In the past couple of days Facebook has been rolling out to its users a new homepage. This is the second time that Facebook changes dramatically its look. While there was great upheaval against the first change in the home page compared to the original Facebook (where fun applications, superpoking and friend hugging held center [...]

I have just come back from a three day workshop on: “The Internet and Democracy, Lessons Learnt and Future Directions of Research”, which we at Berkman’s Internet & Democracy project have been organizing in collaboration with the Oxford Internet Institute and the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. The [...]

I am currently at Oxford for a three day workshop on: “The Internet and Democracy, Lessons Learnt and Future Directions of Research”,  which we at Berkman’s Internet & Democracy project have been organizing in collaboration with the Oxford Internet Institute and the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford.
The aim [...]

Today, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University has officially launched: http://www.herdict.org — a tool that employs the distributed power of the Internet community to provide insight into what users around the world are experiencing in terms of web accessibility.
Everyone is invited to explore http://www.herdict.org and participate by reporting websites that they [...]

It has been about two hours since CNN has shown on cable tv snippets of Obama’s first interview with Al-Arabiya TV station but no news of it appears yet on any of the major news and newspapers’ websites both national and international. The Huffington post, however, has documented it and posted a video and a [...]

A few days ago in the IHT Evgeny Morozov, a Fellow at the Open Society Institute in New York, has published an interesting op-ed entitled: “Digital renegades, or captives?” where he analyzes the role of the Internet in promoting civic engagement in authoritarian regimes. Evgeny asks: “What if the original premise was wrong and the [...]

More and more Italian politicians have been jumping on the Internet bandwagon. The Education Minister Mariarosa Gelmini has started a YouTube channel, where she announces with a video that she hopes this channel will allow her to listen to people’s opinion, in order to “implement change together”. The video has reached 260,000 views since it [...]

In their book Born Digital: Understading the First Generation of Digital Natives, John Palfrey and Urs Gasser introduce us to the notion of “digital dossier”, the collection of all the information and of the little traces that you are leaving behind every time you go online, while checking your email, posting on Facebook, when you [...]

[Cross-posted on Berkman's Internet & Democracy blog]
Today an outstanding panel gathered at Harvard Law School to discuss Obama’s election and the next steps for Obama’s administration and the American people: “In Order To Form a More Perfect Union: Next Steps for President-Elect Obama and For We the People”. Panelists included:
* Douglas Blackmon, Atlanta Bureau Chief, [...]

[Cross-posted on Berkman's Internet and Democracy blog]
Two events have recently shaken Italian cyberspace: the launch of the Italian version of Facebook and the comments of Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi after the election of President-elect Barack Obama. I believe that after these two events Italian social and political life may never be the same again.
I [...]