Dan Gillmor is director of the Knight centre for digital media entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite school of journalism and mass communication. His most recent book is Mediactive (2010), also a blog of the same name, about how people can be empowered as new media users. He recently blogged about why he feels that everyone should register a domain name. I agree with him and this is a great article. More teachers should adopt his philosophy…
We’ve all become avid social media users, but it’s smart to have a web identity that you – not corporations – control. My students get extra credit if they can show they’ve registered an internet domain name for themselves. In any future course I teach, this will no longer be optional; it will be a requirement. My students – and the rest of us – are partly who others say we are.
Again and again, we’ve all seen the risks of putting our proverbial eggs in these corporate baskets. Again and again, we’ve seen that “free” always comes at a price, whether it’s using the data we generate to make money, outright invasions of privacy, or the real possibility that the service might (and sometimes does) disappear at the whim of the owner. Google’s decision this month to shutter its Reader product, which helped countless…
Read more… | Source: The Guardian | Date Posted: 3/28/2013
