June 28th, 2009 | by elisabeth | published in iphone | 2 Comments
—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer Fascinating: Steven Peterson, a web developer in San Francisco, put together a handy iPhone app called Routesy that gives schedules and arrival times for Muni, the city’s public transit system. The underlying data is collected by a company called NextBus, which puts trackers on the various vehicles. Generativity at its best—the government […]
June 25th, 2009 | by elisabeth | published in iphone | Comments Off on “The App World has been a bit of a trip”
—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer Marcus Watkins, over at VersatileMonkey.com, has a writeup of what it was like to develop his first BlackBerry app. (BlackBerry came out with its own app store earlier this year, but it’s been strangely reticent about advertising it. BlackBerry users have long been able to get third-party apps from individual developers’ websites […]
June 24th, 2009 | by zittrain | published in Future of the Internet, twitter | 8 Comments
Twitter only allows 140 characters per tweet. The founders explain that they expected interconnection with mobile phone text messaging — SMS — from the start, and that it could be expensive to have longer tweets broken into mutiple messages when people pay per SMS. As Dom Sagolla explains: Messages longer than 160 characters (the common […]
June 18th, 2009 | by zittrain | published in Book, Future of the Internet, iran cyberwar | 5 Comments
One less examined piece of what’s going on in Iran this week goes beyond the use of Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms — beyond what people can do with a basic browser. And that’s the role of the humble PC — the personal computer, whether Windows, Mac, or GNU/Linux. What makes the PC so crucial […]
June 18th, 2009 | by zittrain | published in Future of the Internet | 2 Comments
This blog isn’t that active — I haven’t quite figured out the right rhythm, and what should count as blogworthy enough to post. The past couple days have been active, though, with the events unfolding in Iran. I’m part of OpenNet, which tracks Internet censorship around the world, and we just released an update to […]
June 16th, 2009 | by zittrain | published in filtering, Future of the Internet, opennet initiative | 1 Comment
We’ve just released our OpenNet Initiative 2009 study of Internet censorship in Iran, including new data from the most recent rounds of testing there. We’ll try to augment some of the findings there with data coming in over the past few days, including reports to the Herdict Web network blockage tool. If you’re finding there […]
June 16th, 2009 | by zittrain | published in Future of the Internet, university, wikipedia | 1 Comment
…on Star Trek, Charlie Brown, and Wikipedia: (Text available here.)
June 15th, 2009 | by zittrain | published in Future of the Internet, Generativity | 32 Comments
That’s the question Andrew Sullivan asks as part of his blog’s extraordinary coverage of the events now taking place in Iran. The NYT has a story out with a roundup of the use of social media during the crisis, while Publius at Obsidian Wings worries that Twitter can be blocked just like any other service. […]
June 12th, 2009 | by zittrain | published in Future of the Internet | Comments Off on Musical interlude
My brother Jeff, who loves music more than I love the Internet, just played in a Bob Dylan tribute show, and there’s now video available: I was sorry to be on the wrong coast for it. I’ll be visiting at Stanford again this fall — a great piece of West Coast life for me is […]
June 8th, 2009 | by zittrain | published in university, wikipedia | 17 Comments
I was asked to give the commencement talk at my old high school this year. I wrote it out ahead of time, so figured I’d share it here —
