Skyway Recommended April 15th to 21st

Each Monday we’ll pass on links to articles we thought were well worth reading from the previous week, for those who live where we do (British Columbia, Canada), work like we do (high speed business internet), and think about things we do (internet trends, internet privacy, internet censorship, cutting-edge technology, etc.). If you don’t want to wait ’til Monday, we usually tweet and link to these as we come across them…

Felix Simon, Reuters Blog | The Social Media Tail Mustn’t Wag the MSM Dog

The Boston bombing and subsequent manhunt was in many ways the first big interactive news story. It wasn’t the first big event to be covered obsessively on social media, but it was the first big event where millions of people became part of the story themselves. Some did so through choice, combing through photographs on Reddit or 4chan; others simply happened to be in Boston and saw their public lives, as broadcast to the world on social media, become part of the story just by dint of where they were. Read More…

The Atlantic Wire | Did Reddit fuel a Lynch Mob in “Outing” Innocents in the Boston Marathon Bombing?

If you thought the New York Post‘s “Bag Men” outing was bad, the most crowdsourced terror investigation in American history transformed from Internet sleuthing of FBI photos on Thursday night into a lynch mob — from Reddit to a police scanner to social media and beyond — that led to the outing of even more innocent people as would-be suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing. Read More…

TeleGeography | International Bandwidth Demand is Decentralizing

New data from TeleGeography’s Global Bandwidth Research Service reveal that demand for international bandwidth grew 39 percent in 2012, and at a compounded annual rate of 53 percent between 2007 and 2012. International bandwidth demand growth has been robust on all five of the world’s major submarine cable routes, but has been particularly rapid on key routes to emerging markets in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. While bandwidth demand on the trans-Atlantic route—which has long been the world’s highest-capacity route—increased at a healthy rate of 36 percent annually between 2007 and 2012, demand for bandwidth from the U.S. to Latin America grew 70 percent per year over the same period, and demand for capacity on the Europe-Asia route via Egypt grew a staggering 87 percent per year. Read More…

The Globe and Mail | Are We Being Suckered by the Spectral Economy?

Mark Kingwell argues that “the costs of our spectral economy – from online banking and digital stock trading to virtual currencies such as Bitcoin, the anonymous, peer-to-peer payment system now in the news – may outstrip the benefits, at least when it comes to understanding what’s going on.” Read More…

The Verge | Reducing Four Specific Pollutants Could Cut Sea Level Rise in Half

We’ve known for years that the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide is a main contributor to climate change that threatens to raise the earth’s sea level to a potentially dangerous point, but a new study shows that focusing on eliminating other pollutants could help slow sea level rise as well. Researchers from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) have discovered that cutting emissions of four pollutants that can cycle quickly through the atmosphere could slow the yearly rate of sea level increase between 25 and 50 percent. Read More…