shouting loudly

It’s been fascinating to watch the Wisconsin protests unfurl over the past 10 days.  Governor Scott Walker has chosen to stuff his budget repair proposal full of Trojan horse provisions, including “emergency” power to sell off state assets through no-bid contracts to his favorite corporate backers and an end to collective bargaining rights for all [...]

Note: I’ll be spending the next few months writing a book about the new generation of internet-mediated political groups.  This post will be my first “book blog,” in which I try out new ideas that I’m planning to include in the manuscript.  Book blog pieces will be less tied to the politics-of-the-day, and will be [...]

Markos Moulitsas of DailyKos announced Monday that he is suing Research 2000 for fraudulant activity, based on a statistical analysis conducted by Mark Grebner, Michael Weissman, and Jonathan Weissman.  I won’t comment on the details of their study here — Nate Silver has done a much better job of that already — but instead want [...]

Scrolling through Twitter this morning, I noticed the following tweet from Tom Mattzie (@tommatzzie), formerly of MoveOn.org: I hope all my progressive groups and friends remember #Haiti today. I’d be bummed if they didn’t. Mattzie has backed up the talk himself, pledging to match up to $1,000 in disaster relief donations from his fellow twitter-donators.  [...]

Professor Lessig is presenting on Institutional Corruption today at the Kennedy School as his first public appearance at Harvard since his return a few months ago. Professor Lessig likes to introduce three ideas to frame his talk today: 1) influence, 2) independence and 3) responsibility. Relying on his framework of the four modalities of control [...]

“Moore’s Law,” first articulated in 1965, tells us that we will see a doubling in transistor capacity roughly every two years.  As predictions go, it has proven surprisingly durable, and is a handy conceptual framework for understanding why the internet is evolving so quickly. Consider: when I was in college a decade ago, I carried [...]

Do you want to know how Wikipedia was able to become such an incredible success? Who the people behind its success are? The best book to learn about the history and the culture of Wikipedia is Andrew Lih’s new book “The Wikipedia Revolution“, launched last week. He was at Harvard last night to give a [...]

Most of you perhaps don’t know that I am writing my dissertation about Global Voices. But this is an incredible group of people who make sure that parts of the world that otherwise gets ignored in the mainstream media get their voices heard. They are currently looking for donations that will help them sustain the [...]

When too many people own a resource, the resource will be underused. Cooperation will break down, wealth will be lost. That is today’s message of Michael Heller who is at Berkman to talk about his new book, the Gridlock Economy. Explaining the economic meltdown as an example of a gridlock economy, he suggests that in [...]