The MIT Technology Review just posted Campaigns to Track Voters with "Political Cookies". It freaks me out for a reason I'll get to below...

The technology involves matching a person's Web identity with information gathered about that person offline, including his or her party registration, voting history, charitable donations, address, age, and even hobbies.

Companies selling political targeting services say "microtargeting" of campaign advertising will make it less expensive, more up to the minute, and possibly less intrusive. But critics say there's a downside to political ads that combine offline and online data. "These are not your mom and pop TV ads.

Congratulations to the team behind CRONICAS DE HEROES for the recent Honorary Mention in PRIX ARS ELECTRONICA, Digital Communities category. PRIX ARS is one of the most important annual awards in the field of electronic art, interactive, animation, digital culture, and music

http://prix2012.aec.at/prixwinner/5056/

CRONICAS DE HEROES is civic platform of positivism which through technology, art, education, direct insertion, and other media focuses and promotes social values. We are a team of volunteers, promoters and local representatives who work with the support of the community. Contact us to be part of this initiative, to support by donating talent or funds, with questions, etc at info@cronicasdeheroes.mx

I published a new essay over at HiLobrow on the evolution and symbolism of the Guy Fawkes mask in Anonymous and protest culture. If you're interested in how symbols work within protest movements, or Anonymous culture, please do check it out!

"Anonymous is one face of a broad anti-authoritarian, pro-freedom sentiment; its iconic mask symbolizes both that movement’s ends, its means (individuals collected as a single entity), and the right to anonymous public political participation. The use of the Guy Fawkes mask suggests a movement with an infinitely reproducible identity, a fractal movement via which individuals or small cells can operate and act — for better or worse, hopefully the former — with the power of the whole."

One of Tim O'Reilly's favorite quotes goes, "The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think" (said by Edwin Schlossberg).

Tim's detected a pattern of success across his long and accomplished career, and it is the ability to detect and annunciate patterns that haven't yet been named. He frames and contextualizes big ideas and, across his writing, publishing, and event hosting, helps people tie together related threads and see, in a new way, that which was already right in front of them.

Tim's first successful attempt at framing the dialogue was with open source software. Richard Stallman and others were talking about it, but they were talking very narrowly about Linux and the GNU project and ignoring Apache and DNS and the web, which by that point was in the public domain. The framing and context was a political one, but O'Reilly was able to create a context (and a conference) to help the actors see what they had in common.

The last two days of the Truthiness conference, co-hosted by the Berkman Center for the Internet & Society and MIT's Center for Civic Media, exposed a rich cross-section of people, research, and applications dedicated to fighting misinformation in its many forms. We spent the day Tuesday discussing the wide world of facts and falsehoods, with an embarrassing collection of brains on hand to inform us on the history, cognitive psychology, and best practices of encouraging a healthy respect for reality. The challenge ahead, now that all the mini eclairs are gone, is to convert the goodwill, knowledge, and collaboration generated by this conference into a united front against delusion. Here's my pitch.

Do social networks inherently support democratic values, in contrast with ideology-bound political institutions?

At the MIT Media Lab Friday, former Al Jazeera Director General Wadah Khanfar talked about what it took for the news company to reimagine itself and listen to networks during the Arab Spring. He was joined by Mohamed Nanabhay, head of New Media at Al Jazeera, who discussed their new challenge of shifting media coverage from the spectacle of protest to the politics of building a new society. [Update: a video of the talk has been posted to the Media Lab blog]

Do we need a Magna Carta for the Internet? Who should create it, and what might it contain?

Rebecca McKinnon spoke at the Center for Civic Media today about her new book, Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom (TED Talk). For many years, Rebecca was the face of CNN in Beijing and Tokyo. Then she co-founded Global Voices with our director Ethan Zuckerman. More recently, she has been thinking about what it means to be a netizen, and what might be our responsibilities and rights.

Friday at MIT CSAIL, Lada Adamic gave a talk on "To friend and to trust: eliciting truthful and useful ratings online". Lada is an associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Information & Center for the Study of Complex Systems. I met her in 2009 at the SIGWEB Hypertext conference, and we did a small collaboration (together with her student Jiang Yang) when I was a software engineer at KGB. It was great to hear Lada again; she always brings fascinating examples, unexpected insights and humour into what are serious in-depth quantitative research projects.