Colin Rhinesmith

"In this excerpt from his new book, The Daily You, University of Pennsylvania professor Joseph Turow takes you on a tour of the industry that's trafficking in the data you generate every day on the Internet. You don't have to be a privacy stickler to be worried." - Colin Rhinesmith

"The first broadcast from Philadelphia’s public access television station — Philly Community Access Media —– went live this week, capping a 27-year battle to open the airwaves for everyday Philadelphians." - Colin Rhinesmith

"As someone who probably has spent more time thinking about the Knight News Challenge than anyone outside of Knight Foundation headquarters — doing a dissertation on the subject will do that to you! — I can’t help but follow its evolution, even after my major research ended in 2010. And evolve it has: from an initial focus on citizen journalism and bloggy kinds of initiatives (all the rage circa 2007, right?) to a later emphasis on business models, visualizations, and data-focused projects (like this one) — among a whole host of other projects including news games, SMS tools for the developing world, crowdsourcing applications, and more." - Colin Rhinesmith

"Americans spend more than 33 hours per week watching video across the screens, according to the latest Nielsen Cross-Platform Report. But how they’re consuming content—traditional TV and otherwise—is changing. Demonstrating that consumers are increasingly making Internet connectivity a priority, 75.3 percent pay for broadband Internet (up from 70.9% last year); 90.4 percent pay for cable, telephone company-provided TV or satellite. Homes with both paid TV and broadband increased 5.5 percent since last year. Changes are afoot, however, as consumers seek out the entertainment option that makes the most sense for them. The number of homes subscribing to wired cable has decreased 4.1 percent in the past year at the same time that telephone company-provided and satellite TV have seen increases of 21.1 percent and 2.1 percent, respectively." - Colin Rhinesmith

"When Google announced impending changes to its privacy policy, users and the media alike were focused on one thing: the inability to opt-out, short of deleting your account. Though Congress keeps pushing Google for more clarification, many users have grumpily acknowledged the Gmail notifications and moved to new privacy concerns like an iPhone app that copied and uploaded users' contacts." - Colin Rhinesmith

"The state of technology today means that nearly every village in the developing world could have someone -- a local changemaker -- who broadcasts his or her issues to the world. It's commonplace today to hear people say the world is flooded with content and that "everyone" can now be a producer. At every community video training that Video Volunteers conducts for people from marginalized communities in India, more and more people are showing up with $15 Chinese-made video-enabled cell phones. It's now possible for rural people without data connections to send tweets via SMS. In India, the government has ambitious programs to bring the Internet into the villages. Everything seems set for a mass of content to be coming out of rural areas -- which brings us to our problem: the fact that it is not." - Colin Rhinesmith

"(McLean, VA, January 17, 2012) – The Alliance for Community Media (ACM) will launch its new Youth Media Summit at Peirce College in Philadelphia, PA, on May 8, 2012. In 2011, the FCC emphasized the need for more digital literacy training and increased transparency of government and other civic institutions, with community media centers uniquely positioned to address this challenge. The Youth Media Summit will consist of four one-day symposiums to provide a public forum for discussion about media and news literacy in America. Participants shall include educators, community leaders, media professionals, journalists, nonprofit leaders, policymakers and students." - Colin Rhinesmith

"Internet scholar and advocate Rebecca MacKinnon talks SOPA/PIPA, Twitter censorship, and whether we're in danger of being 'entertained to death.'" - Colin Rhinesmith

"In today’s information-age economy, broadband is becoming a necessity for anyone searching for or applying for a job. Many job openings are only posted online. And about 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies only accept applications online. What’s more, in the current job market, digital literacy skills are often a requirement. For example, about 60 percent of working Americans use the Internet as an integral part of their jobs. Yet too many Americans lack the broadband access or skills needed to succeed in the workforce." - Colin Rhinesmith

A practical guide for citizen journalists - Colin Rhinesmith

"The Broadband Technology Opportunities Program is producing jobs, driving growth, providing tools for economic empowerment and improving lives across the country. That was the takeaway from a recent panel discussion at the annual State of the Net conference held in Washington, D.C. last month. The conference, which is organized by the Advisory Committee to the Congressional Internet Caucus, explores the biggest technology policy issues of the day. This year’s conference included a panel devoted to BTOP, a Recovery Act program administered by NTIA that is investing in roughly 230 projects to increase broadband access and adoption around the country." - Colin Rhinesmith

"Tweeting or checking emails may be harder to resist than cigarettes and alcohol, according to researchers who tried to measure how well people could resist their desires. They even claim that while sleep and sex may be stronger urges, people are more likely to give in to longings or cravings to use social and other media." - Colin Rhinesmith

"In an email exchange with privacy blogger Dan Tynan, Columbia law professor Eben Moglen referred to Facebook as a 'man in the middle attack' — that is, a service that intercepts communication between two parties and uses it for its own nefarious purposes. He said, 'The point is that by sharing with our actual friends through a web intermediary who can store and mine everything, we harm people by destroying their privacy for them. It's not the sharing that's bad, it's the technological design of giving it all to someone in the middle. That is at once outstandingly stupid and overwhelmingly dangerous.' Tynan is a critic of Facebook, but he thinks Moglen is overstating the case." - Colin Rhinesmith

"New practices associated with digital media are profoundly affecting many aspects of daily life and learning. The flood of information online, and the increased use of mobile and internet-based platforms, affect from whom, where and what we learn, how we constitute and engage with learning communities, and how we trust online information and relationships. New paradigms are emerging around key concepts of multimodality, networked learning, participatory practice, e-learning, gaming, and ubiquitous (anytime, everywhere) learning. Yet, there is little that brings these efforts together, particularly across disciplines and across countries. This workshop provides the base for consolidating and extending connections among leading literacy and learning researchers from Canada, UK, US and Australia, and integrating knowledge across disciplines to address these new practices and their impact on how we learn." - Colin Rhinesmith

"Last month, jazz great Miles Davis was honored with a postage stamp issued jointly by the U.S. and France. Yet his childhood home in East St. Louis, Ill., is being torn apart by thieves, its aluminum siding and even wood panels stripped from every side of the house." - Colin Rhinesmith

"Launched by the College of Arts and Sciences in July 2011, the UNC Digital Innovation Lab is a project-focused hub for collaborative, interdisciplinary discovery, experimentation, implementation, and assessment in the use of digital technologies to advance the work of the University in the humanities and humanistic social sciences." - Colin Rhinesmith

“’America Needs Indians’:” Representations of Native Americans in Counterculture Narrative and the Roots of Digital Utopianism” - Colin Rhinesmith

"As government services, political discourse and commerce expand online, policymakers and public interest organizations are promoting broadband “adoption” among people who are not currently using the Internet, or using it marginally. Yet there is little discussion of what “adoption” means or how it can be measured. For lack of a better indicator, agencies and researchers often use the metric of home subscription numbers, which tell us very little about the different modes or locations of access which may be more relevant for some populations, nor about the effects of adoption on new users and communities." - Colin Rhinesmith

"Google is pushing back against complaints about its new privacy policy, saying users can still prevent the company from linking all the data it collects about them by turning off their search history, by skipping some of Google’s offerings or by using different Google accounts at different times." - Colin Rhinesmith

"Another brief announcement: along with our CCI colleague Larissa Hjorth, Axel and I are looking forward to editing a special issue of the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media (JOBEM) on the theme “Emerging Methods for Digital Media Research”, due for publication in March 2013. If you work in a related area, please consider submitting an abstract by the March deadline. Details follow below." - Colin Rhinesmith

"Localore, a new initiative produced by AIR, builds on the groundwork laid by MQ2 to drive the continuing transformation of public media. Our 10 Lead Producers, in collaboration with their local station radio and television incubators, will focus their ingenuity on blending digital and traditional broadcast tools and platforms to expand the reach of public media in local communities and establish new capacity for R at stations. Collectively, our producers and their teams will help lead us to a new vision of 21st century public media." - Colin Rhinesmith

"A few days ago Google announced a new privacy policy: If you're signed into any Google service, the information that Google collects from you can be combined with information from every other Google service to build a gigantic profile of your activities and preferences. On Tuesday I wrote that I was pretty unhappy about this, and a lot of people wanted to know why. After all, Google says this new policy will mean a better computing experience for everyone:" - Colin Rhinesmith

Earlier this year, MAKE Magazine’s Phillip Torrone wrote a provocative article asking “Is it time to rebuild and retool libraries and make ‘techshops’?” In other words, should libraries join some of the other new community centers that are being created (such as General Assembly which we covered yesterday) and become “hackerspaces” or “makerspaces”? “Yes!”, says librarian Lauren Smedley, who is in the process of creating what might just be the first maker-space within a U.S. public library. The Fayetteville Free Library where Smedley works is building a Fab Lab — short for fabrication laboratory — that will provide free public access to machines and software for manufacturing and making things. - Colin Rhinesmith

"To me, public libraries — the availability of free education for all — represent the collective commitment of a community to their future. They symbolize what is most important, a commitment to educating the next generation. The role of a public library should also adapt over time, and that time is finally here. It’s time to plan how we’re going to build the future and what place public libraries have, should have, or won’t have. The goal of this article is to get everyone talking about one of our great resources, the public library, and its future." - Colin Rhinesmith

"What is a public library for? Costa coffee and "bums on seats"? or the promise of a better world? The managerialised nightmare of a London council's cost-cutting misunderstandings is glimpsed at through the deep stacks by a not-yet-defeated librarian and idealist." - Colin Rhinesmith