Change is in the Wind

It is amazing what social networking can accomplish for our world. I use LinkedIn for professional connections and Facebook for fun.

But I'm now inspired by the social networking occurring on both change.org and change.gov -- one in the nonprofit sector and the other for our US government. Both are engaging people directly to make a positive difference in our world and foster dialogs about improving our world and our government. I like this trend and have faith that it will continue to grow and blossom under Barack Obama's leadership. I hope those of you reading this will engage with both change.org and change.gov.

BTW, in my eagerness to send info about both to many friends, I inadvertantly conflated change.org and change.gov together by accident. Sorry about that. All this positive change just got me too excited!

Thanks!

Google’s Gatekeepers

Who should determine what you can and cannot read on the internet? Governments? Which one(s)? Corporations? Your neighbor? At the moment, corporations such as Google and Yahoo are the primary censors.

Personally, I wish we had a better form of worldwide government that could govern the internet equitably and uniformly -- as long as they have strong protections for free speech similar to the US.

Here are a few quotes from this long but good article by the New York Times:

"Voluntary self-regulation means that, for the foreseeable future, Wong and her colleagues will continue to exercise extraordinary power over global speech online. Which raises a perennial but increasingly urgent question: Can we trust a corporation to be good — even a corporation whose informal motto is “Don’t be evil”?"

“To love Google, you have to be a little bit of a monarchist, you have to have faith in the way people traditionally felt about the king,” Tim Wu, a Columbia law professor and a former scholar in residence at Google, told me recently. “One reason they’re good at the moment is they live and die on trust, and as soon as you lose trust in Google, it’s over for them.” Google’s claim on our trust is a fragile thing. After all, it’s hard to be a company whose mission is to give people all the information they want and to insist at the same time on deciding what information they get."

For the record, I and a number of friends have suffered from both corporate and government censorship on the internet. The government censorship was overturned but some of the corporate censorship (by Yahoo) continues as of this blog post.

read "Google’s Gatekeepers" NYT Mag 11/28/2008 | digg story

Longevity, durability, and death...

I was very pleased to learn from Blogger Support that their intent is to retain information on blogspot "forever" (must fall within their TOS -- which means it basically must be legal -- and, of course, they have to stay in business).

This is quite reassuring. As a historian and archivist, I value permanence and durabilty. Plus I would really like my writing to stay around for a very long time, so that others may learn about me and what I think. Here is the email I got from the blogger folks.

----------------
Date: Thu, 06 Apr 2006 17:39:54 -0700
From: "Blogger Support"
To: "Tim Oey"
Subject: Re: [#443986] Longevity, durability, and death...

Hi Tim,

Thanks for writing in. Blogger will never delete or remove any blog
content unless the blog violates our Terms of Service. We intend to retain
content "forever," even after the author dies. Please let me know if you
have any further questions or concerns, and thanks for using Blogger!

Sincerely,
Karl
Blogger Support
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Enjoy!

Sincerely,
Tim