“Facebook has so much power online that they have the ability to buy something at a low price and then make it go high by directing traffic accordingly,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School and a co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “Sociologically, this is called the Matthew effect, where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” He notes that the term comes from a line in the Gospel of Matthew. In other words, Facebook can create its future.

via Disruptions: Facebook’s Real-Life ‘Spidey Sense’ – NYTimes.com.

“The interesting twist here is that the tweets are, or were, public — they just scrolled off,” Zittrain said, referring to the tweets that the Manhattan DA was seeking Twitter turn over. “Twitter presumably reserves the right through its terms of service to decide that the tweet archive will jump to, say, one year instead of several weeks, and if Twitter can do that, goes the argument, why can’t the government simply request the materials?”

via Twitter’s Defense Of ‘Occupy’ Protester Could Decide Future Of Information Laws | TPM Idea Lab.

In the end, I don’t think there’s any contest here: Benkler has clearly won. While there are large corporate entities with profit-oriented motives involved in the web, a group that includes Facebook and Twitter, the bulk of the value that is produced in those networks and services comes from the free behavior of crowds of users. Yes, all of the companies involved in those networks and services are trying hard to monetize that value, but it doesn’t come from charging them directly — and very little of what is produced comes in return for a salary, which was a key part of Carr’s argument.

via The Carr-Benkler wager and the peer-powered economy — Tech News and Analysis.

Zittrain’s message: Internet meme creators and remixers can be a force for good, in that they “look for a pathos in the world and try to capture it,” thereby exposing absurd aspects of commercialization and mass media; but it is increasingly important that those who love memes understand and deal with “the ethical dimensions that can come from our happy generation of lulz” the made-up word that refers to the type of ironic humor many such memes embody.

via Could Technology Tame the Internet Meme? – Technology Review.

We’re not too sure exactly what it is yet, but organizations like ROFLCon, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and Expert Labs are taking us in the right direction by gathering minds to think of what exactly is happening — from not only a social and political perspective, but from a psychological and business perspective as well.

via Something Is Happening At ROFLCon | WBUR.

Most neighborhoods in America have a public library. Now the biggest neighborhood in America, the Internet, wants a library of its own. Last week, Ars attended a conference held by the Digital Public Library of America, a nascent group of intellectuals hoping to put all of Americas library holdings online. The DPLA is still in its infancy—theres no official staff, nor is there a finished website where you can access all the books they imagine will be accessible. But if the small handful of volunteers and directors have their way, youll see all that by April 2013 at the latest.

via Exercises in democracy: building a digital public library.

Zittrain wondered about the “ethical dimensions” involved when propelling an unknown stranger to meme-infamy, and while he proved his meme-love numerous times during the speech, he gently suggested that the size and skills of the online community could be used for more than mere lulz.

via At ROFLcon, Internet Memes Collide With Meatspace | Underwire | Wired.com.

Professor Zittrain gave a keynote talk on Friday before a packed lecture hall at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge as part of ROFLCon, a two-day conference that aims to dissect and discuss the culture of the Web. ROFLCon, which started in 2008, has happened every year since then in one form or another, bringing together artists, curators, entrepreneurs and microcelebrities.

via ROFLCon: The Internet Goes Offline to Talk Web Culture – NYTimes.com.

This is the first Nieman class to feature Nieman-Berkman Fellows, who will work jointly with us here at Nieman and with our friends at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. We initially expected to pick one Nieman-Berkman Fellow, but we ended up going with two: Borja Echevarria of El Pais and Laura Amico of Homicide Watch. You’ll be reading more from them and about their work here in the fall.

via Announcing the 75th class of Nieman Fellows » Nieman Journalism Lab.

(Pilot funding for Mapping Main Street came from an experimental initiative of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Association of Independents in Radio, and the support of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society; the project also appeared as a program of the same name on National Public Radio in 2009.)

via Zeega co-creator Jesse Shapins design code for database documentaries | Harvard Magazine May-Jun 2012.