NYRSF Editorial Blooming (on negative reviewing as performance)

http://www.nyrsf.com/2004/07/nyrsf-editorial-192-blooming-on-negative-reviwin...

[I now] suggest some hard-won guidelines for responsible reviewing. For instance: First, as in Hippocrates, do no harm. Second, never stoop to score a point or bite an ankle. Third, always understand that in this symbiosis, you are the parasite. Fourth, look with an open heart and mind at every different kind of book with every change of emotional weather because we are reading for our lives and that could be love gone out the window or a horseman on the roof. Fifth, use theory only as a periscope or a trampoline, never a panopticon, a crib sheet, or a license to kill. Sixth, let a hundred Harolds Bloom.
(John Leonard The New York Times. 18 July 2004).

It’s All Over Now, Violet Blue

http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/its_all_over_now_violet_blue.php

Sometime last year, Xeni Jardin, the co-editor of the popular blog Boing Boing, erased sex columnist Violet Blue from the site’s archives. Removed from public view on the two-million-unique-visitors-a-month megablog were all Jardin’s posts regarding her former friend, as well as all of Blue’s comments on the site. Readers were not notified of the changes. Last week, the missing posts were noticed for the first time. The move outraged Boing Boing readers—and launched a major, public controversy on the ethics of archiving in the new media era.

Plague and Public Health in Renaissance Europe

http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/osheim/intro.html

This project involves the creation of a hypertext archive of narratives, medical consilia, governmental records, religious and spiritual writings and images documenting the arrival, impact and response to the problem of epidemic disease in Western Europe between 1348 and 1530. When completed researchers will be able to follow themes and issues geographically across Europe in any given time period or chronologically from the first cases of bubonic plague in 1348 to the early sixteenth century.

Internet: It’s Time To Talk.

http://meloukhia.tumblr.com/post/450447690/internet-its-time-to-talk

That thing is bullying and abuse in online social justice communities. This thing is something which is never named. Never addressed. It is allowed to continue and we are all complicit in it. We all tolerate it when we turn our backs and say nothing. When we say “well, maybe this person has a point…” When we see it and we will not articulate it, say it, “this is bullying,” we are a part of it.

Beware Social Media Snake Oil Business Week

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_50/b4159048693735.htm

Consultants evangelize the transformative power of social media and often cast themselves as triumphant case studies of successful networking and self-branding. The problem, according to a growing chorus of critics, is that many would-be guides are leading clients astray. Consultants often use buzz as their dominant currency, and success is defined more often by numbers of Twitter followers, blog mentions, or YouTube

De-anonymizing Social Networks Arvind Narayanan and Vitaly Shmatikov

http://randomwalker.info/social-networks/

A paper presented at EEE Security & Privacy ‘09 by Arvind Narayanan and Vitaly Shmatikov

Operators of online social networks are increasingly sharing potentially sensitive information about users and their relationships with advertisers, application developers, and data-mining researchers. Privacy is typically protected by anonymization, i.e., removing names, addresses, etc. We present a framework for analyzing privacy and anonymity in social networks and develop a new re-identification algorithm targeting anonymized social-network graphs. To demonstrate its effectiveness on real-world networks, we show that a third of the users who can be verified to have accounts on both Twitter, a popular microblogging service, and Flickr, an online photo-sharing site, can be re-identified in the anonymous Twitter graph with only a 12% error rate.