This week, my friend Gilad Lotan of SocialFlow wrote an excellent blog post explaining how trending topics really work, in an attempt it seems, to put rumors of censorship to rest. Twitter has been dealing with these rumors for quite some time, and last December publicly explained that Trending Topics are about velocity, not volume, […]
This year, I have written 7 journal articles, 40 articles for mainstream publications, 76 posts for this blog, 25 posts for the EFF blog, 54 posts for Global Voices, and two academic papers, to a total of 204 decently-sized pieces of writing. With an average length of say, 800 words, that comes to about 163,000 […]
Ever since my good friend Zeynep Tufekci brought me a revolutionary t-shirt from Egypt, I’ve been fascinated by the popularization of hashtags outside of Twitter. And by outside, I don’t mean on blogs, Facebook, and Flickr, where they’re increasingly appearing, but offline. T-shirts, posters, graffiti, and protest signs all make use of hashtag symbolism; rather […]