Reading blogs #16
As part of global catching up, I put together another digest. While rather long, it still misses many interesting things from the past month or so. Hope you will find something interesting in all those links.
I missed the boat to share some interesting stories about the use of technology in the developments that followed the Iranian election, but there is something else rather interesting and recent that I found intriguing. I have posted some thoughts about Amazon Kindle before and even though I started questioning my position a little bit, they just supplied me with additional food for thought.
“Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others” (via Joho) – A NYT article about Amazon removing some books from people’s Kindles because the publishers have changed their minds about distributing digital copies. While the story in itself is not at all funny, there is an aspect of irony to it – the withdraw books were George Orwell’s “1984″ and “Animal Farm.”
“Amazon Removes Books from Kindle, Exposing the True Concern: They’re Watching, They’re in Control“- Michael Zimmer is sharing some thoughts about the accident and is drawing broader concerns about the TOS of the service.
“Orwellian indeed” – Here are Jonathan Zittrain’s thoughts about the accident where he highlights the fact that content is leased in the cloud rather than purchased, which in turn raises an additional set of concerns.
To me this story links well to a broader conversation about consumer electronic producers building proprietary, locket devices, which make their users sort of hostages. Apologies to my Mac-loving friends, but Apple is one of the main players in this playground – “Apple hands Palm a problem and gets slapped by Microsoft” – the Palm part of the story is relevant to my argument here.
Interesting reports, numbers, and visualizations
“Home Broadband Adoption 2009” – Pew report that shows that more Americans use broadband even though it got more expansive compared to just a year ago.
“Report: kids’ use of tech growing exponentially” – I clearly remember that I saw a link to this article on somebody’s FB, but I cannot remember on whose (so, sorry for not providing proper credit). This is an Arstechnica article summarizing a report from NPD Group with some numbers about communication technology adoption among the US teens. I think there are two particularly interesting observations. First, kids are the trend setters in the families when it comes to communication technology. Second, the girls adopt laptops and mobile phones on a higher rate than the boys, which I think is not trivial finding (for example see danah boyd’s notes on perceptions of computing).
“Political Regime Characteristics and Transitions, 1800-2007” (via Thoughts about K4D) – A brief introduction of the Polity IV project at the Center for Systemic Peace and George Mason University with link to the raw data. Looks pretty interesting.
“Factbook eXplorer” (via FlowingData) – OECD launched an interesting tool that allows one to play with their statistical data about the member states.
“2008 Briefing Booklet” – of the World Information Access Project. Unfortunately, the report has only a few soundbites, but it would be so great if the authors would make the actual data available for exploration and perhaps even replication of their studies (they did it with other studies in the past).
“A 10 percentage-point increase in broadband results in a 1.3 % increase in economic growth” – Cisco’s summary of a recent World Bank report on information and communication for development; unfortunately, the report itself is available only partially online.
Some country data:
- Brazil – Mobile penetration
- Cuba – Teledensity
- Czech Republic – Mobile advertising
- Europe – Broadband
- Global – Telcos competition
- Global – Wireless
- Hungary – Mobile penetration (decline)
- India – Telecom market
- Indonesia – Telecom market
- Latin America – Telecom markets
- Lithuania – Telecom market
- Pakistan – Mobile penetration
- South Africa – SIM card usage
- Turkey – Telecom market
- USA – Broadband
And finally, in the spirit of the recent Twitter-mania, here are “100 Tips, Tools, and Resources for Twitter Research” to fool around with.
Interesting thoughts, ideas, opinions, and discussions
“The end of journalism” and “The Challenges of Online News Micropayments and Subscriptions” – Robert Picard discusses journalism and newspaper business models.
“Students Without Borders” – WP article about various initiatives where school student in the US connect online with their peers abroad in an organized fashion.
“Google and the Evolution of Search” (via The Googlization of Everything) – A series of three articles about Google and how it works. I learned a number of new things there.
“One Laptop Per Child: Vision vs. Reality” – An ACM article reviewing the OLPC project. Unfortunately, you will need to have a subscription to read it, but I think most universities should have one.
“Popularity of Facebook and MySpace changes, but SES differences in use persist” – Eszter Hargittai is sharing some preliminary findings from her study of college students’ use of the Internet; in this update: Facebook is gaining popularity, while MySpace is loosing it, but ethnic and racial differences in usage persist as well as differences based on parents’ education.
“Guide to Measuring the Information Society” – The OECD has published a document with definitions of various aspects of what is considered the ‘information society’ – good food for thought. And on a related note – “The real story behind broadband household penetration rates.”
More on the matter of definitions. As the broadband stimulus in the US is moving forward, a debate is starting to take place about the definition of broadband in the plan. Here are two critical opinions: “Why The BTOP/BIP NOFA Definition of Broadband Is Inadequate” and “Back to the future for broadband in America” – both seems to be stunned by the lack of aspiration of the technical requirements.
“Broadband Over Power Lines” – A very detailed report (PDF) from the OECD covering both the technology and the regulatory issues (have not read it all, but it looks promising).
“Digital Britain final report” (via ICT Statistics) – More detail on the UK ambitious plan of having universal access to broadband by 2012.
“When You Hear ‘Security,’ Think ‘National Sovereignty’” – Hans Klein is taking a critical look at the recent Internet policy rhetoric of Obama administration; I think this post helps us think about the importance of studying the discourse of the policy making, particularly in such a dynamic area as Internet Governance (and in light of the background of the incoming ICANN CEO).
“What are TLDs Good For?” – John Levine is raising some questions about the need for new top level domains (like .com, .org, and .info). I have to say that I share some of his questions, particularly about whether “anyone will use a TLD rather than a search engine as a directory” and there seems to be a general agreement in the comments.
“Sharing ICANN Can Be Win-Win for the United States” and “Careful What You Wish For: Why ICANN “Independence” is a Bad Idea” – As the expiration date of the MOU between ICANN and the DOC approaches, I think we will see more and more analysis of pros and cons of changing the control structure of ICANN.
“The poor connection between internet advertising and newspaper woes” – Robert Picard shared some data about newspaper revenue from classifieds and online advertising, which started an interesting discussion in the comments. What do you think on the subject?
Simply Interesting, Fun, and Coll Stuff
“5 Great Microsoft Web Services You Probably Don’t Use” – Is Microsoft loosing its status as the ultimate evil? But seriously, some of these services are useful.
“A plant that ‘twits’” – Veronica and I got a little bit into Arduino recently and this is a really nice example of how it can be used creatively. And here is another use for it – “Precocious Baby Starts Twittering from the Womb.”
“If Aliens Were Tuning Into Our Television Frequencies…” – A fun and graphical trip back in time.
“Collect Data About Yourself with Twitter” – A friendly invitation to self-survelance using Twitter (I am trying to think what practical uses it may have).
“Life and Internet” – The post itself is in Hebrew, but the point of the post is a little collection of Internet-related caricatures – enjoy! :)
And finally, here is the future as it is envisioned by Microsoft (everything is connected to everything and no privacy whatsoever) (via netcraft Bytes):
