Philosophically, the open source concept borrows some selected elements from socialism. It upholds a notion of the "common good," it eschews the appearance of authority or hierarchy, and it often frowns upon capitalizing on one's own work, insofar as being exclusive. In practice, however, open source projects may look less...
In a sign of how strongly Internet-related issues can affect real-world politics, the German branch of the Pirate Party has won 15 seats in Berlin's regional parliament. The Pirate Party, which was was originally founded in Sweden in 2006, is a political party whose platform is built around issues like...
Companies and projects focusing on large-scale collaboration might want to start thinking about collaboration in a new way. Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody closed out the second day of LinuxCon North America 2011 with a contrarian look at collaboration. While many treat collaboration as a "love fest" or...
As popular uprisings have unfolded across the Middle East this year, much attention has been paid to the both underlying unrest that is causing them and the social media that often helps fuel them. In the background, receiving less of the limelight, lies another phenomenon: the growing community of musicians...
Geographic data provider SimpleGeo announced yesterday that it now offers US census data for any location an app queries for, along with all the other types of data about what surrounds that place. Gender breakout, commute time, age, housing prices and other data gathered by the U.S. Census Bureau's American...
When the iPad was launched, people across the geek-o-sphere condemned it as a dumb chunk of glass "for consumption only" - a tool incapable of facilitating content creation and possibly a threat to the future of human creativity. "The iPad is an attractive, thoughtfully designed, deeply cynical thing," wrote Alex...
On March 18, 2009, Omid Reza Mir Sayafi became the first blogger to die in prison. A culture blogger, he was imprisoned in the vicious Evin prison outside Tehran and either killed outright or at least allowed to die. He was followed on April 9 of this year by Bahraini...
The stories that we hear about teens and technology often border on hysteria. Technology is ruining their grades. It's ruining their eyesight. It's making them fat. It's exposing them to dangerous people, dangerous ideas. It encourages stupid, senseless behavior - the sorts of things that will ruin their lives forever.Sure,...
This week we successfully staged our latest event, the ReadWriteWeb 2WAY Summit. A series of conversations mirroring the two-way nature of the Web, we welcomed speakers like danah boyd, Jason Calacanis and Baratunde Thurston. We also introduced breakout sessions spotlighting specific issues and speed geeking demos by a host of...
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg once said, when asked when we would finally see an iPad app for the social networking service, "iPad isn't mobile. It's a computer, sorry." The implication was that there would never be a Facebook app for Apple's tablet computer, because, frankly, it didn't need one.Now, according to...
Data collected from customers is routinely anonymized and then sold or otherwise disseminated for research purposes. But does anonymization work? One particularly high profile case was Netflix's release of its customer data as part of its machine learning algorithm contest. According to Forbes' firewall blog, researchers were able to de-anonymize...
Online social networking sites have oftenbeen accusedof separating people from the real world, and providing them with the illusion of connection through virtual relationships which aren't the equivalent of their offline counterparts. But that's not actually the case, a new study says. Facebook users actually have more close relationships than non-users,...
Tomorrow is election day in Canada (and to any of my fellow Canucks thinking of giving the ballot box a miss this time, "maybe give Derek Miller a read).Most of the discussion I've seen online has been relatively polite, even muted, with only a few lapses into Godwin's Law territory...
Rumors have been circulating for some time now that Facebook is poised to make its entry into China - one of the few remaining countries in which the social network has no presence. As it stands, Facebook is currently blocked in China.But entry into China isn't as simple as unblocking...
Since Seth Priebatsch's keynote at this year's SXSW, excitement about adding a "game layer" to the world - liberating games from their traditional place on a computer screen and imposing game-like, social and situational constraints onto the real world (largely through mobile apps) - has positively erupted. There's been considerable...
At the end of March, The New York Times finally activated the paywall that it had announced a year earlier. The publication took a "porous" approach to charging users, letting readers access up to 20 articles a month for free and allowing for links from social networks like Facebook or...
At this week's SXSW conference in Austin, Texas, we got a sneak peek at a new Twitterized "newspaper" application for iPad called BroadFeed, just prior to its iTunes launch. Designed by marketing agency Organic, Inc., the app has publisher appeal because it won't "steal clicks" (i.e., page views) from content...
There is a lot to be learned from our tweets. Laugh if you will. Go ahead. But Twitter has become an important historical and cultural record. It's a site for real-time news and information, to be sure. The stuff of history with a capital H. Politics. Natural disasters. Revolution. It's...
Arguably, the upheaval, activism and revolutions in of the last two months may serve to counter what has been a longstanding stereotype: youth are largely apolitical. Moreover, those that do participate in politics and activism online do so in shallow ways, the so-called "slacktivism." But recent findings from a longitudinal...
Last week Rupert Murdoch's iPad-only newspaper The Daily was launched. The Daily is a newspaper app available to U.S. users on the iPad for 99c per week (the first 2 weeks are free; non-U.S. people can download it for trial via this method). The Daily has been touted as the...
Explore the latest in tech with our Tech News. We cut through the noise for concise, relevant updates, keeping you informed about the rapidly evolving tech landscape with curated content that separates signal from noise.
Explore tech impact in In-Depth Stories. Narrative data journalism offers comprehensive analyses, revealing stories behind data. Understand industry trends for a deeper perspective on tech's intricate relationships with society.
Empower decisions with Expert Reviews, merging industry expertise and insightful analysis. Delve into tech intricacies, get the best deals, and stay ahead with our trustworthy guide to navigating the ever-changing tech market.
