A Discussion with danah boyd

boyd, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Information, explores how young people negotiate the presentation of self in online mediated contexts. Her research focuses on how this young audience engages with “digital publics” – connected social spaces such as MySpace, LiveJournal, Xanga and YouTube.

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Currently, boyd is a Graduate Fellow at the USC Anneberg Center, and social media researcher at Yahoo! Research Berkeley. Her recent work has explored diverse topics such as the creation of digital publics in Myspace.com (Identity Production in a Networked Culture: Why Youth Heart MySpace), the design of culturally adaptive software (G/localization: When Global Information and Local Interaction Collide), and the exploration of folksonomy (HT06, Tagging Paper, Taxonomy, Flickr, Academic Article, ToRead).

At Berkeley, boyd is advised by Peter Lyman and Mimi Ito. She holds an M.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she studied with Judith Donath at the Media Lab, and a B.A. from Brown University. boyd is frequently cited in top media, including the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR and Salon.com. She even went toe-to-toe with scary old Bill O’Reilly once. boyd blogs atwww.zephoria.org/thoughts/, a must-read destination for those interested in social technology.

Jimmy Wales: a Public Talk on Wikipedia

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Jimmy ‘Jimbo’ Wales setup the Wikipedia project in early 2001. The project has now grown into the largest freely available online encyclopedia and is available in more than 100 languages.

In mid-2003, Wales set up the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, to support Wikipedia and its sister projects. Wales is the foundation’s president and chairman of the board.

Wales was appointed as fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School earlier this year.

Dan Gillmore: We the Media


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Dan Gillmor, founder of Grassroots Media Inc., is working on a project to encourage and enable more citizen-based media. This weblog is devoted to the discussion of the issues facing grassroots journalism as it grows into an important force in society.

Dan is author of We the Media: Grassroots Journalism By the People, For the People, a 2004 book that is widely credited as the first comprehensive look at way the collision of technology and journalism is transforming the media landscape.

From 1994-2004, Dan was a columnist at the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley’s daily newspaper, and wrote a weblog for SiliconValley.com. He joined the Mercury News after six years with the Detroit Free Press. Before that, he was with the Kansas City Times and several newspapers in Vermont.

A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Vermont, Dan received a Herbert Davenport fellowship in 1982 for economics and business reporting at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. During the 1986-87 academic year he was a journalism fellow at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he studied history, political theory and economics. He has won or shared in several regional and national journalism awards.

Before becoming a journalist he played music professionally for seven years.