the global web
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I gave this talk at Wikimania in London yesterday. In the first years of Wikipedia’s existence, many of us said that, as an example of citizen journalism and journalism by the people, Wikipedia would be able to avoid the gatekeeping problems faced by traditional media. The theory was that because we didn’t have the burden
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First posted at EthnographyMatters.net Last month’s Wired magazine showed an infographic with a headline that read: ‘History’s most influential people, ranked by Wikipedia reach’ with a group of 20 men arranged in hierarchical order — from Jesus at number 1 to Stalin at number 20. Curious, I wondered how ‘influence’ and ‘Wikipedia reach’ was being decided. According
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On the 3rd of January this year, Guardian contributor, James Richardson wrote an article about how Wikileaks would have committed the same ‘collateral murder’ it accused the US military of (in their edited video of an Iraq drone operation) if Zimbabwean Prime Minister, Morgan Tsvangarai was convicted of treason. One of the cables (published 8
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This essay <download below> is being published as part of the ‘Critical Point of View: Wikipedia Research Initiative’ Reader. Thank you to Geert and Nathaniel and the rest of the folks at the Amsterdam-based Institute of Network Cultures (INC) and the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society for making me realise that you can love
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It’s that time of the year again. Creative Commons and Wikipedia are working towards their fundraising goals for the coming year and asking users to donate to support the cause. I spent the last five years working on building a global perspective on the commons and will probably spend the next working out what I
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I just found an email dated over a month ago from a representative from the agency Atmosphere Communications asking me to contribute to a project that they are working on ‘on behalf of the Economist’ in SA. According to the representative, the project aims to set up a temporary South African “microsite” called www.theunexpected.co.za in
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From now until and August 15, 2009, Institute for the Future, Sun Microsystems, and Boing Boing invite young people from around the world, age 17 and under, to join us as we explore the frontiers of free and open innovation. The Digital Open: An Innovation Expo for Global Youth seeks projects in a variety of
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Friends Jess Hemerly and David Evan Harris have asked Simon Dingle and I (from SA, at least) to be judges in this awesome competition/community initiative from BoingBoing, Sun and the Institute for the Future where they work. As always, the devil is in the detail, and I really love the details of this competition –
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I’ve been trying to buy an image from Getty Images for the last few days and it’s been a harrowing experience. I’ve spent at least 2 hours trying to login to the system on Firefox. My relief was short lived when I eventually moved over to Safari: it appears that South Africa is not on
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The Publius Project (Essays & conversations about constitutional moments on the Net collected by the Berkman Center) has just published an essay from Ethan Zuckerman (originally written for the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on the Future of the Internet) about the need to address translation issues on the Internet in order to retain
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