Publications
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Now en route to NetSquared
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?)
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
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>
May 30 & 31: NetSquared’s online conference with nonprofit leaders
as posted on Corante's Civic Minded blog: Where can you find inspiration for online advocacy, guidance for online faclitation, and gossip about online politics? On Tuesday May 30th and Wednesday May 31st, NetSquared is hosting a remote conference featuring live chats...
Building online community: Behind the scenes at NetSquared
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.
All about Rob
Rob is teaching a workshop.
Create a hallway for your web site with Gabbly
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
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.
Now available: Hacktivism & The Future of Political Participation
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...
Attached to Accuracy
Tonight's bout of vigilante fact-checking was prompted by a story on the web site of Attachment Parenting International (API). API is a nonprofit that advocates for what is these days the ascendant philosophy of child-rearing. Best known through the works of William...
The Harvard Business Review
Now en route to NetSquared
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?)
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
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>
May 30 & 31: NetSquared’s online conference with nonprofit leaders
as posted on Corante's Civic Minded blog: Where can you find inspiration for online advocacy, guidance for online faclitation, and gossip about online politics? On Tuesday May 30th and Wednesday May 31st, NetSquared is hosting a remote conference featuring live chats...
Building online community: Behind the scenes at NetSquared
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.
All about Rob
Rob is teaching a workshop.
Create a hallway for your web site with Gabbly
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
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.
Now available: Hacktivism & The Future of Political Participation
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...
Attached to Accuracy
Tonight's bout of vigilante fact-checking was prompted by a story on the web site of Attachment Parenting International (API). API is a nonprofit that advocates for what is these days the ascendant philosophy of child-rearing. Best known through the works of William...
OneZero
Ten women speakers to look for at SXSW Interactive 2010
The panel picker for next year’s South By Southwest Interactive conference has just gone live, and zowee! there are some great choices. We’re especially thrilled to see so many great social media panels proposed by interesting women speakers, promising a SXSW in which we get to hear some sopranos and altos mixed in with the basses and baritones that dominate so many tech events.
Here are some of the
How to make sense of Twitter follows and unfollows
A couple of weeks ago I wrote my most hypocritical tweet ever:
Follows are not love. You are as lovable with 5 followers as with 50,000. You are not your Twitter feed.
How to use social media to support your personal and business goals and relationships
Stop keeping up.
That’s the central message of my latest post for Harvard Business Online, in which I argue that we’re seduced by the relentless flood of must-have social networks, applications and gadgets. We focus on keeping up with the latest thing, instead of focusing on what’s important to us and looking for the technologies that support our own personal and business priorities.
Vancouver’s 12 best wifi cafés and restaurants
In my search for the perfect Internet café I’ve tried more than my share of Vancouver’s wifi-enabled cafés and restaurants. Just like Vancouver’s neighbourhoods, its wifi cafés and restaurants range from the scruffily hip to the chicly modern.
In this post I round up (and map!) the best of the good-to-great. Every place on this list has reliable Internet service, at least a few accessible power outlets, and decent coffee; on
The 10 ingredients that make a great wifi café
Some people prowl the earth in search of the world’s greatest Don Giovanni; others look for the finest shoemaker, the best bookstore, the ideal glass of Pinot Noir. I put my energy where it counts: the search for the perfect wifi café. While I’ve yet to find my Holy 802.11b-enabled Grail, i have pinpointed what makes for the perfect, laptop-friendly coffee spot.
Best tech gadgets of 2009 (so far)
Our contribution to the economic recovery took the form of feverish technology purchasing throughout April, May and early June. Now that the dust and Visa bills have settled, it’s time to stop and rate the roses.
The ratings I’ve assinged to our past 6 months of tech investments aren’t based on assessments of comparative products — though every product on the list was purchased after reading other people’s reviews and comparative
How to use social media to recruit your dream hire
From Harvard Business Online: my post about how social media can help employers find the best people for their team.
10 action recommendations based on Industry Canada’s Digital Economy conference
Today’s Digital Economy conference has surfaced the hunger for a serious effort at moving Canada back into a leadership position in the global digital economy. As the day has unfolded, many people have noted that we need to meet that hunger with a concrete action plan. Here’s my first crack at a set of recommendations, guided by our experience in the emergent field of social media, for both action and further dialogue.
JSTOR DAILY
Ten women speakers to look for at SXSW Interactive 2010
The panel picker for next year’s South By Southwest Interactive conference has just gone live, and zowee! there are some great choices. We’re especially thrilled to see so many great social media panels proposed by interesting women speakers, promising a SXSW in which we get to hear some sopranos and altos mixed in with the basses and baritones that dominate so many tech events.
Here are some of the
How to make sense of Twitter follows and unfollows
A couple of weeks ago I wrote my most hypocritical tweet ever:
Follows are not love. You are as lovable with 5 followers as with 50,000. You are not your Twitter feed.
How to use social media to support your personal and business goals and relationships
Stop keeping up.
That’s the central message of my latest post for Harvard Business Online, in which I argue that we’re seduced by the relentless flood of must-have social networks, applications and gadgets. We focus on keeping up with the latest thing, instead of focusing on what’s important to us and looking for the technologies that support our own personal and business priorities.
Vancouver’s 12 best wifi cafés and restaurants
In my search for the perfect Internet café I’ve tried more than my share of Vancouver’s wifi-enabled cafés and restaurants. Just like Vancouver’s neighbourhoods, its wifi cafés and restaurants range from the scruffily hip to the chicly modern.
In this post I round up (and map!) the best of the good-to-great. Every place on this list has reliable Internet service, at least a few accessible power outlets, and decent coffee; on
The 10 ingredients that make a great wifi café
Some people prowl the earth in search of the world’s greatest Don Giovanni; others look for the finest shoemaker, the best bookstore, the ideal glass of Pinot Noir. I put my energy where it counts: the search for the perfect wifi café. While I’ve yet to find my Holy 802.11b-enabled Grail, i have pinpointed what makes for the perfect, laptop-friendly coffee spot.
Best tech gadgets of 2009 (so far)
Our contribution to the economic recovery took the form of feverish technology purchasing throughout April, May and early June. Now that the dust and Visa bills have settled, it’s time to stop and rate the roses.
The ratings I’ve assinged to our past 6 months of tech investments aren’t based on assessments of comparative products — though every product on the list was purchased after reading other people’s reviews and comparative
How to use social media to recruit your dream hire
From Harvard Business Online: my post about how social media can help employers find the best people for their team.
10 action recommendations based on Industry Canada’s Digital Economy conference
Today’s Digital Economy conference has surfaced the hunger for a serious effort at moving Canada back into a leadership position in the global digital economy. As the day has unfolded, many people have noted that we need to meet that hunger with a concrete action plan. Here’s my first crack at a set of recommendations, guided by our experience in the emergent field of social media, for both action and further dialogue.
THE VERGE
Riot vigilantes speak for themselves
In the past couple of days I've heard from people who were initially enthusiastic about the crowdsourcing of rioter identification, but now see the concern with this kind of vigilantism. I'd love to take credit, but I'm not the most convincing voice in this argument....
Crowdsourced repression: Could it happen here?
The debate that is unfolding online about crowdsourced surveillance -- what Christopher Parson referred to as Vancouver's Human Flesh Search Engine -- rests on two implicit assumptions. It's time to get clear about what they are, so that people can talk more...
On the dangers of crowdsourced surveillance
My blog post for Harvard Business today looks at the troubling online reaction to last night's riots in Vancouver. Reflecting on the widespread enthusiasm for using social media to track down criminals, I wrote: I don't think we want to live in a society that turns...
8 ways to beat the urgency trap in online communications
In a thoughtful post about The Pitfalls of social media, Aleksandr Voinov writes Social Media exerts pressure on us to do things immediately and respond to everything immediately. I'm not sure about you, but sometimes I like to think things through and discuss it with...