Stanford computer, which promptly crashed before the command could be [...]
In Infotention Part One, I introduced dashboards, radars, and filters as means for balancing need-to-know with protection against information overload. In this video, the second in the series, I show how to build an information dashboard using an RSS reader. In this case, I concentrate on Netvibes.
While we humans try to figure out how to use the new global networking, critters are remarkably tuned in. With the assistance of human conservationists and animal scientists, many species are enjoying genetic revival through inter-zoo connections. Global networks for healthy breeding patterns that provide [...]
Here is some flavor from a U.S. New story about teen texting. It may surprise you:
Forward-thinking teachers say the informal writing style that defines text messages can be incorporated into class lessons. And a new study from California State University researchers has found that texting can improve teens’ writing [...]
I’ve been a fan of Mizuko Ito’s work for a long time, and I was fortunate to be one of the 2008 winners in the MacArthur Foundation/HASTAC Digital Media and Learning Competition (and a judge in 2009), so I was delighted to hear of the launch of the [...]
A recent blog-posting from AirAmerica highlighted a recent surveillance video depicting youth rampaging through a convenience store. The video in question was published with dramatized commentary portraying the youth as miscreants (literally a plague of locust) bent on using flash-mobs to bring chaos and destruction to [...]
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Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer, advised Sun Tzu
Something very interesting is happening blogwise. An Australian intel analyst blogger, Leah Farrall, and an insurgent strategist blogger, Abu Walid, are now holding a debate in public across the blogs. It began a [...]
Shel Israel has published part 2 of his interview with me, “Where we’re going:”
Students are accustomed to having knowledge delivered to them. But in an era where knowledge, media, and professions change so rapidly, storing knowledge is not adequate. Students need to learn how to learn, learn how to [...]
Shel Israel, author of the excellent new book, Twitterville, has published the first part of an interview with me: SM Global Report: Howard Rheingold, Part 1:
With a billion people on the Internet and 4 billion mobile phones, the ability to gain information, to process it computationally, to [...]
Help expose bad journalism — and fight the spin that is spreading in the news media and on the Internet.
This week, NewsTrust is organizing a ‘News Hunt for Bad Journalism’ to identify news reports and opinions that are inaccurate, biased, irresponsible or superficial. They will be joined by journalism students [...]
A SEED Magazine article begins: “Nearly everyone reads. Soon, nearly everyone will publish.” The analysis includes the following, and much more:
But does increasing authorship matter? And is this increase a blip or a signpost? Authorship has risen steeply before. The period of the first steep [...]
A Washington Post report today titled Worldwide ebb posits that each social networking site that has come along has followed something like a bell curve path. The article does not call it a “bell curve” but describes that shape in the allegedly typical rise, [...]
When my Mother (1910-1984) was a little girl, her father was a big family road trips guy. Around 1920 he began outfitting his Dodge automobile for cross country trips with his wife and two little girls and departing from El Paso, Texas where they lived on long sightseeing trips. Today [...]
Why is it that a helium hoax floating across Colorado caused a macro activity explosion on Twitter while a recent report shows . . . Most Big DC Orgs Aren’t Embracing Social Media Tools? There are also indications that the vaunted Obama campaign grassroots activism has been difficult for [...]
The Internet As Playground and Factory: A Conference on Digital Labor, will be held at Eugene Lang College of The New School in New York City on November 12-14. An overview Introduction sets out the seminal questions arising “in the midst of massive [...]
Within the overarching umbrella of social media lives the trend of allowing the community around a service or product participate in its production, from TCHO allowing its “beta testers” to submit feedback on beta versions of its chocolate, and tweaking the recipe accordingly, to Digg allowing its users [...]
Wired Campus reports today: “A Year Later, a Texas University Says Giving Students iPhones Is an Academic Success.” Several aspects are discussed one year after Abilene Christian University handed out iPhones to its entire first-year class. In my view, the following is a very clear [...]
Many sectors such as travel agencies, the music industry, and these days journalism, have been reshuffled by the internet phenom. As Michael S. Malone describes at edgelings live from Silicon Valley, real estate is responding with big shuffling as well:
But the big tech battle in the real estate business [...]
A Hewlett Foundation report describes the rapidly developing digital liberation of textbooks from printing and binding. From the report:
“If it’s a dead tree [that you put the information on], you can put a higher price on it, but you can’t search for specific content or easily find inconsistencies in [...]
Today the New York Times reports on the busy present and fast-emerging smart mob: In Rural Africa, a Fertile Market for Mobile Phones:
Africa has the fastest-growing mobile phone market worldwide. Entrepreneurs and development organizations are eagerly seizing the opportunity presented by such growth. They [...]
Tim Ash is a founding top guru of the landing page methodology that is a key component of modern Webpage design. His company’s blog has a recent post called SiteTuners New Website Relaunched that sketches the conceptual work they did to relaunch their Website. The [...]
The WhyFILES from the University of Wisconsin are choice treatments in web style of informative subjects. The most recent topic is “Thumbs down! Texting + driving = disaster on the road.” A feature in this treatment of the dangers is the 2008 Chatsworth, California [...]
The saga continues at Wikipedia in holding off the dubious who cannot get themselves to trust the crowd in its wisdom. There is an article describing current episodes in TIME and Yahoo!; here is an except:
There’s only one problem with the new policy: “It’s just completely wrong,” says Jimmy [...]
We have all wanted to do it — and Hugh Jackman did:
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Theatergoers won’t forget to turn their cell phones off again, after Australian actor Hugh Jackman stopped a Broadway show to ask one audience member to stop a phone from ringing.
[...]
I am proud to be on the board of advisors of Newstrust, a non-profit effort to build a non-partisan/bi-partisan community of intelligent news consumers who keep journalists and news publications honest by rating and recommending news stories on a more sophisticated basis than a simple thumbs-up/thumbs-down. NewsTrust now features [...]
A special collection of videos of this weeks #PICNIC09 (www.picnicnetwork.com) generated by the attendees and collected via twitter by dutch trendwatcher Vincent Everts. Enjoy! Here is his overview !! Also check Picnic09 on Vimeo, YouTube and Blip.tv
Tagged picnic presentations on [...]
Politico’s story today about the Republican twitters being nearly twice as many as Democrats may reveal something about political smart mobbing emerging for next year’s elections. One of the 3 GOP power twitterers singled out by Politico is John McCain — who took flak when he was running for President [...]
A Harvard University Library news story updates the great news of the Harvard research community’s leadership of open access to scholarship through DASH. The release begins:
September 1, 2009—Harvard’s leadership in open access to scholarship took a significant step forward this week with the public launch of DASH—or Digital [...]
In a post on his blog edgelings today titled “Facebook Rules the World,” Michael S. Malone says, “The cultural side of technology revolutions have a tendency to sneak up on us.” Social networking did not sneak up on Howard Rheingold, who foresaw much of what is happening when he [...]
Next week the Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam hosts PICNIC ‘09, Europes trendsetting festival with three inspiring days of ideas, fun and sensory stimulation in media, technology, entertainment, art and science.
Of the Smartmobs team Mark A.M. Kramer of Mobilizy GmbH in Salzburg and trendwatcher Gerrit Visser will attend and aim [...]
Now in its fifth Year, the HandheldLearning conference assembles the full spectrum of players in the field: Teachers, school governors, parents, employers, accompanied minors and anybody who is interested in the positive impact that mobile, always-on computing is having on the quality of learning and [...]
Graffiti Taxonomy: Paris, 2009 from Evan Roth on Vimeo.
The wonderful Information Aesthetics folks have more from the Grafitti Taxonomy: Paris 2009 current exhibition at Fondation Cartier. By way of introduction, you can enjoy the video embedded above. It is a delightful bop and bounce through a [...]
My experience in knowing Ajit Jaokar is that 1) he is one of the most passionate and perceptive advocates of smartmobby mobile matters out there, and 2) he is usually beyond the cutting edge on new ideas in the field. He is heading up a conference on a topic [...]
This image is from a blog post at CreativeCloud. There are several other related facts, such as: If you printed the internet reading it would take 57,000 years 24/7. Reading it for 10 minutes a night before bed would take 8,219,088 years.
The post is [...]
Host Phil Barrett at BurningTheBacon.com sets up Carnival of the Mobilists #191 around Mobile in Canada, mixing great mobile posts with his insights into the jelling Canadian mobile scene. Phil includes this review:
There has been a ton of buzz lately over augmented reality and its potential applications on [...]
Anders Sandberg’s presentation is highly illuminating and shares many parallels with concepts brought about in the book “Smart Mobs.”
Anders Sandberg (SE) is a researcher, science debater, futurist, transhumanist, and author. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Stockholm University in computational neuroscience, and is currently a James Martin [...]
I am highlighting Soundwalk here on SmartMobs because I believe that this “experience” could go beyond it’s commercial purpose and become a form of “Aural Augmented Reality” for mobile learning. I can imagine how the Soundwalk could be used as a learning experience set in the [...]
The pioneering educational technologist Leon Cych has drafted quite possibly the most comprehensive overview of the use and development of Virtual Worlds on Open Source technologies in Schools.
“This series of posts is intended to be a comprehensive look at the use and development of Virtual [...]
In conjunction with the paraflows 09 – Festival for Digital Art and Cultures in Vienna, the Peer-2-Peer theorist Michel Bauwens, (a longtime friend, supporter and colleague of SmartMobs) will [...]
For nearly 50 years, Educational Technology Publications has been a choice publisher of those doing the finest, most up-to-date thinking in the education field. On its website the company reports having been at the forefront of every important new trend in the development of the field throughout the past [...]
I was asked to contribute a short video about my most inspiring teacher, for a site that launched today: My Teacher, My Hero. Check it out. And add your own story! In my case, my hero teacher was also my mother, who died at age 99 almost a [...]
I am the SmartMobs man inside covering the 2009 Ars Electronica festival for Art, Technology & Society. You can follow a LIVE Stream here:
“Led, curated and produced by artists and scientists—and inspired by their work—the festival’s [...]
The Wired Campus has a report of a Carnegie Mellon student, Can Duruk, who tracked thieves who had robbed him:
After calling the police, Mr. Duruk used the program MobileMe to track the movements of the robbers, according to The Tartan, Carnegie Mellon’s student newspaper. MobileMe has a feature [...]
On Thursday September 24, PICNIC Amsterdam 2009 and dotopen will present a short but sweet PICNIC Mobile Bites session: Five of the most interesting, creative, touching, weird or exciting applications in mobile will be showcased to the PICNIC audience in mini-presentations lasting 3 minutes each.
Do you have a really [...]
In my continuing examination of 21st century literacies at my SFGate City Brights blog, I get into more detail about mindful infotention:
Knowing what to pay attention to is a cognitive skill that steers and focuses the technical knowledge of how to find information worth your attention. More and [...]
Another reason here for bloggers to be in pajamas: it will help slow down an epidemic if we blog about it when we get sick. So says this report today in the Washington Post:
Say you feel sick, but before you see a doctor you search the Web for information, [...]
Undoubtedly, the greatest enabler of “SmartMobs” are the mobile technologies and services people adopt and use. Jan Chipchase is an ethnographer with Nokia Design who actively examines these enablers and reflects upon the intersections between people, society and mobile technologies / services. I believe that Jan [...]
Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display until Sept 09 at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab. It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity. In [...]
We are all part of the “delete generation”. Every second of every minute of every day people around the world are deleting their history, their thoughts and arguments, which these days are invariably presented in a digital environment. Penny Carnaby states that “our understanding of the impact of this kind [...]
Informationaesthetics.com has been for years an excellent website for capturing the emerging digital age. The image with this post is from their report about GoodMorning [blprnt.com] which visualizes tweets. Go to the movies at Vimeo for an amazing eyeful. This is information [...]
Above is the title of a new post by Teemu Arina, whose originality of insight has opened several doors for me. Since Teemu is over forty years younger than I am, I particularly appreciate his thoughts on early adopter age range. He says, in part:
What comes up over and [...]
On June 22 at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands doctor Lilia Efimova defended her thesis on blogging practices of knowledge workers. For her dissertation Lilia studied early adopters of weblogs to provide insights relevant to introducing blogging in knowledge-intensive environments.
Efimova’s findings suggest that ‘while in some cases [...]
The Traveling Geeks’ tour of the UK this summer was one of the most intense junkets I’ve ever been sucked into. Among other things, I gave my first major talk at Reboot Britain about 21st Century Literacies, and JD Lasica captured a 6 minute interview with me [...]
This week’s “Frog Days of Summer” themed Carnival at GoldenSwamp.com included Gerrit Visser’s SmartMobs piece about a press announcement that “Layar Reality Browser 2.0 Launched Globally.” In his post, Gerrit sketches some details for this free application on your mobile phone which shows [...]
See the request all the way at the bottom…
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‘Place & Mobiles’ collection
edited by Rowan Wilken (Melbourne)
& Gerard Goggin (New South Wales)
One of the striking aspects of globalisation is that it [...]
A Wall Street Journal piece running in their Opinion section analyses A Better Way to Go Postal. A number of factors are described. The final one is a basic change caused by the smart mob era. Bringing together a scattered population now costs a hundred times less via the [...]
I’m ruminating here and on my City Brights blog about issues related to 21st Century literacies. I’m putting together videos, widgets, blogs, a website to pull it all together, and eventually a book. I started looking for domain names, and of course everything remotely connected to literacy, [...]
A refreshing switch toward the positive concerning kids using their online devices in class was published this week at suite101. The article provides 12 Expert Twitter Tips for the Classroom. In introducing the tips, author David R. Wetzel says:
Using twitter in the classroom is becoming mainstream in many [...]
The Southeastern Conference is trying to ban spectators from using social media during games. The motive is apparently about keeping eyeballs on the broadcasters who are paying big bucks for game rights. Hum. . . . this might be a whole new set of issues for college sports — not [...]
According to todays Press Announcement in the Netherlands Layar is a free application on your mobile phone which shows what is around you by displaying real time digital information on top of reality though the camera of your mobile phone.
Layar, which was first launched in June 2009 in The [...]
It is greener to download music than to acquire hard copy CDs of the same music through analog methods. An article in earth2tech.com gives background and details. One supposes the principles in the report would apply to many other changes from hard copy acquisition to the digital download sort. [...]
Manuel Castells deals in his book Communication Power with the question where power lies in the network society. In this paper, Christian Fuchs discusses important issues that this book addresses, and connects them, where possible, to his own works and reflections.
The book is discussed along [...]
In our fascinating 21st century, patterns not just of people are emerging in importance and being managed in new ways. In the image with this post, acoustic tweezers are positioning samples for tissue engineering without damaging cells the way other sorts of tiny tweezers might. [...]
Shifting The Debate measures the movement of ideas through social networks. In the Political Video Barameter which you can access by clicking the above image, you can follow the linkage from YouTube videos to political blogs. Move your cursor over the colored circles [...]
SmartMobs readers may like to watch on blip.tv this special Supernova Interview with Andrew Rasiej on ‘How Tech has changed Politics’.
[...]I was a state and then national campaign staffer in the 1960s, and I can report that present White House community activism is very 1960s. As Howard Rheingold has been pointing out in recent posts, in 21st century smart mobbing new stuff is happening (as another bit describes in [...]
This blog was an early supporter of peer-to-patent, and I’m proud to have introduced Beth Simone Noveck to her early funder, Omidyar Network. Henry Jenkins showcases a post by Daren C. Brabham, based on his Ph.D. dissertation, about Get Ready to Participate: Crowdsourcing and Governance:
Crowdsourcing is a killer [...]
Clay Spinuzzi has a long and thoughtful post about the top-down vs bottom-up arguments of the recent right-wing-sponsored health care legislation town hall protests:
Now, in 2009, some on the Right are bringing up these 2005 protests to suggest moral equivalence as they defend the health care protests. That’s [...]
Foreign Policy August 6 2009 ‘”Authoritarian regimes should fear Twitter”
Combined with other tools - e-mail, social networking, and blogs — Twitter can certainly be helpful in spreading news about upcoming flashmobs and protests. The demonstrations following Moldova’s disputed election earlier this year were a perfect example, where a [...]
Reuters is carrying an enlightened column titled “Why I believe in the link economy” by Chris Ahearn, President, Media at Thomson Reuters. On a day when Murdoch is promising to lock down his online newspaper sites by charging for them, Ahearn has the right stuff:
. . [...]
A video from Discovery Tech provides a brief overview of some smart grid basics. The screenshot from the video above is illustrating a refrigerator that communicates directly with the smart grid that knows what is happening with electricity in the community in which the [...]
(Via Alan Moore)
The Guardian writes
In the first of our Activate videos, Gerry Jackson, founder and director of SW Radio Africa, delivers a powerful and humbling presentation on the difficulties of providing independent information to a country stripped of its most fundamental freedoms.
As you’ll see when you watch the videos, [...]
The Natural History Museum is headlining the news that a DNA barcode to identify the world’s plants has been agreed upon. The museum’s article outlines some of the interesting challenges — how to smartly order plants into meaningful bouquets of botanical communities:
Efforts to build [...]
At his new blog ThreeDimensionalPeople, Stephen Johnston has posted about the Mayo Clinic going mobile. The usual foresightedness of Mayo makes me proud. I was born at the Mayo Clinic when my father was a resident in orthopaedic surgery there. It was so long ago that he knew the [...]
Via lifeline_forum@googlegroups.com July 13, 2009
Brief Proposal Mobile Literacy UNESCO
Dear all,
Let me inform you about our literacy programme with mobile phones.
We are implementing this programme with Bunyad and Mobilink (Mobile carrier).
The idea is simple. By sending many interesting SMS in Urdu to learners everyday, we try to [...]
Today’s POLITICO’s article, A President Obama accident: A nation of lobbyists, describes what I think was a natural outcome of the 2009 use in elections of smart mobbing. With a full court press, the Obama campaign activated voter involvement through the internet. As the POLITICO article author Andie Coller [...]
I just got a a glimpse at the future of context aware, location based video broadcasting with a project called Locast from the MIT Mobile Experience Lab. My initial rection to Locast was to contemplate how this project could be used to enhance citizen-media scenarios. Upon further [...]
The smarter folks in the texting mobs keep their eyes on the road, for reasons captured by this cartoonist, Mike Luckovich.
From the Washington Post
When I wrote Smart Mobs in 2001 and launched the smartmobs.com blog with the book in 2002, I made a number of forecasts about the convergence of the mobile phone, the personal computer, and the Internet. Some of these forecasts, particularly in regard to the use of mobile communications [...]
If you want the 6 minute version, rather than the 40 minute version of my talk about 21st century literacies, check out the interview JD Lasica did in front of King’s College, Cambridge, UK, during the last part of the Travelling Geeks tour:
This is my edit of a talk on 21st century literacies that I gave in London at the Reboot Britain conference in July, 2009. It was part of the action-packed, fun-filled Travelling Geeks tour. About 40 minutes.
Judy Breck, Howard Rheingold, Charles Cameron, Mark A.M. Kramer, Gerrit Visser
