morgan schwartz

“Spanish government’s domain names held for ransom over water”

A cybersquatter is holding the Spanish government ransom by refusing to give up the domain names of several government ministries unless they agree to transfer water to all of Spain’s drought stricken regions.
read the full article

Cybersquatter’s have developed a bad reputation for holding hostage trademarked domain names from their legal owners. But to me, this feels like good old fashioned socially conscious civil disobedience.

Check out this video by Josh Levy that explores Second Life as a platform for social and political activism.

“What are you doing?”

This is the social problem that twitter declares to solve. Big deal. Twitter basically lets you spam your friends (and other silent lurkers/followers) about whatever you may be doing at any given moment.

Over 2 years ago TXTMob, by the Institute for Applied Autonomy, provided a similar service with a much more compelling agenda. It provided a platform for social and political activists to organize in the streets.

Instead of “What are you doing?” people were asking “What are the cops doing?”. TXTMob allowed protesters to quickly communicate and circumvent police tactics aimed at curtailing their movements in urban environments. In 2004 the service was used by protestors at the Democratic National Convention in Boston and the Republican National Convention in New York: lots of signal, very little noise.

If twitter was a beverage it would be kool-aid. Kind of tastes good at first, but leaves a nasty sugary taste in your mouth and slowly corrodes your teeth.

Equally perplexing is the recent feature in last week’s Sunday NY Times business section complete with full color picture of twitter’s developers. Why it is being featured at all is beyond me. But in addition, Jason Pontin’s half-heartedly bemused critique was kind of wimpy and missed an opportunity to really challenge the social merit of this service.

Lots of noise, very little signal.

<<< 4th Annual NYC Grassroots Media Conference, Saturday Feb 24th >>>

The NYC Grassroots Media Conference Organizing Committee is happy to announce that the full conference program including workshop descriptions is now available on our website.

$5 - Youth (21 and Under) & Senior Registration
$15 - Student registration with valid ID

Read descriptions of all of the workshops at the conference:
www.nycgrassrootsmedia.org/schedule

Register today:
www.nycgrassrootsmedia.org/conference

NYC Grassroots Media Conference
“Media and Movements Beyond Borders”
Saturday February 24th, 2007
New School University
65 Fifth Avenue (at 13th Street)

Some of the over 40+ workshops include:

• Solidarity, Not Charity: A Youth Media Workshop on Katrina
• Grassroots Media and Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards Development
• Our World Our Mic: Creating Youth Radio Documentaries
• Prometheus Radio Project and the global community radio movement
• Crossing the Border: Hip Hop liberation, revolution and resistance
• On Public Access and the State of Media: Policies That Affect Us All
• Dead Trees: Small Magazines and Newspapers in the Digital Age
• Black-Community Radio and Media Reform
• Slingshot Hip Hop: From Brooklyn to Palestine
• Art & Activism: the NYC Ghost Bike project
• Youth exploring the Root Causes of Migration
• Podcasting 101: Creating Your Own Podcast
• NODE 101 - learning how to make a videoblog
• Engaging workers through media
• New York’s Wireless Future
• Youth Debate Concerns over Internet Filters, Sex Ed & Free Expression
• We are all in Darfur, and Nairobi, & Johannesburg: The African perspective
  
  

A recent article from the Associated Press discusses how blogs are transforming Mideast social dialogue. This is an interesting link to read in regards to my class this week on citizen journalism.

Thanks to Chris Astruoski for the link. Chris writes a blog about OpenCourseWare.