We’re launching a very cool new project at Berkman today, Media Cloud. Basically, Media Cloud is a platform to help researchers find quantitative answers to questions like: - What type of stories are covered more heavily in blogs than in newspapers? - How does coverage of a topic like Iran dif...

Pimps Go Online to Lure Kids Into Prostitution, from Wired.com By Kevin Poulsen She was a 16-year-old California girl looking for trouble on MySpace; he was a 22-year-old self-described pimp who liked the revealing photos she posted to her profile. Three weeks after they met on the social networking...

Professor Pippa Norris of Harvard’s Kennedy School, is focused on “Cosmoolitan Communications” for her forthcoming book, titled “Cultural Convergence”. Working with Ronald Inglehart of the World Values Survey, she’s studying the ways that communications impact the...

Online child safety — especially the fear of predators lurking on social networking sites (SNS) — continues to spur calls by state and federal lawmakers for regulation.  At first, some federal lawmakers advocated outright bans on SNS in schools and libraries via the Deleting Online Pred...

My colleagues rock. When you give a talk at the Berkman Center these days, one of your rewards is a Berkman lunch apron. I like it so much that I’m now trying to schedule two more talks so I can get the Berkman spatula and spice rack. (Next week’s lunch talk is about the Internet Safety ...

We’re booking along now. At this pace we’ll be done with this slow mock draft by mid-June. It doesn’t matter how long it takes as long as you learn something, or at least laugh at us a little. Here’s the results from round two; a round where we see the first pitcher taken and...

Lunch talks at the Berkman Center usually promise a challenging room, filled with smart people asking tough questions. But it’s rare that speakers have as tough an act to follow as Peter Semmelhack of Bug Labs whose lunch talk fell directly on the tail of President Obama’s inaugural addr...

Lots of folks in China get around the Great Chinese Firewall by using circumvention tools. But at what risk? That’s one of the biggest questions raised by Hal Roberts in this post here. Seems the Global Internet Freedom Consortium, or GIFC, which offers this laudable PR… GIF Offers China...

So now my dream app is ready on the iPhone. It’s just the beginning of What It Will Be, but it’s highly useful. If you have an iPhone, go there and check it out. It’s free. As you see here, I’m involved, through the Berkman Center, which is collaborating with PRX, which is wo...

The last two major projects I’ve worked on - Geekcorps and Global Voices - share an interesting trait. Both ended up becoming research projects for academics studying the changing nature of organizations in a digital age. Dr. Leo Hsu of New York University wrote an excellent dissertation, R...