kerkko.fi

I have noticed a huge trend not only in websites moving away from RSS to Twitter and Facebook, but removing it completely! This is NOT a good move for people who provide content to stay in touch with consumers. RSS is a way to consume a LOT of information very quickly, and store it in nice categories if you miss it. I can catch up with a small blog’s output at the end of the week and, if I so choose, read every article easily in one sitting.

Small blogs cut their own throat by taking away the RSS capability. Social media outlets are information colanders: 5% of your followers will see anything you post, and that is probably only within 20 minutes of posting. That is the way it is, and it is going to only get worse. Apart from email lists, RSS is the best way you can collect stuff across the internet to read quickly, and I am so irritated when that choice is taken from me.

http://feliciaday.com/blog/rss-rant

The newest government in the world was designed with help from comments on the internet. God help us all.

After Iceland’s economic collapse in 2008, the island nation decided it was time to write a new constitution, this one not based on its parent country of Denmark but rather made from the original ideas of its citizens.

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The Egyptian April 6 Youth Movement's PR man, Bassem Samir, turned activists into reporters by organizing a trip to the United States for a group of Egyptian activists, where they learned the ins and outs of video journalism. They then went back to Egypt and travelled to major cities secretly teaching more activists these techniques. Samir and his colleagues even trained activists to choose sites for their protests that would make good photo locations. They were also taught how to move their content after it had been shot: Photographers would hand off small memory flash cards at frequent intervals, switch cameras with activists posing as innocent bystanders, and send in camera teams in waves instead of all at once. These training programs led to the abundance of footage from Egypt that we have seen the past few weeks.

Several sources are reporting Egypt has shut off all internet access ahead of a new wave of anti-government protests are expected to begin. A major service provider for Egypt, Italy-based Seabone, reported early Friday that there was no internet traffic going into or out of the country after 12:30 a.m. local time. The Associated Press reports that the government has "deployed an elite special operations counterterrorism force" to the streets.

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/01/28/0114217/Egypt-Shuts-Off-All-Internet-Access

Blërg is a microblogging platform. Or maybe a miniblogging platform. Blërg is not sure. Blërg is a lot like Twitter, but aims to fix some of its idiosyncracies. Blërg's author finds it entertaining to anthropomorphize Blërg in the third person.

Is this a joke? Yes. No. Maybe. Blërg is an exercise in constructive satire — a fully functional service created in a fit of hubris to poke fun at Twitter's engineering. It's just for fun, but no one is going to keep you from using it seriously. :]

As the Web becomes more social, privacy becomes harder and harder to come by. People are over-sharing on Facebook and Twitter, broadcasting their whereabouts every ten steps on Foursquare and Gowalla, and uploading photos and videos of their most private moments to the Web for all to see. It’s easy to say that privacy is dead, we all live in public now, and just deal with it.

But things are a bit more complicated. It used to be that we lived in private and chose to make parts of our lives public. Now that is being turned on its head. We live in public, like the movie says (except via micro-signals not 24-7 video self-surveillance), and choose what parts of our lives to keep private. Public is the new default. Stowe Boyd calls this new state of exposure "publicy."

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/30/we-all-live-in-public/

Can the internet really bring about political change? Optimists point to the green movement in Iran, when the reformist campaign showed the power of new technologies to organise resistance and to break the stranglehold of censors on information; but the episode also showed that technology alone is not enough to secure democratic change.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/04/iran-politics-blogging-internet/print

I was on a Virgin America cross-country flight, and used its wireless connection to tweet about the fact that the guy next to me seemed to be the leader of a cult involving Axe body spray. A half-hour later, a steward approached me and said he wondered if I would be more comfortable with a seat in the bulkhead. @VirginAmerica, its corporate Twitter account, sent me a message afterward saying perhaps it should develop a screening process for Axe. It was creepy and comforting all at once.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/weekinreview/03carr.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/weekinreview/03carr.html