Posts Tagged ‘Berkman Center’

RSS possibly dead, RSS Investors mostly dead

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009
John Palfrey

John Palfrey

Last May, TechCrunch wrote the obit for RSS. Yesterday, after Feedburner founder Dick Costolo became COO of Twitter, the blog danced on RSS’ grave. Today, PEHub wonders what that means for RSS Investors, a Cambridge-based private equity firm started by John Palfrey in 2005.

Palfrey tells PEHub:

“We never officially dissolved the fund, but we stopped making investments and everyone’s moved on to other things,” said Palfrey, who now teaches law at Harvard and is a venture executive with Highland Capital Partners. “The only active investment we have left is StyleFeeder, here in Cambridge.”

In February 2008, StyleFeeder, a Cambridge company spun out of a holding company, Top Ten Media, formed by Palfrey, landed a $2 million Series A round of venture capital from Highland Capital Partners.

RSS investors might be gone, but Palfrey has plenty to keep himself busy — he’s an author, and a venture executive at Highland, as well as a law professor, vice dean for library and information resources, and co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard.

Berkman Center’s Sam Bayard on TechCrunch publishing hacked Twitter info

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

Sam Bayard, assistant director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society’s Citizen Media Law Center, weighs in on the stink caused by TechCrunch’s publication of information hacked from Twitter CEO Evan Williams and others. Among the stolen info:  A projection the company would be profitable in Q3 2009 and that it would reach 1 billion users by 2013; and a pitch for a Twitter-themed reality TV show called Final Tweet, which needs to be stopped — privacy, First Amendment or whatever other laws be damned. 

TechCrunch says publishing hacked information is no different than publishing old-fashioned leaked information. Bayard says the blog is likely on solid legal ground:

In the current scenario, it is fair to say that a good deal of information about Twitter as a company is fair game given its immense popularity and newfound cultural significance. Twitter’s financial projections probably fall safely within the public concern category.  The TV pitch might be a closer call, but still probably falls on the safe side of the line …

… I’m not sure how the First Amendment would impact a possible prosecution for receipt of stolen property because it is receipt of stolen material, not publication, which is criminalized.  But it seems unlikely that First Amendment concerns wouldn’t also limit criminal liability in this context. 

Via Robert Weinberger.

Way longer than 140 characters: The Web Ecology Project’s report on Iran’s “Twitter Revolution”

Monday, June 29th, 2009

That was quick — the Berkman Center’s  John Palfrey links to the Web Ecology Project’s report on Twitter’s effect on the unrest in Iran after the June 12 election. After initial reports about the site’s central role, pundits have backed off a bit on Twitter’s importance. The study, which looked at more than 2 million tweets from June 5 to June 26, notes:

As Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic comments, after reposting two messages from Twitter, “Those are recent tweets which probably tells you more about the mood than hard facts. But mood matters.” The proliferation of qualitative opinion regarding the Twitter-Iran issue has been helpful thus far in conveying the “mood” of the conversation, but this paper reveals some of those “hard facts” that give a fuller picture of the situation. With our report, we encourage researchers to further pursue qualitative analysis supported by quantitative data.

The Cambridge-based Web Ecology Project is affiliated with Harvard’s Berkman Center.

Berkman Center studies the Arabic Internet

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009
arabic_blogosphere_imgnode

Berkman Center graphic

Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society has released a study of 35,000 arabic-language blogs, 6,000 of which it arranged visually into a colorful bubble map.

The center found the bloggers to be predominantly young and male, politically minded, and critical of both terrorism and the United States.

Earlier this year, MHT reported on the Cambridge-based Internet startup Yamli,which is tackling the challenge of building an Arabic search engine.

Bing and Kayak.com

Friday, June 5th, 2009

The Berkman Center’s David Weinberger had a unique take among the avalanche of It’s-pretty-cool-but-won’t-kill-Google Bing reviews — he says Microsoft’s new search engine bites Kayak.com’s style.

Bryant University Graduate School

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