Gaimin, Conan and Khan: Revolution in Progress

A few things this week stood out from the What's Miso Reading list that I thought worth sharing:

*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*

Following the HBGary Federal boasting about going after Anonymous for cyber attacks on companies terminating services to Wikileaks, the subsequent breach of HBGary by Anonymous releasing company memos implicating Bank of America, its law firm Hunton & Williams and the US Chamber of Commerce in proposals to recruit cyber criminals to "go after" Wikileaks and other "activists" by illegal methods and resultant uncovering of collusion between government and business.... whew! Head-spinning but crucial. One of the writers targeted by BofA, Glenn Greenwald, has an interesting article on the entire skirmish and its implications.

*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*

Neil Gaiman released a video on ORGZine being interviewed by the Open Rights Group about piracy, copyright, the net and business models.

"That's really all this is. It's people lending books. And you can't look on that as a lost sale.... What you're actually doing is advertising. You're reaching more people. You're raising awareness. And understanding that gave me a whole new idea of the shape of copyright and what the web was doing. Because the biggest thing the web was doing is allowing people to hear things, allowing people to read things, allowing people to see things they might never have otherwise seen. And I think, basically, that's an incredibly good thing."

*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*

Conan O'Brien, a hardcore Big Media Guy for 17 years, is an interesting case study in self-reinvention and embracing the digital world. Dropped from The Tonight Show only 7 months after moving the entire show from NY to LA and a digital naif, O'Brien has embraced the digital distribution model and is enjoying his 2.0 career immensely. This article from Fortune Magazine details his baptism and conversion process, talks about ownership and distribution partnerships and gives some excellent real-world statistics why he's more successful than ever.

*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*

The Khan Academy

If you aren't aware of this site, I've just done you a huge favor. Salman Khan founded the Khan Academy with the hope of using technology to foster new learning models. Begun as a series teaching simple math lessons for free through over 2000 YouTube videos, the Khan Academy has exploded recently with an influx of donations and support, expanding the math videos into a complete set of lessons, test exercises, and evaluations and adding whole new video courses on history, the sciences, finances and even venture capital. This is one of the bright and blazing stars for future education models. Oh yeah - it's also totally free.

*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*

Gaming search engines is a form of information pollution; skewing or slanting results through dubious and sly maneuvers. Sometimes those maneuvers pass the dubious-n-sly line, as this NY Times article on JC Penney's gaming of Google search results illustrates. There's also some nice names and techniques to delve into in the article as well as a critical look at Google's efforts to maintain an honest search engine.

Such articles are becoming more common and the reason why I use blekko and DuckDuckGo lately to cross-search (Memory Lane: I was a staunchly loyal AltaVista user until these same issues converted me to Google back in the day)

*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*

The InfoWars are heating up...