andresmh

That's so cool! What was your handle? Mine was andresmh. I worked on the community part during grad school :-) Scratch on!

The online community was the focus of my dissertation, so it's really great to hear your daughter has benefited from it. We worked really hard to keep the community a friendly space for everyone. It was, and continues to be, a lot of work for the team. I no longer work on Scratch, but I try to donate when I can. I encourage folks to do so as well: https://www.scratchfoundation.org/

What is your Scratch handle? I worked on the online community for my dissertation and it's always great to know how the social aspect of Scratch has helped people in their journey.

Glad the community and remixing got you engaged with Scratch! Those two things were the focus of my PhD dissertation at the Media Lab. Do you mind sharing what you do now? What was your Scratch handle? Scratch on!

Somewhat related story: During the Mexican presidential election mentioned in the article, a PhD student at one of the top Computer Science departments in the U.S. got in touch with me (through a shared friend) because he saw I was doing research on Mexican civic tech.

He mentioned that while he was teaching a workshop at his university, two of the workshop participants, who were employees of a powerful Mexican TV network, asked him to help them discredit or deflect the student movement described in the article (the movement was called the "Mexican spring" at the time for their use of social media).

This sounded shady to the student, and he wanted to tell someone, but didn't know who. Ultimately he just avoided the TV folks for the rest of the workshop.

Weeks later, The Guardian published some leaked documents that showed nefarious ties between said TV network and the then candidate.

The student connected with the press then, but the story never came out. Perhaps he got cold feet, or maybe the journalists didn't think it was interesting enough.

I think a medallion represents a group of taxis cabs. Each cab has its own hack license.

Shit Reddit Says

I kinda gave up, and simply create an email filter that deletes any email from the domain name of the sender.

Possibly relevant. I wrote this few months ago regarding some of the challenges with crowdsourcing crime reporting in the Mexican Drug War: http://readwrite.com/2012/08/14/the-problem-with-crowdsourci...

How is this different from, say, a coffee shop saying "sorry, we're closed because the electricity went out"?

I would argue that people can die when Twitter goes down. In Mexico citizens are using Twitter to alert each other when Drug War violence erupts: readwriteweb.com/archives/shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_hashtag_narcocensorship.php

I do this with Mozilla Prism http://prism.mozillalabs.com/

Apparently they published the first one: http://neglectedwar.com/blog/archives/8516

what does she make with Scratch?

Here is something I wrote about the events: http://socialmediacollective.org/2011/08/31/shouting-fire-in...

I see. What is interesting is that most of the requests come from Samsung devices in Spanish-speaking countries, so I guess their keyboards must make it even easier to make the mistake.

Yes. I think this is part of it. Here are the logs from a few weeks ago: http://j.mp/pBqfbx I'd be curious if anyone can figure out why so many visitors are using a browser called Netfront (apparently from Samsung mobiles).

this reminds me of IDN domains, a few weeks ago I purchased fácebook.com and góogle.com. I get a few hundred visits every day. I posted about it here https://plus.google.com/110362380602139255131/posts/NPS3VNyD...

could you explain? I'm a noob wrt the stock market.

Me too. I even tried to share a link to http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5023425/Holy_Bible%28s%29_-_... but it was denied

...and a bitcoin address

why is that a problem? serious question

I see, but the iPhone apps people often pay for tools they can use to create multiple artifacts. Maybe it'd be best to charge less per creation (like $1) and remove more features from the free one (e.g. animations could expire in 1 day and can't be downloaded).

I am a bit confused about the pricing model. Why did you decide to charge per creation rather than per month? Who is the expected audience? Again, great tool.

I'm one of the people behind Scratch <http://scratch.mit.edu>; and I can tell you that Automatoon is seriously cool. I can already see a lot of our users would like your tool. Kudos to you for empowering amateur users!

Another option, albeit expensive and time consuming, is to start snowballing by reaching out to users in person. For example, we ran many in-person programming workshops for kids using scratch.mit.edu and now we have more than 800,000 users.

One of the reasons Facebook and Twitter are used by activists to spread their message, is that non-activists use these media for sharing banal update of their kids, cats and other mundane things. One problem with these type of well-meaning projects is that they rarely attract mainstream audiences.

I am wondering why they didn't go for something that allows for richer semantics like XHTML+RDFa http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfa-syntax/

Which maker/electronics projects do you see as similar? Arduino?

I hope more people support this project. Not only because lowering the barriers for Processing programming is an exciting thing to do but also because this could be repurposed for other languages (the code will be released under GPL). Full disclosure: I'm an advisor on the project.