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.
Parsing Chinese political memes
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
Let the bidding begin: new gTLDs visualized
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 …
Exploring Chinese internet censorship
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. Back in May, Nieman Lab reported on …
The once and future grail: Interop
Thanks to Nathan Matias for a terrific liveblog of Berkman’s Interop book event with John Palfrey and Urs Gasser last night. The need for interoperability isn’t new (see Cesar Brea’s 2002 post on Competition and the Role of Standards) but the scale at which it can be achieved in a internet-enabled world of open APIs is dramatically …
What will gamification look like in 2020?
Pew Internet recently issued a report featuring divergent opinions on gamification, and asked respondents to consider how gamification might fit into people’s day-to-day digital lives by 2020. I agreed more with the statement that it would be “implemented in many new ways for education, health, work, and other aspects of human connection.” My take is …
What makes a video go viral?
When people starting calling/texting/emailing me on Monday about Harvard baseball’s inspired version of “Call Me, Maybe,” I had a sense it might captivate people – but I didn’t predict how much. The video’s been picked up everywhere from Good Morning America to New York Daily News to Mashable, with views closing in on 880,000 at …
Getting ready for the campus tsunami
The early Web radically democratized culture, but now in the media and elsewhere you’re seeing a flight to quality. The best American colleges should be able to establish a magnetic authoritative presence online. David Brooks, The Campus Tsunami
Tying transaction to check-in
The friction inherent to the foursquare check-in becomes a harder sell in an attention economy full of competing distractions – the value had better be high. Today, foursquare announced a partnership with OpenTable. Marrying the “Explore” feature’s social reviews by friends with the transaction and history of OpenTable’s reservation system is a big win, especially for travelers. …
edX is here
edX is a joint partnership between The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University to offer online learning to millions of people around the world. edX will offer Harvard and MIT classes online for free. Through this partnership, the institutions aim to extend their collective reach to build a global community of online learners …