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Two dozen of the nation’s largest and best-funded farm groups have formed a coalition to counter poor publicity they say had led to bad public policy and threatened farmer’s ability to produce food.

LOS ANGELES, Calif. - Seen and heard Sunday at the 17th annual Screen Actors Guild Awards.

Sudanese police beat and arrested students on Sunday as protests broke out throughout Khartoum demanding the government resign, inspired by a popular uprising in neighboring Egypt.

An email suggesting staff should clock out to talk about non-work subjects such as the weather was an “isolated incident”, a Carlisle Council chief has said.

The social media world is moving toward highly personalized ads based on your activities, relationships and profile information.

Sadbook? Studies suggest Facebook contributes to sadness. An entity as pervasive as Facebook is going to spark its share of backlashes.

Egyptian security forces have all but disappeared from the streets in the heart of the country’s capital ahead of planned demonstrations against President Hosni Mubarak’s rule.

About a half-hour past midnight Friday morning in Egypt, the Internet went dead.

Authorities say the body of a baby was recovered from the debris of an upstate New York home ripped apart by an explosion.

Is the age of openness and peer-to-peer collaboration really coming? How does a system work when it is based on cooperation and collaborative approaches rather than on competition and predatory practices?

Photo credit: Ints Vikmanis

What are P2P and open infrastructures? Can open knowledge and peer production subvert the economic system of physical production? How do open business models compare with the traditional economic system based on intellectual property and copyright?

As you can learn inside this special digest dedicated to P2P and open infrastructures, what we are seeing today is the emergence of a growing number of companies that make use of the “Commons“, and then who sell the extra value they have created or added to the Commons, back into the marketplace. Open source software is such an example.

Such new business model approach does not work by leveraging the same elements of our present work system such as job employment, wages and copyright. Instead, the new economy of the Commons grounds itself on three brand new components:

1. Distributed communities of passionate individuals working together spontaneously on
2. collaborative platform and Internet technologies and by
3. the foundations, for-benefit institutions that make their know-how available for free.

In this MasterNewMedia digest, you will find the best selection of articles and interviews on the world of peer-to-peer, and on the future of open systems and infrastructures. Specifically:

• Peer-to-peer politics and the future
• From open business models to an economy of the commons
• P2P and open infrastructures: the society of openness comes of age
• P2P and the social cloud - the emergence of peer economic systems
• The alternative P2P wireless internet network: the Netsukuku idea

If you are looking to understand what peer-to-peer, open infrastructures and open economic systems look like, strive for and entail, you have landed on the right page.

The appetite for initial public offerings is heating up … with eight companies slated to go public this week alone.

Egyptian activists on Wednesday used social networking sites to call for a fresh wave of demonstrations, a day after they staged the biggest protests in years in Egypt to demand the end of President Hosni Mubarak’s nearly 30-year rule.

Facebook is putting you in an ad. The Palo Alto company today introduced a new advertising vehicle called Sponsored Stories, which takes all those shared “likes,” check-ins and other actions that are already being posted by you and your friends and turns it into a paid ad.

The large adoption of communication and collaboration technologies, alongside the intelligent use and adoption of these tools by a new emergent class of educators, have opened up new horizons for the world of education and learning, by empowering students to be again explorers and active collaborative seekers of their know-how, and by extending the teacher role into one of a guide, coach and supporter rather than the one of the ultimate holder of truth.

Photo credit: Victor Habbick

This is why, in our view, the future of education is all about studying, understanding and embracing these new trends while opening up to the new realities of work and entrepreneurship that are emerging inside and around it.

For a growing number of people, learning has in fact already become a lifelong opportunity to master new skills and capabilities, to continuously upgrade one’s own expertise and now, a new direction in which to design and develop high-value business services.

In this MasterNewMedia guide on online learning, teaching and education, you will find the top five interesting essays and articles (according to popularity) that we have published here, in the last 12 months. Specifically:

• How to publish an online course as a book
• How to approach learning without falling into the certification-loop
• How to learn teamwork, critical thinking and communication skills
• How to prepare yourself for digital citizenship: new media literacies
• How blogs and wikis are changing the academic publishing process

If you are eager to understand some of the key trends and changes happening in the world of education, and how the goals, expectations and approaches to learning are transforming themselves, you may well find some interesting materials into this curated digest.

Dermot O’Leary has revealed that he has been kicked off Facebook because he was thought to be an imposter.