Some Herdict Updates: * Here is a new video with Prof. Z navigating the screen and explaining how to use Herdict. * Helping us get the word of Herdict out to the herd-at-large, Shep has taken on some impressive language skills (and more impressive gender changes) to promote Herdict in a number of different languages […]

Imagine that you’re playing World of Warcraft and you decide you could use a little help finishing your quest. So you go to a site that aggregates and distributes “add-ons”—independently-written programs that hook into WoW and create new functionality for game players. You choose a popular one called QuestHelper and go on your way. As […]

As you all know, one of Prof. Z’s projects is Herdict, which monitors blocked web sites around the world. One of the ways you can help out the project is to jump over to the Reporter, a.k.a. amiblockedornot, which lets you test the accessibility of websites where problems have been reported. The Reporter will suggest […]

I’ve agreed to be a guest blogger for a little while at the Chronicle of Higher Education.  I’ll plan to cross-post here and there.  My opening question: I’ve recently written a book about the Future of the Internet (the paperback version comes out this week).  The argument it makes has a lot of moving pieces.  […]

I never tire of listening to Prof. Z and am probably not the only one. For those who were unable to attend any of his classes, panels, and lectures in the past few weeks, several audio interviews are available on the Internet (where else?). * On NPR’s On the Media, Prof. Z talks about the […]

BadwareBusters.org was officially launched today by StopBadware.org and Consumer Reports WebWatch. The latest of a string of Berkman Center projects that aim at garnering the wisdom of the crowd through the Internet, BadwareBusters facilitates an online community for people looking for help combating viruses, spyware, and other malicious software on their computers and websites. (StopBadware […]

The Berkman Center has just launched a very cool new project, MediaCloud, which you can see over at mediacloud.org.  They’re gathering stories from thousands of newspapers, blogs, and other news sources around the web, and then extracting piles of data from the stories—source, topic, entities mentioned, and so on.  Their idea is to figure out […]

—by Elisabeth Oppenheimer In several of the posts on this blog, we’ve talked about how we’ll be waiting to see how Apple’s semi-open model competes with Android’s mostly-open model over the next several years. Slashdot links to a few articles addressing that question. The first two articles say that Apple is totally overwhelmed by trying […]

by Yvette Wohn Speaking at the Berkman Center earlier this year before the official launch of Herdict, Prof. Z described Herdict’s potential as being a real-time tool for mapping web filtering activities around the world. “Should it start producing a map of filtering as it happens, I think it will have a major impact,” he […]

-by Yvette Wohn Snowfall in Cambridge is keeping people at home but perfectly illustrates situations that can be solved with ubiquitous human computing. Prof. Z discusses this concept of using remote human resources in a recent interview with Nokia’s Ideas Project. Cheap networks, he says, enables organizations to get things done regardless of location. Bad […]