Spinuzzi: 1/21/07

Friday, January 26, 2007

Republican presidential candidates lag Democrats online

That's Micah Sifry's conclusion. (Via Instapundit)

Blogged with Flock

Thursday, January 25, 2007

"in Gingrich's world consumer health care should look more like Travelocity...."

That's Nina Eason, quoted in Dan Drezner's post on Newt Gingrich's possible presidential bid, with the perfectly succinct summation of how Gingrich wants to handle policy with low-friction technological solutions. I predict that Gingrich will not run for president, but will want a policymaking role in another candidate's campaign.

danieldrezner.com :: Daniel W. Drezner :: I'm intrigued -- does that means he's doomed?

technorati tags:gingrich, health-care, travelocity

Blogged with Flock

Not content with this universe, perhaps Google will create another one

TechCrunch reports a rumor that Google will use Google Earth and Google Sketch to launch a SecondLife competitor. As Jeff Jarvis noted yesterday, SL has a very high attrition rate, so the market may be ripe for a high-powered competitor.

technorati tags:secondlife, google-metaverse

Blogged with Flock

Open source studying -- or cheating?

Reporting from Davos, Jeff Jarvis tells this anecdote:

Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, told what he called a random story — it’s a perfect tale for the medium and the age — about empowering collaboration. His sophomore year at Harvard, while starting his company, he failed to study at all for one of his courses; he didn’t even go to class. So days before the final, he pulled all the pictures he needed to analyze off the web and put them up on a page online with boxes underneath. He emailed the class and said he’d put up a study guide. Sure enough, in moments, the students filled in their essential knowledge on the art. Zuckerberg got an A. And the prof told him that the grades in the class improved 10 percent over previous years.

BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Davos07: Media notes

technorati tags:facebook, studying

Blogged with Flock

Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Iraq playing cards and mediation

I'm discussing Vygotsky's insights on mediation in class today, and preparing for the lecture reminded me of the infamous playing cards that the US military issued troops after the Iraq invasion. See this picture of the cards from a random Flickr set.

What reminded me was that -- despite the message many took away from the deck, that capturing the Iraqi leadership was a "game" -- these playing decks present a strong example of what Vygotsky meant by mediation. In Mind in Society Ch. 3, he talks about how adolescents used colored cards to keep track of which colors they had used in a game as well as which colors were "forbidden." I imagine that these cards were used in much the same way by some troops, with captured leaders being removed from the deck. On the other hand, they were also used as playing cards, and in that capacity they allowed military work to infiltrate even the sparse leisure activities enjoyed by the soldiers. And I suppose that reminds us that mediation is a sociocultural phenomenon, and as such is never far from ideology.

technorati tags:vygotsky, mediation, iraq-playing-cards

Blogged with Flock

SecondLife at Davos

Jeff Jarvis is characteristically smart in reporting from Davos07. This bit about SecondLife caught my eye, partially because of the sharp attrition rate in SL and partially because of the prediction about what's on the horizon: haptic interfaces.

At this morning’s session, John Markoff admits that he hasn’t gotten past the opening and I admit I have not either. It’s small. They have 334,000 “regular visitors,” Kirkpatrick says - though that’s only people who come back after a month while 2.6 million have come and most, like Markoff and me, give up. But Gage makes an eloquent case for the virtual-world interface making a big difference in the future architecture, medicine, education, entertainment. “The moment that the haptic interface works in Second Life, it is going to double and double again…” Mitch Kapor, chairman of the Second Life parent, says that a haptic interface — that is, the ability to feel something virtual in the real world — is months away.

BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Davos07: Beyond Web 2.0

technorati tags:davos, secondlife, haptic

Blogged with Flock

Astroturfing Wikipedia

In Battleground Wikipedia, Michael Arrington calls out Microsoft for recently trying to astroturf Wikipedia: faced with pages on OpenOffice standards written largely by the competition at IBM, with what were believed to be factual errors, a Microsoft employee attempted to pay an Australian blogger to change the pages in Microsoft's errors. When the issue came out, people were of course appalled.

I'm surprised at my sympathy for Microsoft (see the original story), but nevertheless the behavior violates the emergent principles for interaction on Wikipedia and social networking sites more generally. Someone should do a thesis (and probably has already done one) on how these interaction principles are emerging and how they conflict with the old command-and-control PR at which Microsoft is so adept.

technorati tags:wikipedia, microsoft, astroturfing

Blogged with Flock

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

More on representations

Via Instapundit, Jules Crittenden writes the State of the Union speech that he thinks President Bush should give. Readers of the former incarnation of this blog may remember that Ariana Huffington did the same for Ned Lamont. It's not really a favor: Such speeches are of course a way for the (real) writer to tell off people who don't agree with them, while evading the responsibility of leadership -- the responsibility of forging consensus and coalitions (as well as maintaining decorum).

technorati tags:representations, politics

Blogged with Flock

Has your identity been stolen?

If you've been wondering that, TechCrunch points to a service that can help you find out.

technorati tags:identity-theft, ssn

Blogged with Flock

China takes down Marxists.org?

China nukes Marxists.org is the headline over at BoingBoing. Marxists.org, if you haven't been there, is an extensive compedium of Marxist writings, including Marx, Engels, Vygotsky, Ilyenkov, Mao, and others. It's not clear, of course, who is actually perpetrating the attack -- below the headline, it just says that the attacks are originating "within China." Either way, I hope they stop: this compedium is useful for Marxists and non-Marxists alike.

technorati tags:netwar, cyberwar, marxists, china

Blogged with Flock