Information Society Watch

December 11, 2007, Center for Democracy and Technology

This report by the Center for Democracy and Technology looks at the United States E-Government act of 2002 and its effectiveness in making government available to citizens. It aims to highlight the lack of accessible government information to encourage federal agencies to consider their information policies.

March 31, 2008, Rory Cellan-Jones, BBC News

This blog by a BBC technology correspondent discusses the future of online encyclopedias, with a focus on whether Wikipedia will continue to rule the reference arena. It explores the benefits of an open model of knowledge building versus models that favour 'experts'.

March 17, 2008, Nate Anderson, Ars Technica

Based on a recent report on the state of the news media, this article says that the making and marketing of news on the Internet is dominated by the same players who control the traditional print media. The report, released by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, suggests that bloggers rarely represent popular opinion, as most bloggers come from elite backgrounds.

January 29, 2008, BBC News

A web-archive developed by the aboriginal Australian community opens up a new set of possibilities in the area of Digital Rights Management (DRM). This grew out of the social mores and needs that have been embedded in the community over centuries, which filters out different content based on certain parameters which may be linked to gender, family or tribe.

July 5, 2007, Choe Sang Hun, New York Times

In South Korea, the paradigm of the Internet search is being transformed from the Google model to a real-time question-and-answer platform featuring local language content. South Korea's leading search portal, Naver.com, fosters a sense of community and human interaction by relying on volunteers to generate content.

January 20, 2008, Norimitsu Onishi, New York Times

Digital technologies are transforming the way that knowledge is created in Japan, as half of the country's ten best selling novels of 2007 were books that had originally been composed on cellphones. This article discusses the rise of the genre of the cellphone novel in Japan and how both its critics and its proponents have responded.

January 7, 2008, Miguel Helft, New York Times

Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, is launching an open source project to put information on the Internet back in the hands of users. This time Wales has developed a new Internet search engine, Wikia Search, which will rank Web pages by users' rankings of search results for quality and relevance.

September 2007, USA Today

With increasing signs that the Internet is approaching its limit in terms of speed, security and ability to cope with new technology formats, there are calls for the underlying architecture to be completely overhauled. Japan is part of this effort that promises to makes the Internet more fast, safe and environment friendly.

2007, Thomas Lowenhaupt & Michael Gurstein

The Internet’s impact on cities grows daily as it electronically enables the meeting, movement, and exchange of people, ideas, products, and cultures at a range and frequency never before possible, creating what is called the “global village”. This paper looks at certain of the effects that the emergence of this global village has had on cities and explores ways that one significant element of the Internet can be remoulded to support the traditional and progressive role of the city: as the ambience for creativity and innovation, the fountainhead of progressive movements and so on.

March 30, 2007, Technewsworld

Measures by Google to replace Post Katrina images on Google Earth with images prior to the hurricane have come in for major flak. The images portray the city as it was before the hurricane with good roads, intact bridges and parks.