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FSA Kittens is a tumblr blog dedicated to celebrating the kittens fighting to overcome the Assad regime in Syria. The dozen or so posts range from the documentary to the deeply whimsical: This FSA kitten, Yasmeen, is on sniper-duty. Yasmeen's commander shared with FSA Kittens Yasmeen's sniper log for August 23rd: 8:30 am: Two regime [...]
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Running late for a flight from Boston to San Francisco today, I was delighted to discover that my boarding pass made me eligible for the "TSA Pre-√" line. Instead of waiting in a labyrinthine line, removing my bottles of shampoo, my shoes and my laptop, I found myself as the only person waiting to use [...]
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Earlier this week, I gave a lecture titled "The Emergence of Digital Civics" at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. I was in South Austalia to give another lecture, a joint lecture with Dr. Genevieve Bell of Intel in memory of her friend James Tizard. I hope to write up the talks Genevieve and I gave, [...]
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Last year, Sweden took on an experiment in social media as a form of nation branding by turning over its national Twitter account, @sweden, to a different citizen each week. Citizens are nominated and evaluated by a panel, but their tweets aren't reviewed or edited, which led some observers to predict the experiment would be [...]
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2012 has been a bad year for gun violence in the United States. Yesterday, Thomas Caffall, apparently distraught about being evicted from him home in College Station, Texas, shot and killed a Brazos County constable and a bystander. Earlier this month, white supremacist Wade Michael Page entered a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, and [...]
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Ten people each contribute $100 a month into a pool. They meet once a month and discuss possible projects to support. Each month, they give a grant of $1000 to a project that meets a simple criterion: it's awesome. That's the logic behind the Awesome Foundation, founded by Tim Hwang and friends, brilliantly built and [...]
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This year is the first in decades where I've been beneficiary and victim of the academic schedule. While I spent almost a decade at the Berkman Center, research at that institution continues year-round, and there's not much of a summer lull. The Media Lab is closer to the traditional academic cycle, as many students head [...]
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I'm discovering that one of my special joys in life is having my presumptions proved wrong. I've just returned from a ten day trip to Kenya, helping host the fifth Global Voices summit, attending board meetings for two companies, and helping my students research an idea we're playing with at the Media Lab. Our idea [...]
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I spent Tuesday on the crowded roads of the northern suburbs of Accra, catching up with old friends and marveling at transitions and transformations: those my friends have made, as well as the changes made to a city I love and dearly miss. When I lived in Accra, in the mid-1990s, the city proper ended [...]
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In 2005, Matt Harding posted a video on the internet. It's a compilation of clips of him dancing - badly - in locations around the world. It was his video postcard of an extended walkabout, a vacation that began in 2003 when he quit his job and started following his Aussie friends on their global [...]
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