Volunteers can download the Grub web crawler, which runs in the background on their PC, indexing web pages according to their content. The crawler will be used as the basis for Wikia’s forthcoming search service. By contrast, search engines like Google run their own web crawlers and keep details of the way they work secret.
Read this item from New Scientist and contribute your knowledge of Jimmy Wakes or Grub to the Whats New Media Wiki.
Filed under A Culture of Participation, Open Source, Search
Billboard, the world’s most comprehensive source of music, digital data and events, today announced an expansion of its Hot 100 formula to include weekly streamed and on-demand music data to the chart’s traditional mix of sales and radio airplay. Keeping pace with the growth of digital delivery, Billboard’s franchise chart will be supplemented by weekly data from AOL Music and Yahoo! Music, two of the most prominent sources of online music.
from a press release by Billboard Magazine. Commentary at the Read/Write Web.
Filed under When New Meets Old
Cyberchondriacs are not only using the Internet to educate themselves, many are also using it to assist in their conversations with their physicians. A 58 percent majority of adults who have gone online to get health information say that they have discussed this information with their doctors at least once in the last year. Furthermore, more than half (55%) of cyberchondriacs have searched for health information based on discussions with their doctors.
More from Harris Interactive and commentary at Ars
This article discusses the growing trend towards ‘lay’ people accessing information about health from the internet. Surveying the major studies of online health consumption, I argue that this phenomenon can be seen as a marker of a broader shift in focus within public health discourse and the popular media on health as an individual ‘lifestyle’ issue. Despite this cultural shift, the medical debate over online health consumption has been largely negative, viewing the internet as an unruly and unregulated space of mis-information and lay web users as potential victims of ‘cyberquackery’. In contrast to this reductive account, I discuss a qualitative study I conducted into young people’s use of the internet for health material that showed they are often highly sceptical consumers of online health material. Furthermore, the study found that the kinds of health material young people access is informed by issues of social positionality or ‘health habitus’ complicating individualistic notions of lifestyle ‘choice’.
Abstract from Tania Lewis’ Seeking health information on the internet: lifestyle choice or bad attack of cyberchondria? in the journal of Media, Culture & Society
The modified bill that passed the committee today included a provision that limits its protections to those who make “financial gain or livelihood” from their journalism. Bloggers who make ten bucks a quarter from their Google ads seem unlikely to get protection, though this will depend on how broadly the courts interpret “financial gain.”
Read this item from Ars Technica. Previously from WNM: Free Flow of Information Act positions bloggers as journalists
Disclosure is a tricky business and as a practice is still ill-defined even in the realm of traditional journalism. The general idea is that anything that might be seen as a potential conflict of interest between a writer and the subject of his story should be disclosed to the reader. If I invested in a startup I am writing about, for example, or if the CEO is my best friend, I should disclose that fact. But it’s not always so cut and dry.
Read this item from the Read/Write Web
Filed under Blogosphere, The Politics of New Media
“(Online counseling) teaches clients to be aware of what’s coming out of their mouths, what they’re feeling and thinking, their wholeness and whole bodies,” Mankita said. “It’s an exciting and empowering thing that we haven’t done in the past (in person) the way we can with text. Text is really powerful.” Online therapy is particularly suited to sex and relationship work, especially for clients who crave a layer of anonymity we can’t get by going through our insurance companies or driving to an office. And clients can seek matches based on compatibility rather than proximity.
Read this item from WIRED’s Regina Lynn
Hi-tech criminals have found novel ways to carry out web-based attacks that are much harder to spot and stop, warn security experts. Some cyber criminals have exploited file-sharing networks and popular webpages to attack targets. The malicious hackers have turned to these methods instead of going to the trouble of hijacking home PCs. Using these methods the hi-tech criminals have staged some of the biggest attacks security experts have ever seen.
Read this item from the BBC
Filed under Cybercrime, P2P (Peer to Peer)
With the help of simple tools introduced by Internet companies recently, millions of people are trying their hand at cartography, drawing on digital maps and annotating them with text, images, sound and videos. In the process, they are reshaping the world of mapmaking and collectively creating a new kind of atlas that is likely to be both richer and messier than any other. They are also turning the Web into a medium where maps will play a more central role in how information is organized and found.
Read this article from the New York Times
