I’m on a mailing list for former employees of a company, and we’ve been on a track for a day talking about what computer is best for aging parents or grandparents who want to do email and some basic Web browsing. This is from the point of view of the people who are going to be doing support and sysadmin for their relatives.

For years I’ve casually tried to get various folks interested in creating an OS shell or skin specifically designed for the elderly who are unfamiliar with computers. The existing OSes do things like put icons on desktops that are then covered by windows. Yes, the Mac’s Dock helps. And obviously the elderly can learn how to use computers, just as we all have. But the hurdle is unnecessarily high for people who have never held a mouse before.

So, my questions:

1. Is there such an operating system shell or skin?

2. Is there a wiki so we can at least share our experiences providing computers and support to our elderly relatives?

[Tags: aging elderly user_interface ]

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Can you spot the most important difference?

Here’s a well-known photo of the original, extant Kindle:

Here’s a photo from MobileRead that purports to be of the soon-to-be-announced Kindle 2.

If you said that the Kindle 2 can be held without inadvertently pressing buttons, you win!!!

[Tags: kindle amazon ]

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Urs Gasser has officially been announced as the new executive director of the Berkman Center.

This is excellent news. Urs has been a fellow at the Center, as well as the head of an Internet research center in Switzerland. There’s thus no period of wondering if he shares our values, what do we think of him, etc. We know his, values and many of us have already had the pleasure of working with him and learning from him. Urs, in a word or two, is completely at home in the Berkman’s admirable ethos of smarts and kindness. I’m very, very happy that Urs has taken up this role. [Disclosure: Yes, Urs is in some sense my boss. But that’s not really how the Center runs.]

Urs steps into the Bunyon-esque shows left by John Palfrey, who remains a faculty co-director but is now Vice Dean of Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law. Colin Maclay, managing director of the Center — so smart, so kind — served in the interregnum.

You can hear an interview with Urs (by, um, me) as part of the continuing Radio Berkman podcast series…

[Tags: berkman urs_gasser ]

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Wendy Seltzer has a screen capture that proves that Google is harmful to the Internet.

This is a reference to the 40-minute Google outage a couple of days ago. More about StopBadware here. And here’s an example of a site Google lists as malware.

[Tags: google stopbadware ]

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… in the dark, threatening, and one-sided.

Thus, the RIAA is appealing the decision to let a hearing in its suit against a file sharer — Joel Tennenbaum — be webcast.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (did you remember to join?) has filed a brief in support of webcasting the hearing, in which it says:

“The record companies have long maintained that they brought these lawsuits against ordinary users to start a national conversation about peer-to-peer file-sharing,” said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. “What better way is there for the public to learn what the record companies are doing than by seeing for themselves what happens in these lawsuits?”

[Tags: riaa eff tennenbaum nesson download copyright copyleft ]

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I’d like to be able to jump to a date in Google Calendar by typing in a date, because paging through 15 months takes precious seconds that could otherwise be spent in scratching myself. I was hoping that typing a date into the search field would work, but it doesn’t. In fact, searching for something like “5/8/08” gives results that seem random but undoubtedly have an inner but unhelpful logic.

[Tags: google google_calendar lazy_sob ]

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danah boyd has posted her doctoral dissertation online. Here is the abstract. (I haven’t yet read the dissertation, but I’m pretty confident it’s great.)

“Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics”

Abstract: As social network sites like MySpace and Facebook emerged, American teenagers began adopting them as spaces to mark identity and socialize with peers. Teens leveraged these sites for a wide array of everyday social practices – gossiping, flirting, joking around, sharing information, and simply hanging out. While social network sites were predominantly used by teens as a peer-based social outlet, the unchartered nature of these sites generated fear among adults. This dissertation documents my 2.5-year ethnographic study of American teens’ engagement with social network sites and the ways in which their participation supported and complicated three practices – self-presentation, peer sociality, and negotiating adult society.

My analysis centers on how social network sites can be understood as networked publics which are simultaneously (1) the space constructed through networked technologies and (2) the imagined community that emerges as a result of the intersection of people, technology, and practice. Networked publics support many of the same practices as unmediated publics, but their structural differences often inflect practices in unique ways. Four properties – persistence, searchability, replicability, and scalability – and three dynamics – invisible audiences, collapsed contexts, and the blurring of public and private – are examined and woven throughout the discussion.

While teenagers primarily leverage social network sites to engage in common practices, the properties of these sites configured their practices and teens were forced to contend with the resultant dynamics. Often, in doing so, they reworked the technology for their purposes. As teenagers learned to navigate social network sites, they developed potent strategies for managing the complexities of and social awkwardness incurred by these sites. Their strategies reveal how new forms of social media are incorporated into everyday life, complicating some practices and reinforcing others. New technologies reshape public life, but teens’ engagement also reconfigures the technology itself.

[Tags: danah_boyd internet_sociology sociology teenagers social_networks networked_publics myspace facebook ethnographics berkman ]v

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Report: Obama Meets Unconditionally With George Will, Bill Kristol, David Brooks

From TPM.

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JP Rangaswami chooses his favorite among the 151 responses to Edge’s question: “What Will Change Everything? What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?” JP chooses Chris Anderson’s essay on Web-empowered teaching. (This is the CA of TED, not the CA of Wired.) JP also recommends reading all 107,000 words of all 151 responses, which I have not done. But it’s a great pool to take a random dip in.

[Tags: edge teaching education future jp_rangaswami ]

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Two of the hands are especially good. This is a fun video.

[Tags: guitar youtube ]

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