HOWTO for Social Movements
I recently read chapter five of Castell’s Communication Power. Here is an overly simplified, half-joking summary of it in the form of a half-joking Linux HOWTO. HOWTO create a successful social...
View ArticleQR codes: technology as fashion
In a recent trip to New York I saw a huge QR code on the side of a building. The QR code was a pointer to an ad for apartments. I wondered how often people take out their phones and use those QR codes....
View ArticleProject Idea: an Internet Rube Goldberg Machine
The other day I was chatting with some folks at Berkman and this idea came up as a possibly fun and quirky experimental project. It’s not fully fleshed out, but maybe this can inspire more...
View ArticleResponsible Drama
I would like to argue that drama, used responsibly, can be a positive factor for building online communities. In this paper boyd and colleagues describe it as the “skirmishes and their digital traces”...
View ArticleTrip report
I’ve been to a couple of conferences and presentations lately so I wanted to write a trip report, but then I thought it would be more useful to summarize it in terms of the most popular topics I...
View ArticleTwitter Syntax
I have been reading a lot of Tweets in Spanish lately. One thing that I find particularly interesting is how a lot of people use a different retweeting syntax is. For example, a lot of retweets look...
View ArticleIs Anonymous vetting presidential candidates?
The group called Anonymous Hispano, the Spanish-speaking branch of the famous hacker collective, issued a statement a few weeks ago announcing that, despite their efforts, they “could not find any...
View ArticleMentoring Crowd Workers
Traditional workplaces spend a fair amount of effort mentoring and training their workforce as a way to increase the quality of their work and their job satisfaction. Does mentoring crowd workers also...
View ArticlePanel discussion on the #YoSoy132: Mexico’s Networked Social Movement – Sep...
In collaboration with the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, Microsoft Research New England is hosting a discussion about the #YoSoy132 activist movement. Open to the public. What: #YoSoy132: Mexico’s...
View ArticleScientist and activist gone missing in Mexico after fearing for his safety
Here is my attempt at capturing some of the information I have read in Spanish on the apparent forced disappearance of Aleph Jiménez, a scientist at CICESE (one of the leading research centers in...
View ArticleClassism, Accountability, and Social Media
Even before YouTube and Twitter, incidents like the videotaping and public release of Rodney King’s case of police brutality gave a glimpse of what is now a common occurrence with social media:...
View ArticleTurn This into That: a Remixing Experiment
Two sides of social production: crowdsourcing and remixing Networked technologies have facilitated two forms of social production: remixing and crowdsourcing. Remixing has been typically associated...
View ArticleThe Cost of Collaboration for Code and Art
Does collaboration result in higher quality creative works than individuals working alone? Is working in groups better for functional works like code than for creative works like art? Although these...
View ArticleThe New War Correspondents: The Rise of Civic Media Curation in Urban Warfare
A few weeks ago, while I was visiting a city in northern Mexico, I witnessed some of the drug-related violence people have been experiencing almost every day: several bodies were hung from a bridge and...
View ArticleWhoo.ly: Facilitating Information Seeking For Hyperlocal Communities Using...
You hear sirens blaring in your neighborhood and, naturally, you are curious about the cause of commotion. Your first reaction might be to turn on the local TV news or go online and check the local...
View ArticleThe Remixing Dilemma: The Trade-Off Between Generativity and Originality
This post was written with Benjamin Mako Hill. It is a summary of a paper just published in American Behavioral Scientist. You can also read the full paper: The remixing dilemma: The trade-off between...
View ArticleHow is the Brazilian Uprising Using Twitter?
By Andrés Monroy-Hernández and Emma Spiro More than a million Brazilians have joined protests in over 100 cities throughout Brazil in the past few weeks. Since their early beginning as a “Revolta do...
View ArticleThe 6 things you missed if you didn’t attend the ICWSM Town Hall meeting
This post was written live and collaboratively during the town hall meeting using Newspad. 1. Growth in submissions, flat attendance, slightly cheaper 349 papers, up from 232 last year. Total...
View ArticleThe 3 things you can learn about your neighborhood using Whooly
Along with my colleagues Shelly Farnham, and Michal Lahav—and our interns Yuheng Hu, Emma Spiro, and Nate Matias—we have been exploring ways of discovering and fostering latent neighborhood information...
View ArticleMultilingual Interactions through Machine Translation—Numbers from Socl
For the past two years, social media platforms have been rolling out machine translation in the hopes of enabling multilingual interactions. However, the people interacting in these platforms often...
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