USC Professor Henry Jenkins is a hard-core fan with hard-core fans. I should know. I’m one of the audience members who stalked him at a conference a few years ago after his keynote, hoping to have a conversation about a paper he’d just published at the time. It was an argument for a whole new way of thinking about literacy. Reading, writing, and understanding words on a page won’t cut it anymore. In a digitized world, Henry says young people need new skills that go way beyond basic composition and comprehension. Skills like play (“the capacity to experiment with [...]

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There are lies, damned lies, and statistics, as Mark Twain once said. A couple days ago, I wrote a post titled, “What Happened To bit.ly’s Market Share” after I noticed some new statistics on TweetMeme which suggested that the market share for short URLs has shifted in the past few months and is actually diversifying as more and more short URLs inundate the Web. John Borthwick, the investor who incubated bit.ly and then spun it off from betaworks, didn’t like that headline because it called into question bit.ly’s continued dominance. He also didn’t like it because [...]

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