• Germany is now the largest market for video games in Europe, driven primarily by German interest in the Wii Fit (more …).
• German laws banning the distribution of photos of people or their property without their permission is forcing Google to modify its StreetView functionality before its launch in Germany (more …).
• A number of German states, led by Lower Saxony, are now trying to prevent web services such as Amazon, Facebook, or Google from aggregating and sharing visitor information without the explicit consent of the visitor (more …).
• Facebook has grown by 260% in Germany over just the past year and Germany is now the 18th largest country in Facebook with over 2M members. However, Facebook still remains much smaller in Germany than the Berlin-based StudiVZ social network which boasts over 13M members (more …).
• A Hamburg court has ruled that YouTube can be held liable for damages when it hosts copyright-protected material without permission (more …).
• Dead Drops — an anonymous, offline, p2p file-sharing network in public space — has been established by Berlin based media artist Aram Bartholl. Dead Drops embeds USB flash drives into walls, buildings and curbs in public space, allowing anyone to plugin their laptop to share their favorite files and data (more …). h/t jgieseking

This is, but of course, a very small sample of recent happenings. Hopefully I’ll have more to report post-seminar.

The marches, organized at a lightning pace by volunteers using Facebook, show the increasing power and reach of a social-networking site originally designed to help college students find drinking buddies.

An interesting theme which runs through the article is that of a “longstanding Burma Campaign UK” and a “fledgling Facebook group” – a theme of mature activism and immature activism. This theme is brought to the fore in comments made by the Burma Campaign UK’s acting director:

They’re able to do things that we can’t because we’re a small organization with a small capacity — they’ve been able to mobilize people, and there’s been a division of labor.

That there has been a division of labor in activism is an interesting thing to ponder. This narrative is not uncommon, in fact the article’s description of the facebook liaison getting a desk in the Burma Campaign UK office parallel’s Joe Trippi’s (Dean for America campaign manager) description of the creation of a MeetUp liaison desk at their headquarters during the 2004 presidential primary.

In Education and Democracy, John Dewey spoke of the need to bridge this critical disconnect between mature and immature experience. This begs the question of how to create a historically informed yet innovative and original activist movement for the so called informational society?

Facebook, the fast-growing social networking group, has come under investigation by Andrew Cuomo, the New York attorney-general, who said on Monday that the company did not do enough to protect children from sexual predators on its website...

The attorney-general’s investigation comes days after Rupert Murdoch, chief executive of News Corp and owner of MySpace, a rival social network, predicted Facebook would run into problems over child safety…

Good thing there are giant corporations waiting in the wings to save social networks like myspace and facebook from child safety problems…