These three Google employees may be the world’s most powerful censors

The New York Times Magazine today featured Google’s Gatekeepers - a look at the small unaccountable team within Google who decide whether and to what extent they will comply with the wishes of governments around the world who wish to regulate its operations. Encouragingly, Andrew McLaughlin, global public-policy director, is a Berkman Fellow, which is about as good a place as I can imagine to start from if you want to appreciate Internet regulation issues.

More disturbingly, Nicole Wong describes her role as finding an approach which “will allow our products to move forward in a country” (which should come as no surprise - as a publicly-held company it is legally obliged to maximise its profits).

I knew this would happen sooner or later. I have a fairly unusual name and nobody with any online prominence who is anything like me has popped up online. Until now. I therefore would like it to be on the record that I have nothing to do with The Social Media Bible (even though I have been studying social media for the last 6 years). The David Brake who is co-authoring that book is David Kendrick Brake - I am David Russell Brake (and I am starting to think that it might be expedient to use that middle name for my publications). Not that I would want you to get the impresson I don’t like the book - I haven’t seen it and don’t know the authors (though I had swapped emails with my namesake briefly earlier when I noticed his/our name online).

Unquestionably, blogging has encouraged greater political participation. Nonetheless, it appears that choosing to blog about politics remains socially stratified. I just did a quick and dirty re-analysis on some Pew figures from 2006 and found that not only is blogging in the US already skewed towards the college educated (39% of bloggers contacted had college degrees compared to 28% of the US population 25 and over at the time) but political blogging is even more so - 59% of those sampled who blogged primarily about politics (N=16) have college degrees. I believe the sample size makes it difficult to be definitive about this but the numbers are suggestive. Has anyone written up a ‘proper’ statistical study of how socio-economic status correlates with particular forms of weblogging use?

This week saw the launch of Kids’ Informal Learning with Digital Media - a collection of ethnographic studies in both white paper (58 pages) and book form - and the release of a draft literature review Online Threats to Youth: Solicitation, Harassment, and Problematic Content (87 pages) both of which arrived opportunely as Sonia Livingstone and I are busy trying to finish off a short paper “On the rapid rise of social networking sites: Emerging findings and policy implications”. There goes the day!

The (US) Natural Resources Defense Council just published a report claiming that video game consoles across the US alone use 16 billion KWh a year (what San Diego uses) and by better and easier to use power management they estimate that could be dropped by 11 billion KWh. Their spokesman described the XBox 360 and Playstation as having similar energy footprints to fridges. So if you’re a console gamer, visit the page below, find the auto-shutdown mode for your console (which I gather isn’t enabled by default!) and enable it. Your children will thank you…

NRDC: Lowering the Cost of Play.

As a consulting researcher at MIT Convergence Culture Consortium, I’m happy to announce this year’s  Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Futures of Entertainment 3 conference! It will take place Friday, Nov. 21, and Saturday, Nov. 22, at the Wong Auditorium in the Tang Center on MIT’s campus.

Futures of Entertainment 3, an event sponsored by the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium is the third annual conference bringing together media industries professionals and media studies academics to discuss the current state and ongoing trends in media.  This year’s conference will include panels on how value is counted in the media industries, understanding audiences, social media, the comic book industry, franchising and transmedia, media distribution in a global marketplace, and the intersection of academia and the media industries.

Speakers at the conference include Kim Moses, executive producer of The Ghost Whisperer; Alex McDowell, production designer for Watchmen; Gregg Hale, producer of The Blair Wtich Project and Seventh Moon; Lance Weiler, director of The Last Broadcast and Head Trauma; and Tom Casiello, Daytime Emmy award-winning former writer for soap operas including As the World Turns, One Life to Live, Days of Our Lives, and The Young and the Restless; Peter Kim, a founder of the Dachis Corporation; as well as representatives from HBO Online, World Wrestling Entertainment, and other innovative media companies and projects.

The conference will also feature academics such as Henry Jenkins (MIT, founder of the Convergence Culture Consortium and author of Convergence Culture and Textual Poachers), Yochai Benkler (Harvard Law School, author of The Wealth of Networks), John Caldwell (UCLA, author of Production Culture), Anita Elberse (Harvard Business School, author of “Should You Invest in the Long Tail?”), and Grant McCracken (author of Transformations).

More information on the conference, including the program and registration, is available at http://www.convergenceculture.org/futuresofentertainment/