Young people do not expect micro blogging services like Twitter and SMS to take on any real role as news sources over the next twenty years.
Internet is a trusted and reliable medium for young people, although only those in their twenties and thirties take much news from the internet. [...]
Some groups of teenagers in Harlem use the messaging website Twitter, via their mobile phones, to organize street fights and other shady activities.
Manhattan’s young thugs have turned to Twitter, and the cops who track them are fast behind, the Daily News has learned. Investigators are monitoring the traffic in [...]
The Mobile Experience Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology focuses on creative and radical designs to recapture connections between people, information, and physical places, using cutting-edge information technology to improve peoples’ lives through meaningful experiences.
Their Locast Civic Media project is a mobile & web platform [...]
How can newspapers, books, and magazines thrive in the internet age? and understand the new medium? Darron Rowse refers to Jason Preston from Eat Sleep Publish (follow him at @jasonp107). Jason asks if Twitter can be a real news platform?
For centuries, “journalist,” [...]
On Saturday afternoon Tiger Woods had become a Trending Topic on Twitter. As I write this Sunday morning, Tiger is gone from the Trending Topics, but stuff like “New Moon” and “Paranormal Activity” remain. My observation is hardly scientific, but maybe Tiger is winning against the tweets.
I confess to being [...]
Andy Beckett [bio] in The Guardian, November 26 : In the ‘deep web’, Freenet software allows users complete anonymity as they share viruses, criminal contacts and child pornography. What is Freenet?
‘The modern internet is often thought of as a miracle of openness – its global [...]
Regardless of one’s opinion on global warming, the leaked emails now making headlines are interesting for another issue. They are shining light into a growing challenge to scientific publication peer review. A Wall Street Journal opinion essay today explores these issues in our era of increasing open source of [...]
WikiLeaks “ … could become as important a journalistic tool as the Freedom of Information Act. „ — Time Magazine
Alex Pasternack, Beijing, China writes on Treehugger (2007): “Perhaps the most recent evidence of smart mob reporting is WikiLeaks, a wiki site designed to allow anyone to [...]
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 [...]
Judy Breck, Howard Rheingold, Gerrit Visser, Charles Cameron, Mark A.M. Kramer
