Government transparency through technology. U.S. federal government agencies published their open government plans online this week.  The plans detail long-term strategies for addressing one of the three identified principles of open government—transparency, civic participation, and government collaboration with public and private sectors.  They can be accessed by appending “/open” to the department website address.  The end goal of President Obama’s initiative is to obviate requests under the Freedom of Information Act.

Online newspapers to modify anonymous comment policies. Several major online news sites are considering or implementing changes in their approach to user comments.  There has been a trend toward requiring users to register, establishing ranking systems to identify trusted users, and highlighting the comments of those willing to use their real names, all in an attempt to hold commenters accountable for their statements and discourage vitriol.  Linking identity with posted opinions facilitates a reputation system to mitigate abuses of anonymity online (other examples of such strategies, and their risks, are discussed in the book).  Here it serves both to cement a user’s responsibly for his or her comments and maintain the status of a particular news site as a respected forum for discussion.

In the department of really freaky things: 80legs. 80legs pays developers to embed a bit of code in their programs to turn the user’s computer into a bot. But unlike all the malicious code that does the same thing, this one purports allow 80legs to use the botnet for good (for their web-crawling services), and is theoretically disclosed to the users. I’m skeptical—especially since, as one example indicates, the “disclosure” may be a few lines buried way down in the TOS. And who monitors whether 80legs is in fact doing good?

Crowdsourced Art. On the ubicomp front, Amazon Mechanical Turk can be used to create cool works of mass art. If you follow the link to artist Aaron Koblin’s website (who also kindly guested in last winter’s Stanford/HLS cyberlaw class), the Sheep Market is my favorite (although there was some debate about it).

Mark Fiore can win a Pulitzer Prize, but he can’t get his iPhone cartoon app past Apple’s satire police. Pulitzer-prize winning political cartoonist has his app bounced by Apple for…mocking political figures. Oh, come on. One interesting thing: this has apparently happened several times before with cartoonists; each time, there was an outcry, and Apple relented. Fiore himself isn’t arguing with Apple—he’s just sitting back and waiting for the reversal. Maybe this is the real App Store model: reject broadly, accept anything the public deems important enough to make a fuss about.

And a few links on the iPad:

The Kids Are All Right. An unusually thoughtful post on the iPad/Pod/Phone tradeoffs: the technology isn’t as generative, but distribution can be much simpler.

The Apple Two. Apple introduced the original generative PC, and is now doing away with that generativity with the iPad, among other devices. Tim Wu explains that this isn’t about a change in “Apple’s” ethos: it’s Steve Jobs’ ascendancy over Steve Wozniak.

The iPad Luddites. One more meditation on the iPad, generativty, and the inevitability of technological change. Carr points out that “[i]t’s useful to remember that the earliest radios were broadcasting devices as well as listening devices and that the earliest phonographs could be used for recording as well as playback,” and that the evolution from primitive to refined devices nearly always comes with a generativity loss. But the question is whether that loss is inevitable, whether there’s a salient difference between the PC/Internet combo and the radio, and whether we can hope for some generative and general-purpose device that tinkerers will turn to if the PC becomes more locked down.

—By Jennifer Halbleib and Elisabeth Oppenheimer