Michael Zimmer.org

For the last 353 days, I’ve been part of a team planning Internet Research 10.0 – Internet: Critical, the 10th annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR). My life is about to get back to normal, as an interdisciplinary collection of nearly 400 scholars, researchers and graduate students interested in Internet and new media studies are descending on Milwaukee this week.
The conference program is fantastic, featuring keynote addresses by Siva Vaidhyanathan, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, and Megan Boler. I’ll be presenting an updated version of my paper, “But …

A few months ago I contributed to a news article about businesses increasingly participating in social media platforms for marketing and management of customer relations.
Seems the recording industry behemoth Universal Music Group was listening, as they’ve recently joined the multimedia blogging platform Tumblr. Problem is, they don’t seem to know what they’re doing (and are still in the process of hiring someone to “Participate in online social networking environments and develop viral marketing campaigns”).
Countless users are cringing at the notion that UMG is now participating in this social environment and …

News reports indicate that Google will begin providing free music downloads in China.
Apparently Chinese Internet users have grown so accustomed to downloading music online, that piracy and illegal downloading has impacted music sales there more than even what the RIAA claims to be such a huge problem here in the U.S. Relatedly, Google has been struggling to take market share away from Baidu, the leading Chinese search engine.
The win-win solution seems to be for the music companies to join forces with Google to create a free music download option for …

I’m delighted to announce the launch of a new book series I am co-editing with Laura DeNardis, Ph.D, the Executive Director of the Yale Information Society Project:
Information Society Series: An Interdisciplinary Series on Technology, Law, and Society
Series Editors, Laura DeNardis and Michael Zimmer
MIT Press
The Information Society Series will address the social, legal, and policy implications of the Internet and new information technologies and will especially feature works from the growing global ranks of interdisciplinary scholars in information schools; communications departments; science, technology, and society programs; and programs in law, technology, …

Just in time for the sections on intellectual property and fair use in my “Information Technology Ethics” class, the Israeli artist Kutiman released a brilliant collection of YouTube video mashups called “Thru You” (his site has been down due to traffic, but the mashups are also available here and here).
Kutiman has taken existing YouTube videos of people playing music alone, sampled, looped, mixed and mashed them together to make absolutely amazing new music. Here’s a sample:

These songs are genius. They are original. Yet, most interpretations of existing copyright laws would …

The Call for Papers for Internet Research 10.0 – Internet: Critical, the 10th annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), has been released:
Call for Papers
Internet Research 10.0 – Internet: Critical
The 10th Annual International and Interdisciplinary Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR)
October 7-11, 2009
Hilton Milwaukee City Center
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA
http://ir10.aoir.org
As the Internet has become an increasingly ubiquitous and mundane medium, the analytical shortcomings of the division between the online and the offline have become evident. Shifting the focus to the fundamental intermeshing of online and offline spaces, networks, …

A collection of information and communication companies, advocacy groups, and academic centers have announced the formation of the Global Network Initiative, aimed at protecting free expression and privacy on the Internet on a global scale.
From the announcement:
In an effort to protect and advance the human rights of freedom of expression and privacy, a diverse coalition of leading information and communications companies, major human rights organizations, academics, investors and technology leaders today launched the Global Network Initiative.
From the Americas to Europe to the Middle East to Africa and Asia, companies in …

The 10th annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) will take place in Milwaukee, Wisconsin from October 7-11, 2009. The conference theme will be “Internet:Critical“, providing a space for interdisciplinary researchers to reflect on, describe, interrogate, challenge, and stake new claims to various critical Internet issues, including:
critical moments, elements, practices
critical theories, methods, constructs
critical voices, histories, texts
critical networks, junctures, spaces
critical technologies, artifacts, failures
critical ethics, interventions, alternatives
The program chair is Susanna Paasonen, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. The local organizing committee is comprised of Elizabeth Buchanan, UW-Milwaukee, Michael Zimmer, UW-Milwaukee, …

On the heels of the recent Pew study concerning cloud computing and privacy, Consume Reports has released a poll revealing that most Americans are very concerned about what is being done with their personal information online. Some highlights:

72% are concerned that their online behaviors were being tracked and profiled by companies
53% are uncomfortable with internet companies using their email content or browsing history to send relevant ads
54% are uncomfortable with third parties collecting information about their online behavior
93% of Americans think internet companies should always ask for permission before …

Similar to the Yale Information Society Project’s “9.5 Theses” and CFP’s “Letter to the Next President,” the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) has created an issue document targeted to the next President and Congress: “The Internet in Transition: A Platform to Keep the Internet Open, Innovative, and Free” (full PDF here)

From the abstract:
This document examines a broad range of issues the next President and Congress must address in order to keep the Internet a powerful engine for innovation, economic growth and democratization. The policies outlined in this paper describe …

Yet another blog meme, courtesy of folks at Chronicles of Dissent (by way of Threat Level). This time I’m supposed to grab the nearest book, open to page 123, go down to the 5th sentence and type up the 3 following sentences. Not sure why, or if someone is going to be patching all these together into some kind of mash-up, but I’ll play along…
The book closest to me is “Libraries, National Security, Freedom of Information Laws and Social Responsibilities,” an amazing report published by the IFLA/FAIFE detailing how libraries …

I’m sitting in a hotel room in New Haven, trying to finish an article for First Monday, but then I received a call from my wife suggesting I turn on PBS, as Frontline is airing an amazing report on “Growing Up Online.” It is a thoughtful treatment of the topic that, in their words, “takes viewers inside the very public private worlds that kids are creating online, raising important questions about how the Internet is transforming childhood.”
The show’s website has some nice supporting material, including a discussion of how many …

In more chilling news, it has been reported that Google reached a settlement with a group of Israeli council members and will voluntarily turn over the IP address of a blogger accused of slander to a court overseeing the case. From the report:
For more than a year, the anonymous blogger slandered three Shaarei Tikva councilmen: local council chairman Gideon Idan, Shaarei Tikva director general Haim Blumenfeld and council member Avi Yokobovich. The blogger accused the men of criminal acts, such as pretending to be handicapped in order to receive discounts …

Wired has posted the results of their survey of the major ISPs regarding their tracking and data retention policies. I’ve created a table summarizing the results:

How long do you retain records of the IP addresses assigned to customers?
Do you store URLs of the websites that people visit?
Do you allow marketers to see anonymized or partially anonymized clickstream data?
Have you been in contact or had discussions with the government about how long you should be keeping data?
Do you oppose data retention?

AOL

“limited period of time”
No
No
“No comment”
“Working with industry & Congress”

AT&T

varies but “within …

[This thought piece appears on the On The Identity Trail project's blog, blog*on*nymity. Thanks to the amazing folks there for the (second) invitation to contribute to the project. -mz]
This post is an attempt to collect and organize some thoughts on how the rise of so-called Web 2.0 technologies bear on privacy and surveillance studies. After presenting a few examples of unintended consequences of Web 2.0 that bear on privacy and surveillance, I will introduce the term “netaveillance,” which might provide a useful concept around which a more robust theory of …