Damien Van Achter

As the fruits of Google”s rush to build a social network are now achingly public, someone has asked a pretty apropos question on Quora, “How long would it take to build Facebook as of July 2011?” Former Facebook CTO and Quora founder Adam D”Angelo provides an informed answer, arguing that if we were just talking about the software and systems and not the company”s user acquisition (which Google granted has a way easier time with), that the entire process would take two years, if undertaken b…

Few websites have changed the way we access knowledge as much as Wikipedia. Now, however, it looks like the online encyclopedia is hitting some snags, as the number of volunteers who write and edit its articles is getting smaller.

When Google News launched in 2002, it did so with a declaration: "This page was generated entirely by computer algorithms without human editors. No humans were harmed or even used in the creation of this page."

By Gail Shister on August 4, 2011 11:30 AM CNN exile Rick Sanchez is not a big fan of cable news. "It’s an ugly, nasty, vitriolic business," Sanchez, 53, says from his home in Atlanta. "Every day, it’s a knife fight in an alley, and you don’t walk away from a knife fight without a lot of blood on you."

August 3, 2011 at 6:56 am PT Magazine publishers have veered back and forth on what tablets means for their business – Savior! Disappointment! Maybe sort of promising! – but here’s Time Inc. making another bet on the technology: The Time Warner publishing unit says that by the end of the year, all 21 of its titles will be available on just about every tablet platform.

This spring, the Knight Foundation and Mozilla took the premise of hacks and hackers collaboration and pushed it a step further, creating a contest to encourage journalists, developers, programmers, and anyone else so inclined to put together ideas to innovate news.

Bon alors, ils ont quoi dans les tripes les rédacteurs en chef du Monde, du Figaro ou de Libération ? Sont-ils fabriqués dans le même moule ? S’intéressent-ils tous aux mêmes sujets ? Difficile à savoir sans pratiquer d’autopsie, et étrangement, les principaux intéressés n’ont pas l’air de vouloir se laisser approcher par un bistouri.

According to a new Harvard University survey that was partially funded by the State Department, 7% of Arab bloggers have been arrested or detained over the past year while 30% have been threatened.

ArrayToday is a significant day in the history of the Internet. On 6 August 1991, exactly twenty years ago, the World Wide Web became publicly available. Its creator, the now internationally known Tim Berners-Lee, posted a short summary of the project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup and gave birth to a new technology which would fundamentally change [...]

Alexis Madrigal – Alexis Madrigal is a senior editor at The Atlantic. He’s the author of Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology. More Alexis Madrigal is a senior editor at The Atlantic. He’s the author of Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology.

HTTPS Everywhere is a Firefox extension produced as a collaboration between The Tor Project and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It encrypts your communications with a number of major websites. Many sites on the web offer some limited support for encryption over HTTPS, but make it difficult to use.

The conventional wisdom among digital journalists is that tweeting is better done by humans than robots – an argument that would cause @nytbot5000, the robot that automates Twitter feeds for The New York Times, to break down and cry. Luckily, he doesn’t have feelings.

Il est désormais possible de se passer de la suite bureautique Microsoft Office et du système d’exploitation Windows en utilisant de fiables alternatives libres (GNU/Linux et Libreoffice pour ne pas les nommer). Mais quid du réseau social Facebook et des services Google par exemple ?

Les mots intraduisibles ont ceci de merveilleux qu’ils rappellent l’importance du vocabulaire, titillent l’inventivité et poussent au néologisme. Il en va ainsi de "curation", l’activité qui, aux États-Unis (et en Grande Bretagne) consistait à sélectionner les collections d’un musée et à les mettre en scène.

Whether you’re using wireless internet in a coffee shop, stealing it from the guy next door, or competing for bandwidth at a conference, you’ve probably gotten frustrated at the slow speeds you face when more than one device is tapped into the network.

The most prominent national environmentally-aligned political party in the world, the German Green Party, saw its Berlin chapter announce a groundbreaking mobile app today that allows supporters to discuss environmental issues around the city and brings party billboards to life using Augmented Reality. I think it’s pretty cool.

"It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia" It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s contribution has been more than steady ratings and big laughs. The long-running comedy, which was picked up for an eighth and ninth season Saturday, has also offered the News Corp. division an enviable business model, built on hefty ownership and low cost production.

Y-a-t-il trop de journalistes en France ? Il y en avait en tout cas un peu moins en 2010 qu’en 2009 (du moins à être détenteur de la carte de presse). 489 de moins, pour être exact, soit un plus que la rédaction du Monde, par exemple.

Citing privacy concerns and the difficulty involved in deleting a account, hopes to "kill ," the "medium of communication [we] all so dearly adore." This isn’t the first time has spoken out against social networks. After removed Anonymous’ and Google+ accounts, pledged to create its own social network, called AnonPlus.

London has been the scene of utter chaos over the past few days, and last night it hit a new peak when it seemed many parts of the UK capital were under siege, from north to south. Whilst many criticisms have been flung at the lack of police presence in many areas, the Metropolitan Police [...]

When we open-sourced the code for Help Me Investigate the plan was to move from a single site to a decentralised, networked structure. Now, thanks to Andy Dickinson, it has become even easier for anyone to host their own journalism crowdsourcing platform.