Monday Round-Up

Dawn does some real-time investigative work on crowdsourcing. In Saturday's NYT's article, "E-Mail Identified G.O.P. Candidates for Justice Jobs," reference was made to a spreadsheet of federal prosecutors indicating membership in the Federalist Society. Dawn backtracked through quite a few blogs, including Daily Kos and Firedoglake, to find out who was the first to post about the spreadsheet. Take a look at her work to learn more.

Reports are coming in from Brazil. RenRusso describes the crowdsourcing differences between several well-known Brazilian publications, such as Portal Estadao, iG MInha Noticia, etc.. 7sigma provides us with a list of brazilian wiki sites. Anyone want to take a closer look at what's going on?

Across the Atlantic, Peterpoe describes collective writing as a strong italian literary tradition, citing "The Zar is not dead," a futurist novel written by ten people. Anyone know if multiple author books are a tradition in other cultures? Tell us on Peterpoe's entry.

Michael Ho plans to interview Sarah Tuttle and wants to know if you have any questions for her. Sounds like a question for the day.

Sean Richardson attended "Democratization and the Networked Public Sphere" this past Friday and contributed his notes to the "Tell us about Danah Boyd and her work." This is a really creative way to contribute to Assignment Zero and to help complete the assignment. While reading someone's book or checking out their website is often our first instinct, we can learn just as much from listening to or attending a talk or lecture of theirs. If you're interested in studying new media thinkers, look online to see where they're speaking next... maybe that's the way for you.

Michael Shaw points us to a study written by consultants for Advanced Systems & Concepts that recommends the government advocate adoption of open source technologies. Shaw posted this to the Open Source Political Party page. For the purposes of Assignment Zero we want to know how the government is employing crowdsourcing techniques. Does anyone know of other examples like this one? How would you analyze this adoption?

Editor Jesse Wegman posted about the Peer to Patent project, writing: "The US Patent Office is overwhelmed by patent applications, and patent officers are not permitted to conduct outside research in the assessment of an application. The result? There's a backlog of more than 800,000 applications, and the vast majority of these get approved, simply because there's no time to conduct in-depth review. Enter the concept of "Community Patent Review," pioneered by Beth Noveck at New York Law School. The idea, in its most basic sense, is to share patent applications with people in the community who have pertinent expertise, and in this way to both speed up the review process and make it more foolproof." Is this something that interests you? If so, contact Jesse and he'll get you started. If you're interested in writing the article, send your application in here.

KG downloaded "These Wicked Games," a crowdsourced romance novel, and dishes on the details: I was only allowed to print the editorial parts of the novella. I could not print the publisher's advertisements or the copyright information. (Is this done so printed out and pirated copies could be easily identified?) When I tried to copy text from the ebook for the first time, I got a dialog box that said: "Copy to Clipboard Permissions---
You may copy 15 selections in this document in the next 7 days. Would you like to continue?" (I didn't copy the text.) Summary:
Overall, it seems like Avon is trying to let readers feel they own a "real" book (and write in it, comment in it, underline/highlight parts of it like readers would in a paper book, even though it's an ebook). Yet they have no intention of letting copies of it be reproduced and distributed without their permission and profit." Anyone else have similar experiences with published crowdsourced novels?

JSykes posts an interview with Nemesea, the dutch rock band that first met the $50,000 mark on Sellaband. He also writes that the group is currently trying to reach the founders of Sellaband and are going after Sellaband investors for interviews. Do you know anyone they should talk to?