From The Economist
Fans of online games are used to battling for their lives in virtual worlds. But, as Activision Blizzard, a big producer of such games, has just discovered to its cost, they seem to be just as willing to fight for a cause that has significant real-world implications. After being bombarded with protests from users, the company recently announced it was reversing a decision to make people use their real names when posting comments to its game forums.
The episode is a considerable embarrassment for Activision Blizzard, which had previously argued that its proposed policy was needed to cut down on “trolling”—game-speak for the posting of offensive comments online. Like many online communities (including online newspapers’ comment forums), those associated with the company’s games, which include the hugely popular World of Warcraft, are prone to this unpleasant behaviour. Activision Blizzard’s bosses were betting that by forcing players to use their true identities in its forums—while letting them continue to use make-believe monikers in game play—they could make “trolls” behave themselves.
Instead the move infuriated almost everyone. “Possibly the worst idea in the history of bad ideas,” raged one player on Battle.net, an online forum associated with World of Warcraft that was deluged with many thousands of complaints about the proposed policy. Another called the game company’s plan an “epic fail”, while several more decried it as “a violation of trust.”
From Tom Simonite in MIT’s Technology Review:
From Sasha Frere-Jones in The New Yorker:
Designer Ronen Kadushin has designed an open-source mallet for smashing up iPhones.
From David Talbot in 
From Alex Iskold in 
Amazon.com.
From John Markoff in The New York Times:
From Claire Cain Miller in The New York Times:
From James Fallows in 
from an article at 
From the 
From Canadian entrepreneur and software developer Tim Bray in his blog 
From Joseph Tartakoff at 
From The Economist print edition for 25 February 2010:
From David Goldman at CNNMoney.com:
From Janna Anderson and Lee Rainie at 
From Ellen Nakashima in the Washington Post:
From Ryan Singel in the Wired blog Epicenter:
From Charles Petersen in the New York Review of Books:
humans to organize and create in radically new ways. He says that we are moving from being People of the Book to People of the Screen. Kelly’s radical pronouncements earn fire from both sides of the chasm between religion and science, even as he seeks to see beyond those dogmas. Today he wants to “talk about faith using the vocabulary and logic of science.” When I arrive at Kelly’s home south of San Francisco, he’s sweaty from riding his bike up the steep hill, which rises from the coast. Poet, wanderer, publisher, cross-country bicyclist, former hippie, and self-described nerd, Kelly’s trimmed white beard is that of a New England clipper-ship captain. His home office is perched in a wooded neighborhood and has the pleasant feel of a lived-in tree house, the floor strewn with books and papers and gadgets.
From Tricia Wang’s blog 
John Markoff reviews W. Brian Arthur’s The Nature of Technology in the New York Times,
e react, people think, and people remember. And you encounter this not only in a theoretical way, but when you meet people, when suddenly people start forgetting things, when suddenly people depend on their gadgets, and other stuff, to remember certain things. This is the beginning, its just an experience. But if you think about it and you think about your own behavior, you suddenly realize that something fundamental is going on. There is one comment on Edge which I love, which is in Daniel Dennett’s response to the 2007 annual question, in which he said that we have a population explosion of ideas, but not enough brains to cover them. 
speech this morning at a journalism conference in Washington, DC sponsored by the Federal Trade Commission. The topic, as it so often seems to be these days, is what can be done to save journalism? Since Rupert Murdoch was scheduled to address the conference a little before me, I thought this would be a good time to take a look at Murdoch’s increasingly bellicose war against new media sites that aggregate the news, the increasingly desperate revenue models being discussed for online news, and what, in fact, needs to be done to ensure that journalism will not only survive, but thrive.
