A new issue of the Journal of Emerging Technologies in Web Intelligence is out. Efrat Shuster (Penn): The Political Philosophy of the Internet: From Locke’s State of Nature to His Social Contract. Kay Lehman Schlozman (BC), Sidney Verba (Harvard), and Henry E. Brady (UC-Berkeley): Weapon of the Strong? Participatory Inequality and the Internet. Elad Segev (HUJ): Mapping the International: Global and Local Salience and News-Links Between Countries in Popular News Sites Worldwide. The web's new walls: How the threats to the internet’s openness can be averted. Manipulation of the crowd: How trustworthy are online ratings? An interview with Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger. What "Platonic" means online: Craigslist, the online classified-ad emporium that now attracts more than 20 billion page views every month, promotes transactional relationships. Farhad Manjoo on how the listserv, one of the Internet's earliest innovations, is still one of its best. Linkrights and Wrongs: Web sites that aggregate content should share profit with the sites that generate that content. A review of The Yahoo Style Guide: The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World (and more and more). In some corners of the web, pirates serve as curators of high culture. The internet has been a great unifier of people, companies and online networks — powerful forces are threatening to balkanise it. The Internet has not proven itself to be some surefire weapon against tyranny or injustice or bad taste, but the same can be said for the written word and everything else. The Web is dead? Evolution, not extinction, has always been the primary rule of media ecology, even if the rate of change is speeding up. For Ben Huh and his Cheezburger Network, Internet success rolls in on little cat feet.
