[W]hat if the name was created by an open source community, without the financial resources to mount a challenge? I have some standing there, because I played a role in establishing blogs. How does Google get the right to capture all the goodwill generated in the word blog?
Dave Winer quoted in Giga Om on the risks inherent to corporate use of generic words in new ICANN gTLDs
Cloud Terrace is astonishing — it’s a wire mesh cloud with 10,000 crystals hovering over a reflecting pool at Dumbarton Oaks, a DC-based research library and collection (and host of the WWII era Dumbarton Oaks conference).
Curious what else they get up to down there? Researchers are now blogging some of the pieces in their collection.
Exploring tragic, funny, and clever Chinese political memes — fascinating observations about “memes as the street art of the censored web” by An Xiao Mina recorded at Personal Democracy Forum
Today’s the big reveal for who applied for a new gTLD. Looks like brands went for proprietary names: Barclaycard, XEROX (really?) and nominal nonprofit AARP, and some of the more compelling generics. Above is the list of English language gTLD applications visualized with wordle. The larger words indicate where there are multiple applicants, which results in bidding — good luck to those vying for .home or .app!
Lots of interesting thinking in Cambridge in the last few weeks about internet censorship in China. For those of you who missed it, last Monday, June 4 marked the 23rd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests and spurred online discussion about what was and wasn’t clearing the censors.
I think a lot about ways in which what we see is victim to implicit filtering – captured well by Eli Pariser in The Filter Bubble – and it’s fascinating to see different ways censorship as an explicit goal plays out.