Could you imagine life without Facebook?

Progressive Media Concepts recently posted an interesting question: What Would You Do If Facebook Shut Down Tomorrow? One I recovered from my blackout (it’s my body’s automatic self-defense mechanism when faced with the unthinkable) I read on, curious to...

Ideas for the future of e-books

I enjoyed watching this video by blogger and digg founder Kevin Rose about his wishlist for e-book features. I found Kevin’s video via a terrific round-up on social e-books at jjprojects

The biggest WikiLeaks disclosure yet

The cover story of yesterday’s New York Times Magazine is a must-read piece about the New York Times’ experience covering the stories that emerged from the WikiLeaks source material. Editor Bill Keller talks about how the Times approached this unusual...

Calling all geeks: Are you ready for the GeekOff challenge?

Working as a person of the female persuasion in the world of tech, I mostly do pretty well being surrounded by a lot of guys a lot of the time. My Women’s Studies degree may not have fully prepared me for my day-to-day life, but I’ve found that I enjoy the...

Making sense of the Wikileaks backlash

The past week has seen a series of denial-of-service attacks on services like Paypal and Amazon, which have been characterized as a hacker retaliation for how these services have treated Wikileaks. Since I wrote my dissertation on hacktivism — politically...

Social media insights from recent research

The more time college students spend online, the worst they do in their first semester….but they end up with better social lives. Facebook activism doesn’t detract from offline activism: people who are politically active on Facebook are actually more...

Can documentation save the world?

Yesterday I wrapped up my 2010 Home Media Overhaul and Documentation Festival with a blog post on why to watch TV. But I left another unanswered question on the table: why document your TV setup? Documentation is somewhere between a neurosis and a calling for me. As...

The next frontier in hierarchy-busting with social media

Lots of organizations suffer from the pain of incorporating social media into command-and-control structures. The very structures that were once a source of organizational efficiencies are not only superceded by technologies that make those efficiences irrelevant;...

Wanted: LadyJoiners

My life is basically a series of social network and web app sign-ups, with a few friends, colleagues and tasks stuffed into the interstitial moments. So the arrival this week of Path — what some people might consider YAFSN (Yet Another F*ing Social Network)...