MichaelZimmer.org

Yet another blog meme, courtesy of folks at Chronicles of Dissent (by way of Threat Level). This time I’m supposed to grab the nearest book, open to page 123, go down to the 5th sentence and type up the 3 following sentences. Not sure why, or if someone is going to be patching all these [...]

In more chilling news, it has been reported that Google reached a settlement with a group of Israeli council members and will voluntarily turn over the IP address of a blogger accused of slander to a court overseeing the case. From the report: For more than a year, the anonymous blogger slandered three Shaarei Tikva [...]

[This thought piece appears on the On The Identity Trail project's blog, blog*on*nymity. Thanks to the amazing folks there for the (second) invitation to contribute to the project. -mz] This post is an attempt to collect and organize some thoughts on how the rise of so-called Web 2.0 technologies bear on privacy and surveillance studies. [...]

A new meme has germinated the blogosphere: 5 Blogs That Make Me Think. The fine folks at Chronicles of Dissent (a production of Pogo Was Right) included michaelzimmer.org among 5 privacy-related blogs that make them think. Thanks for placing me in such impressive company! Here are 5 (mostly random) blogs from my blogroll that really [...]

Siva Vaidhyanathan says “no thanks” to Time magazine naming “you” Person of the Year. From his essay on MSNBC.com: … Well, thank you, Time, for hyping me, overvaluing me, using me to sell my image back to me, profiling me, flattering me, and failing to pay me. As soon as I saw myself on my [...]

Seth Finkelstein has tagged me with the “five things you don’t know about me” meme spreading through the blogosphere, and I figure if Seth is game enough to play, I can too About 8 years ago, before I returned to academia (and, eventually, privacy advocacy), I worked for an electronic payment processing company (we made [...]

Just a quick meta-post about the blog: While I am committed to keeping the blog ad-free (no Ads by Goooooogle, thank you), I have decided to add some buttons for a few campaigns that I believe in: Individual-i: Today, the rights of individuals are being eroded: by government, by corporations, by society itself. This icon [...]

Nicholas Carr has posted a thoughtful essay on “The Great Unread“, describing the relationship between the powerful and the powerless in the blogosphere: What we tell ourselves about the blogosphere – that it’s open and democratic and egalitarian, that it stands in contrast and in opposition to the controlled and controlling mass media – is [...]

The Boston Globe has a story today about plagiarism in blogs. I’ve previously commented on blog plagiarism – blogiarism – in terms of stealing content in order to drive readers to your site to capitalize on advertising revenue. The Globe’s story, however, addresses a different motivation for online plagiarism – personal blog plagiarism, where someone [...]

There’s been quite a bit of discussion lately across the blogosphere on “blogiarism,” the practice of cutting and pasting content from one blog onto your own without any link, attribution, editing or commentary in order to drive readers to your own advertising revenue. Clearly, such practice amounts to plagiarism and is unethical. While the blogging [...]