Although anti-immigration activists demand that English become the US's official language, on the Internet traditional English is radically changing due to the rise of user generated content like the image above and LOLcats. This new democratic form of content creation is the source of new slang and norms of spelling and grammar (like the word "serosly"), which is being developed at a rate that I would imagine is unprecidented.

When conservative demand that we protect our American culture from change,

From today's NY Times:

With a bid for Yahoo, Microsoft was trying to buy its way out of the problem. It was a controversial step and a gamble, but at least it was a big move. Now, there is no clear prospect of a quick fix for Microsoft, as the center of gravity in computing continues to move away from the personal computer, Microsoft’s stronghold, and to the Internet. read more...

image: www.adenhepburn.com

I just found the site We Tell Stories.  It mashes up stories and maps, taking you through space as well as through narrative, an unusually poetic application of the map mashup meme. Thanks, Ethan.

Last Friday I went to ROFLCon, the “rolling on the floor laughing” convention. It was a two-day event organized by an enterprising group of Harvard undergrads (and sponsored by the Berkman Center) to celebrate and explore internet memes and culture.

Why is this an appropriate topic for blog on digital activism, you might ask. Although the conference was ostensibly about funny Internet memes it was really about how Internet is fueling the growth of user-generated culture - cultural democracy, if you will. Internet fame, which Berkman fellow David Weinberger discussed in his keynote address, is a perfect

According to a report by Al Jazeera English (see video above) Palestinian youth are using the Internet to run an informal phone bank to call voters in the US before every primary in order to convince them to vote for Barack Obama.

The organizer of the international phone-banking initiative, Ibrahim Abu Jayab, age 23, brings a group of 17 friends to a cybercafé in Gaza before every US primary to use Internet telephony to randomly call numbers in the state where the primary is being held and ask citizens to vote for Obama.

¡Vamonos a apoyar a Barack Obama!

But with this privilege comes responsibility. If the Internet allows ordinary citizens to influence world affairs we have to think very carefully about how we use that influence. Case in point: MoveOn's campaign to get American troops out of Iraq. Above is a video they

In addition to my master's program and DigiActive, I am also a research assistant for the Internet and Democracy Project at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. For much of this year, John Kelly of Morningside Analytics and Columbia University, and his team, has been studying the Iranian blogosphere for the Internet and Democracy Project. He's used both a network analytics program and human reserch to create the map above.

A little bit of explanation: A dot represents a blog.