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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

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The Harvard Business Review

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OneZero

Now en route to NetSquared

Now en route to NetSquared

by | May 28, 2006 |

Rob and Aaron are both heading down to San Jose this week for the NetSquared conference. For the past eight months, we've been working with the CompuMentor/Techsoup team that is behind this event. 

The conference aims at pushing nonprofit engagement with the "social web" (aka "web 2.0") to the next level. The web site (which we helped develop) has built an online community around the same agenda, and will now link the online community to the San Jose conference through a two-day remote conference.

I'm holding down the virtual fort from here in Vancouver, but look forward to hearing updates from Rob & Aaron. And if you're going to be at NetSquared yourself, be sure to say hello.

Tidying tags (and cars?)

Tidying tags (and cars?)

by | May 28, 2006 | ,

When a story titled Confession: I'm a car slob popped up in the RSS feed I use to track who's linking to me, I figured that some recent passenger had decided to out me to the world. Turns out that Beth Kanter has identified the correlation between untidy cars and...

Just because it’s a remote conference doesn’t mean you don’t get a badge

Just because it’s a remote conference doesn’t mean you don’t get a badge

by | May 26, 2006 |

Meet me at Net2 Remote Conference

Planning on joining us for the remote conference? Let the world know (and give the conference some link love) by posting this badge on your blog or web site. Just copy and paste the following HTML code wherever you'd like it to appear:

<a href="http://www.netsquared.org/remote"><img alt="Find me at the Net2 Remote Conference" title="Find me at the Net2 Remote Conference" src="http://tinyurl.com/mkav3"/></a>

Building online community: Behind the scenes at NetSquared

Building online community: Behind the scenes at NetSquared

by | May 20, 2006 |

As part of the NetSquared remote conference, I'm going to be hosting an online chat conversation on "Building online community: Behind the scenes at NetSquared". Since Social Signal helped to develop the strategy for the NetSquared site, and undertook the Drupal set-up and configuration work on both NetSquared and Net2Learn, we periodically get questions from people who want to know why we set up a certain feature in a particular way, or how we were able to get a page to work a certain way in Drupal. This session is a chance to answer some of those questions in a more structured setting.

Create a hallway for your web site with Gabbly

Create a hallway for your web site with Gabbly

by | May 11, 2006 |

We've been playing with a new tool, Gabbly, as a possible means to run live chat on the NetSquared site during the conference. Gabbly lets you add a chat window to any web page on the Internet, simply by typing "http://www.gabbly.com" in front of any URL. For example, you could chat with other folks reading the NetSquared blog by typing in the URL "http://www.gabbly.com/netsquared.org/blog" — check it out!

Gabbly keeps the last 18 messages in the chat room visible to anyone joining the room; and as long as you keep the chat windown open, you'll see ALL the messages typed since you logged in (plus the up-to-18 that were then when you arrived). And since Gabbly generates an RSS feed for each chat room, you can archive the chat about any web page by aggregating it back onto that page (as long as your web site has a built-in tool for aggregating RSS feeds).

Now downloadable: Hacktivism & The Future of Political Participation

Now downloadable: Hacktivism & The Future of Political Participation

by | May 11, 2006 |

As announced today on Civic Minded:

I’m making my complete dissertation available for download, beginning today. Depending on your interests, you might want to download the whole enchilada, or to look at selected chapters:

  • Chapter 1: Introduction provides an overview of the dissertation & methodology; it’s useful for folks who want a quick overview
  • Chapter 2: A taxonomy of hacktivism is a beast (65 pages) but provides a very comprehensive picture of the three main types of hacktivism: political cracking (like site defacements), performative hacktivism (like the Yes Men’s work), and political coding (like folks trying to circumvent Chinese firewalls)
  • Chapter 3: Collective action among virtual selves looks at hacktivism in the context of political science research on political participation; this is the research that most directly shaped my thinking about how to encourage citizen participation in online communities
  • Chapter 4: Hacktivism and state autonomy looks at how hacktivists get around policy and legal decisions with the real effects of code; it’s useful for organizations trying to understand how the Internet changes the bounds of their effective authority
  • Chapter 5: Hacktivism and the future of democratic discourse looks at how hacktivism illuminates hopes for an online “public sphere”; it’s useful for folks thinking about issues like free speech and anonymity online
  • Chapter 6: Conclusion pulls it all back together and reflects on how hacktivism has been wrongly conflated with cyberterrorism as part of of the post 9/11 age of anxiety; it may interest folks who want to understand the impact of security anxieties on the space for online expression

I hope these files will be useful to a wide range of people who are trying to understand the more colorful and innovative elements of online participation — including its latest incarnation at Halliburton Contracts.

JSTOR DAILY

Now en route to NetSquared

Now en route to NetSquared

by | May 28, 2006 |

Rob and Aaron are both heading down to San Jose this week for the NetSquared conference. For the past eight months, we've been working with the CompuMentor/Techsoup team that is behind this event. 

The conference aims at pushing nonprofit engagement with the "social web" (aka "web 2.0") to the next level. The web site (which we helped develop) has built an online community around the same agenda, and will now link the online community to the San Jose conference through a two-day remote conference.

I'm holding down the virtual fort from here in Vancouver, but look forward to hearing updates from Rob & Aaron. And if you're going to be at NetSquared yourself, be sure to say hello.

Tidying tags (and cars?)

Tidying tags (and cars?)

by | May 28, 2006 | ,

When a story titled Confession: I'm a car slob popped up in the RSS feed I use to track who's linking to me, I figured that some recent passenger had decided to out me to the world. Turns out that Beth Kanter has identified the correlation between untidy cars and...

Just because it’s a remote conference doesn’t mean you don’t get a badge

Just because it’s a remote conference doesn’t mean you don’t get a badge

by | May 26, 2006 |

Meet me at Net2 Remote Conference

Planning on joining us for the remote conference? Let the world know (and give the conference some link love) by posting this badge on your blog or web site. Just copy and paste the following HTML code wherever you'd like it to appear:

<a href="http://www.netsquared.org/remote"><img alt="Find me at the Net2 Remote Conference" title="Find me at the Net2 Remote Conference" src="http://tinyurl.com/mkav3"/></a>

Building online community: Behind the scenes at NetSquared

Building online community: Behind the scenes at NetSquared

by | May 20, 2006 |

As part of the NetSquared remote conference, I'm going to be hosting an online chat conversation on "Building online community: Behind the scenes at NetSquared". Since Social Signal helped to develop the strategy for the NetSquared site, and undertook the Drupal set-up and configuration work on both NetSquared and Net2Learn, we periodically get questions from people who want to know why we set up a certain feature in a particular way, or how we were able to get a page to work a certain way in Drupal. This session is a chance to answer some of those questions in a more structured setting.

Create a hallway for your web site with Gabbly

Create a hallway for your web site with Gabbly

by | May 11, 2006 |

We've been playing with a new tool, Gabbly, as a possible means to run live chat on the NetSquared site during the conference. Gabbly lets you add a chat window to any web page on the Internet, simply by typing "http://www.gabbly.com" in front of any URL. For example, you could chat with other folks reading the NetSquared blog by typing in the URL "http://www.gabbly.com/netsquared.org/blog" — check it out!

Gabbly keeps the last 18 messages in the chat room visible to anyone joining the room; and as long as you keep the chat windown open, you'll see ALL the messages typed since you logged in (plus the up-to-18 that were then when you arrived). And since Gabbly generates an RSS feed for each chat room, you can archive the chat about any web page by aggregating it back onto that page (as long as your web site has a built-in tool for aggregating RSS feeds).

Now downloadable: Hacktivism & The Future of Political Participation

Now downloadable: Hacktivism & The Future of Political Participation

by | May 11, 2006 |

As announced today on Civic Minded:

I’m making my complete dissertation available for download, beginning today. Depending on your interests, you might want to download the whole enchilada, or to look at selected chapters:

  • Chapter 1: Introduction provides an overview of the dissertation & methodology; it’s useful for folks who want a quick overview
  • Chapter 2: A taxonomy of hacktivism is a beast (65 pages) but provides a very comprehensive picture of the three main types of hacktivism: political cracking (like site defacements), performative hacktivism (like the Yes Men’s work), and political coding (like folks trying to circumvent Chinese firewalls)
  • Chapter 3: Collective action among virtual selves looks at hacktivism in the context of political science research on political participation; this is the research that most directly shaped my thinking about how to encourage citizen participation in online communities
  • Chapter 4: Hacktivism and state autonomy looks at how hacktivists get around policy and legal decisions with the real effects of code; it’s useful for organizations trying to understand how the Internet changes the bounds of their effective authority
  • Chapter 5: Hacktivism and the future of democratic discourse looks at how hacktivism illuminates hopes for an online “public sphere”; it’s useful for folks thinking about issues like free speech and anonymity online
  • Chapter 6: Conclusion pulls it all back together and reflects on how hacktivism has been wrongly conflated with cyberterrorism as part of of the post 9/11 age of anxiety; it may interest folks who want to understand the impact of security anxieties on the space for online expression

I hope these files will be useful to a wide range of people who are trying to understand the more colorful and innovative elements of online participation — including its latest incarnation at Halliburton Contracts.

THE VERGE

Could you imagine life without Facebook?

Could you imagine life without Facebook?

by | Feb 21, 2011 |

Progressive Media Concepts recently posted an interesting question: What Would You Do If Facebook Shut Down Tomorrow? One I recovered from my blackout (it's my body's automatic self-defense mechanism when faced with the unthinkable) I read on, curious to hear PWC's...