Center for Social Media (American University)

There are a lot of places to go to keep up on  fair use practice but American University's Center for Social Media is one  of the best. However, the Center has a wider purpose:

The site prides itself on being a resource to teachers and media/content makers/creators. One can find and download codes of best practices for Academic and Research Libraries, OpenCourseWare, Media Literacy Education, and Online Video; there's even a Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Poetry. They also have a collection of Fair Use videos (ex. Did These Mashups Use 'Fair Use'? You Decide!; Fair Use in Documentary Film Discussion Clips; and Remix Culture).

The Center for Social Media showcases and analyzes media for public knowledge and action—media made by, for, and  with publics to address the problems that they share. We pay particular attention to the evolution of documentary film and video in a digital era. With research, public events, and convenings, we explore the fast-changing environment for public media. The Center was founded in 2001 by Patricia Aufderheide, University Professor in the School of Communication at American University.

If you are interested in making media that matters (i.e. propels viewers into action), documentary production and promotion, or media literacy/education in general this is a bookmark-worthy site.

MICHIKO KAKUTANI on Mash-up Culture

An excellent review article on the mash-up culture of the web (with mention of at least a dozen related books) appeared in the March 21 Sunday New York Times.

Texts Without Context

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Published: March 21, 2010

How the Internet and mash-up culture change everything we know about reading.

These were some of the books were mentioned in the article:

REALITY HUNGER: A MANIFESTO
By David Shields
219 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95.

YOU ARE NOT A GADGET:
A Manifesto
By Jaron Lanier
209 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95.

THE SHALLOWS: WHAT THE INTERNET IS DOING TO OUR BRAINS
By Nicholas Carr
288 pages. W. W. Norton & Company. $26.95. (Scheduled for release in June.)

TRUE ENOUGH: LEARNING TO LIVE IN A POST-FACT SOCIETY
By Farhad Manjoo
250 pages. John Wiley & Sons. $25.95.

THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON
By Susan Jacoby
357 pages. Vintage Books. $15.95.

INFOTOPIA: HOW MANY MINDS PRODUCE KNOWLEDGE
By Cass R. Sunstein
273 pages. Oxford University Press. $15.95.

GOING TO EXTREMES: HOW LIKE MINDS UNITE AND DIVIDE
By Cass R. Sunstein
199 pages. Oxford University Press. $21.95.

THE CULT OF THE AMATEUR
By Andrew Keen
256 pages. Doubleday. $14.00.

Data Mashup Resources for Washington Watchdogs

Wired Magazine's Web Mashups Turn Citizens Into Washington's Newest Watchdogs, by Michael Calore, discusses a recent phenomenon of political participation and the web resources that make it possible by "increasingly giving ordinary citizens the ability to easily document the flow of special-interest money and how it influences the legislature." Sites such as MapLight.org, Opensecrets.org and Follow the Money, along with wiki-based political reporting resources like Congresspedia, are empowering citizens to assemble "custom data mashups that use public databases to draw correlations between every vote cast and every dollar spent in Washington."