Using social media for social change

By SUSAN MERNIT Net-enabled social tools have enabled new models for grassroots activism and community building, and they have changed how we function in society — how we communicate globally and locally, how we form ties and how we organize and connect. What’s tricky about deploying social media today is not access to the technology, […]

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Digital fluency and social change, at any age

An update on Social Citizens By ALLISON FINE Social Citizens BETA is a paper commissioned by The Case Foundation in early 2008 to help bring attention to the ways that young people are using new, social media to affect social change. The notion of young people as “Social Citizens” comes from the intersection of several […]

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Content in the creative commons. Who profits?

There’s a story going around that touts the Internet as a perpetual money machine. It goes something like this: many pieces of old content on the digital-now network have aggregate residual value that, over time, exceed present value of fresh content, which spikes and subsides quickly. The story is called the Long Tail. It is […]

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Tabula Rasa: iPad’s blank slate

The biggest surprise from yesterday’s unveiling of Apple’s iPad was that print publishers and journos weren’t terribly excited. “Waiting to be surprised. That hasn’t happened yet,” said Jim Roberts, the only New York Times wonk who didn’t confuse Steve Jobs with Moses. Valleywag has a good take on Print Media’s Big Tablet Letdown. Our enthusiasm […]

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Who will create the news experience?

New technology spawns new ways to tell stories. That’s the exciting part of Apple’s new tablet, an old idea whose time has apparently come. Now comes the hard part: creating the content and designing the experience for the next wave of consumer devices that deliver our stories. We’re about to discover whether incumbent publishers and […]

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Robots, copyright and the whine at WAN

We couldn’t get to Hyderabad for this year’s group hug of the world’s newspaper publishers, but it sounds like the old boys are getting feisty in their dotage. Forced once to postpone because of bad economics and waning interest, the reconvened World Newspaper Congress, organized by the merged World Association of Newspapers and IFRA, launched […]

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