• How to create a web form to talk with Google Docs
  (tags: howto googledocs spreadsheet forms)
• Dance Off with the Star Wars Stars
  so geeky, so fun
  (tags: video starwars)

The folks who brought you Frozen Grand Central now bring you Human Mirror. These ideas are great and they do a good job with them. Fun stuff!

• What Mainstream Publishers Don’t Want You to Know About Door-to-Door Magazine Sales
  (Houston Press) That kid at your door with a magazine order form will tell you a story — part sad, part hopeful. The truth will be infinitely worse than you can imagine.
  (tags: article scam sales marketing business fraud)

• At Google Finance, Google’s profit miss not news
  (IR Web Report)
  (tags: news google gatekeeping)
• Unrepentant on Facebook? Expect jail time
  (AP) how prosecutors are using pictures from SNS such as Facebook and MySpace in court cases
  (tags: article crime facebook myspace sns law photos)

Huh? It’s a play about “a group of outsourced Japanese Ninjas hired by China to infiltrate the American Psyche by taking on roles in the Media, Pop Culture, and Politics”. Go see it at the Zipper Factory Theater in NYC on Saturday, July 26th at 10:30pm. It’s a fun, fast-paced, multi-media production that will appeal to the readers of this blog. (It’s also directed by one of my oldest and dearest friends.) I thought the actors were great, for example, they were superb with the various accents (from BBC anchor to ninja).

The play also has an improv segment with guests, two this time: Paul Rieckhoff (Executive Director and Founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, and author of Chasing Ghosts, a personal account and critique of America’s war on terror) and Hunter Bell (a writer and performer of the new Broadway show [title of show]).

While you wait to be seated, you can enjoy a drink at the bar or simply engage in some people-watching from one of the comfy/funky seats in the waiting area. Also, the two guests will be around after the play so this is really a play-plus-party event, all for $20.

• Adeona
  just in case your laptop gets stolen
  (tags: software security privacy)

• GMail works with eBay and PayPal to fight against phishing messages
  unless a message is really from ebay.com or paypal.com, it shouldn’t show up in GMail inboxes (or even spam folders) at all
  (tags: email phishing security gmail ebay paypal)
• XKCD-style political fundraising cartoon
  excellent, if I was eligible to donate, I’d give him the $8.34 he’s asking for
  (tags: politics cartoon funny)

• Songza
  music search engine (e.g. plays songs from YouTube)
  (tags: music search-engines)

• Sugata Mitra
  researcher behind hole-in-the-wall PC experiments in India
  (tags: people research)
• BackNoise
  for backchannel conversations
  (tags: tools social backchannel)
• Infogami
  easy Web site editing
  (tags: tools web-design)

• Wundrbar
  “next generation search bar” – command line that accesses your various accounts
  (tags: search-engines search web20)
• Jooce
  Web-based desktop
  (tags: desktop files web20 tools storage)
• What I Wish Id Done Differently – Caring for Elderly Parents
  (NYTimes blog)
  (tags: aging health elderly care healthcare)

• Widgenie
  tool to add data graphs to a Web site (or simply distribute direct link to graph)
  (tags: widgets data visualization sharing)
• Identi.ca
  open-source “microblogging” tool, Twitter alternative
  (tags: twitter open-source microblogging)

I am rushing off to meetings, but this is disturbing news and I figured folks around here would want to know about it.

From the Electronic Frontier Foundation by Kurt Opsahl (posted July 2nd):

Yesterday, in the Viacom v. Google litigation, the federal court for the Southern District of New York ordered Google to produce to Viacom (over Google’s objections):

all data from the Logging database concerning each time a YouTube video has been viewed on the YouTube website or through embedding on a third-party website

The court’s order grants Viacom’s request and erroneously ignores the protections of the federal Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), and threatens to expose deeply private information about what videos are watched by YouTube users. The VPPA passed after a newspaper disclosed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork’s video rental records. As Congress recognized, your selection of videos to watch is deeply personal and deserves the strongest protection.

Rest of EFF post

Various MSM sources are just starting to roll out their own coverage (e.g., BBC).

I guess those – must be many – who watch YouTube without a user ID or without logging in to the service have less to lose, but forget the privacy of the more avid and loyal users.

As to the source code, Google does get to keep that. It’s interesting to see which news item (the user ID issue vs source code) is being covered where.

• Tab Groups: Firefox Extension
  group tabs by type in browser (uses up some browser real-estate)
  (tags: firefox extension)

• What Do Laboratory Experiments Tell Us About The Real World? [pdf]
  (tags: research ToRead methods)
• Mike Curb Creative Campus Program at Vanderbilt University
  “the first national research program on creativity, the arts, and higher education”
  (tags: research creativity arts education)

This ArsTechnica write-up of some recent research of mine has received numerous votes on the recommendation site Digg in the last few hours. I wonder if it will make the front page of Digg, although as a Twitter contact of mine noted, since it’s not a top-10 list (nor, if I might add, does it cover Google or Apple), that may be unlikely.

The post reports on a study in which we found that male college students are more likely than their female counterparts to share creative content online even though both men and women in the sample are equally likely to create such content. However, when controlling for online skill, the gender differences in posting go away.

Gina Walejko and I published the paper “The Participation Divide: Content Creation and Sharing in the Digital Age” this Spring in the journal Information, Communication and Society. We examine the extent to which college students share creative content online and whether we can identify any systematic differences by user background. In particular, we looked at whether students create and share the following types of material: poetry/fiction, artistic photography, music, and video (both completely own and remixed in the case of the latter two), including both private and public sharing.

Administering a paper-pencil survey on a diverse group of over a thousand first-year college students at the University of Illinois, Chicago in 2007, we found that men are significantly more likely to share their creative output online than women. This was especially true for video (with 40% of men sharing such content compared to 15% of women), but holds for the other types of material as well.

Curious to see what explains these differences in sharing, we looked at whether various measures of Internet experience account for the divergences. We controlled for years of use, frequency of Internet use, number of Internet access locations, and online skill. Of these four, skill was a significant predictor of sharing activity. In fact, once skill is in the model, gender is no longer a significant predictor of posting one’s material.

There may be additional issues going on for which, I’m afraid, we have no data. For example, women may be more concerned about privacy issues or the critiques their content may receive. I’m working with another student on doing some qualitative follow-up work on this aspect of the question.

There are some more details in a press release Northwestern put out about the study or feel free to send me a note for a copy of the full paper.

• Confabb: The Conference Community
  (tags: conferences social tools events)
• Let It Be Glass
  dichroic pendants, fused glass jewelry
  (tags: products-services jewelry crafts)
• 800 CEO Read
  buying books in bulk at a discount
  (tags: books products-services)
• ‘Pro-Life’ Drugstores Market Beliefs: No Contraceptives For Chantilly Shop
  “[A]nyone who wants condoms, birth control pills or the Plan B emergency contraceptive will be turned away.” – Including condoms? Unbelievable!
  (tags: news article health contraception rights)
• World Mosaic Created From 1001 Web 2.0 Logos
  world map of logos, all clickable to go to the 1001 sites
  (tags: cool fun maps visualization web20)

• Walk Score
  how walkable is your neighborhood? (relevant for both health and environmental reasons)
  (tags: health environment walking maps)
• Berlin, the Big Canvas
  (NYTimes) – thinking about visiting soon…
  (tags: travel germany berlin article)
• How to create a glass pendant with the Fusing Fun Kit
  (tags: video howto crafts)
• Andre Rieu – Hava Nagila
  (tags: video audio music)

If you have some time to kill or need to introduce someone to Internet memes then take a look at this timeline. [Link no longer works.] Zoom in for some of the less visible videos. Any of your favorites missing?
UPDATE: Well, that didn’t last long. A commenter notes that the page is no longer accessible. Here is a screenshot. Use of Dipity for this was interesting since showing all this on a time line adds something to the list.

A lot of people I know are heading to Budapest these days (whether for pure touristy reasons or for one of the many meetings being held there) so using the My Maps feature on Google Maps, I’ve compiled some annotated recommendations for visitors. These include pastry shops mostly visited by locals with desserts to die for. No, seriously, these are a must and visiting the city without going to some of these would be sad and wasteful.

I also include a pointer to a grocery store with the goal of finding the Hungarian snack Túró Rudi (details: check the dairy section for items that look like a candy bar in a red-dotted wrapper). I would say it’s the most missed item by Hungarians abroad. It’s basically lemony sweet farmer’s cheese coated in dark chocolate. Yum! Wikipedia conveniently has more info, not that words can possibly convey the experience. Some companies new to the country in the ’90s have tried to create other versions (e.g., with fruit filling or milk chocolate coating), but I would rather not even acknowledge those as they’re ridiculous imitations. On the topic of grocery stores, someone recently complained that they couldn’t find any fruits and veggies in them. That’s because other than the gigantic supermarkets, these tend to be sold in separate venues.

I didn’t bother listing most of the traditional sights included in guide books, numerous Web sites and guides will point those out. I do highlight, however, an incredibly touching Holocaust memorial on the Danube (first link on my map). It’s relatively new and not something one would stumble upon by chance, yet definitely worth visiting and now you know where to find it.

Anyone who is familiar with Clay Shirky’s writing won’t be surprised to hear that in his new book Here Comes Everybody, he does a very nice job of discussing how recent technological innovations are allowing for more and more “organizing without organization”. The book is a great mix of engaging descriptions about examples of how people come together in the pursuit of various goals and interests, and a deeper more conceptual examination of how such phenomena are changing in light of recent advances in technology.

I was invited to participate in a discussion of this book over on the TPM Café Book Club and am sorry to come to the conversation so late due to some travel having thus missed out on much interesting back-and-forth. Nonetheless, I wanted to add a bit to the conversation.

The issue I want to raise has to do with questions of inequality like much of the earlier discussion, although I approach this from a somewhat different angle than what’s been presented. While there is no question that new opportunities are allowing more folks to organize and more voices to be heard, they seem to privilege those already in more advantageous positions. I’d like to see more discussion of what circumstances in particular allow those with fewer resources to benefit from these new opportunities.

Let me take a step back as I describe where I am going with this. I will start by approaching it from the point of view of what ends up being a successful organizing (“without organization”, that is:), where success is understood as intended levels of engagement by participants and the extent to which goals are accomplished.

What is it that makes one effort more successful than another? Why does rallying people around one issue result in so much more active participation than getting people excited about another matter? Is it not so much about the topic, rather, about the organizing that yields a different outcome? And if it is the latter then while traditional organization may no longer be necessary, it’s worth thinking about what aspects of new forms of organizing yield more or less successful outcomes.

Success with organizing is related to attention allocation. As Herbert Simon so aptly noted many years ago:

“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” (1971)

New tools don’t change the fact that there are only so many hours in the day and so much attention that people have to give to any one type of activity. So who with what topic or goal has more of a chance at attracting attention?

This is where inequality comes in: Those more likely to attract attention to their content and activities are those who are already more privileged in one way or another. For example, those with more skills in understanding the new tools have a better chance of reaching out to and mobilizing enough initial interest to achieve beneficial outcomes than those who lack an understanding of these new opportunities. Alternatively, those with people in their networks who have the necessary skills (and time) will have a better chance at this than those who lack knowledgeable friends and family.

This is precisely the issue at hand concerning the story in Clay’s book regarding the lost/stolen cell phone and what followed in tracking it down. At the Supernova 2008 conference where Clay and I both spoke earlier this week, an attendee told a very similar story of his own, although this concerned a stolen laptop. The point is that Clay is right, such situations are increasingly common. However, like the woman in the book, the man at the conference was also one with considerable resources – not just financial, but also in terms of human and social capital – that likely made him a good candidate for benefiting from new tools.

I don’t mean to suggest that Clay ignored these issues of inequality in the book as he explicitly offers relevant caveats throughout the writing. Nonetheless, I still think the issue is worth highlighting as I think it is a crucial part of the story that is not understood very well and deserves more discussion.

While it is certainly the case that new technologies, tools and services are leveling the playing field, existing societal position and resources still matter. The question is: when do they matter more or less? Under what circumstances do people with less resources still manage to benefit from the new tools in ways that would have been difficult earlier? What are the examples of mobilization that do not involve people with PhDs, ones with noteable techie know-how or one’s with considerable financial resources either themselves or among those in their networks? There are such examples, certainly, but it would be interesting to see systematically what it is that unites them. What commonality is there among such cases that suggests a true leveling of the playing field that goes beyond allocating more opportunities to those who are already considerably privileged? (On a sidenote, these issues are similar to the ones I raised while discussing Yochai Benkler’s book The Wealth of Networks.)

Because the book focuses on examples of successful organizing, it is hard to discern why some attempts at it fail. (To be sure, Clay also discusses failed projects, for example, in the open-source software movement, but his main focus is the overall effect of such sofware on the industry as a whole.) Of course, failures are harder to find, especially lacking any organization of such information. Nonetheless, a deeper exploration of this side of things would help in understanding the extent to which the playing field is truly being leveled across all societal segments thanks to emerging new tools.