With the help of Eric Tyler, I’ve pulled out a few more “Best of” posts from our (last) year of blogging (oops, we’re a few days into 2012, but we’re making this work!): Will Facebook Delete Sarah Lou’s Account? What happens when activists using pseudonyms are asked (or forced?) to use their real names on social [...]

In the often misunderstood world of digital activism, 2011 will be remembered as a landmark year. Historic revolutions, turbulent aftermaths, fierce debates and misunderstood claims were rampant. While the digital activism idea space was abuzz with cyber-utopians and constant rebuttals from cyber-pessimists, few conversations focused on understanding the evolving field itself. Looking back at the [...]

Making money the old-fashioned way [UPDATED] We idolize the billionaire geniuses of the Internet, people like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, and Jeff Bezos of Amazon.  We associate their companies with innovation and creativity and, on a technical level, this is true.  But financially these firms have not innovated.  [...]

The field of digital activism is too often the victim of tunnel vision.  People start with case studies and news stories and try to understand outward, but the explanatory light cast by one digital activism case on another is fairly dim: If we really understand what happened in post-election Tehran in 2009, that doesn’t mean [...]

I was in a bit of a lull last month, so I think a multi-link post is in order. Zepynep Tufekci’s new principles for pro-am journalism: So, should we give up on social-media based journalism because it is messier and more demanding? On the contrary, as I argued, it provides us with a important resource [...]

By Travis Mayo, Program Analyst at USAID Bureau for Global Health Note: The authors’ views expressed in this article do not reflect the views of the United States Agency for International Development or the United States Government Like a large ship, government agencies rarely change course quickly.  However, when a new path is set there [...]

Today I watched The Name of the Rose, a gloomy film about a medieval Sherlock Holmes named William of Baskerville (just in case the Holmes connection was not otherwise evident). It got me thinking about inductive and deductive reasoning. In inductive reasoning we move from the aggregation of  discrete observations to create a theory that [...]

Ever since I learned of its existence, I’ve been irked by Wathiqah.com, a website created by the Stanford-based project Cloud to Street, the online marketing app makers at IdeaScale, volunteer programmers, and potential presidential candidate Mohamed ElBaradei.  The goal of the site is  “to crowdsource discussion of the fundamental human rights that should be protected [...]

[cross-posted from The Engine Room] The cracking open of political spaces in Egypt in the wake of the 2011 uprising in Egypt, has led to a political landscape marked by a “publish, then filter” model. The issue now isn’t whether an activist has launched the right new party, new initiative, new archive, new campaign, or [...]

In the wake of the Arab Spring, there are few dichotomies left in mass media.   Producer and Consumer?  Dead.  Blogs started the battle years ago, when the “former audience” began to produce their own content.  Now the former audience creates content not only for one another but also for broadcast media.  Where would the [...]