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Ross Douthat and Ezra Klein are two new opinion writers at the New York Times and the Washington Post. Both started out in the blogosphere, and both are young - Klein 25, Douthat 29. The two discuss whether they may have actually lost a measure of influence by moving from the net to traditional media.
The Obama Administration has allocated billions to expand broadband service to underserved areas, but the first step is spending millions of dollars to find those areas. And how that mapping is done will greatly affect whether the digital divide will be bridged. Mark McElroy is the Senior Vice President of Communications for Connected Nation, the nation’s largest broadband service mapping company. Art Brodsky is the communications director for Public Knowledge, a leading critic of Connected Nation’s mapping methodology.
Perhaps the most complete picture we have of the insular, erratic dictatorship of North Korea comes not from the U.S. military but from one obsessed Google Earth-watching civilian named Curtis Melvin. Melvin explains how he pieces together his aerial intelligence and the story it tells.
Wolfram Alpha debuts this week. Its creator insists that it's not trying to take on Google and that it's not even a search engine, it's more of an answer machine. But the tech world is still abuzz about whether Wolfram Alpha is the next Google. All the hype made us wonder about the web's holy grail: the search for the next big thing in search. Brooke investigates.
Click here for the extended interview with Danny Sullivan, editor of searchengineland.com
Under mounting pressure from state attorneys general to curb illegal activities facilitated on their site, Craigslist announced this week that it would take down its “erotic services” section. It will be replaced by “adult services” where each ad will be reviewed by a Craigslist employee. Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan and Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster both say the change is more than just a marketing ploy.
On Wednesday, Time Magazine threw a party for the world’s most influential people. One attendee was Christopher Poole, founder of the website 4chan. What set Poole apart from the guests was his mode of entry: he hacked his way in. Mattathias Schwartz has written about Poole and 4chan's dark culture.
On Friday, a Swedish court ruled against the founders of the popular file-sharing website The Pirate Bay and found them guilty of assisting in the distribution of illegal content online. Mats Lewan, an editor at Ny Teknik, explains what the verdict means for file-sharing, for Sweden, and the world.
When 10,000 Moldovans filled the streets in protest last week, it was characterized as the ‘Twitter revolution.’ But now that the dust has cleared, what role did Twitter really play? And was it a revolution? Ethan Zuckerman, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, tells the tale of the tweets.
