|
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Political 'training 
| | Liza Sabater: The Cluetrain Manifesto for People Powered Politics. A sample: Applied to politics, the Manifesto reads as a primer on how the internet squashes any pretences of republic-like politics. Gone are the days in which engagement is only mediated by an elite 'entrusted' by the masses with every single policy and political decision making that will end up affecting their lives. |
| | She goes on to "translate" the original 95 Theses into democratic terms. Whoa. |
| | This is on the eve, by the way, of the Personal Democracy Forum — the one conference I'll live to regret missing more than any of the others I can't make this year. If you can still make it, please do. |
Quote du Jour
| | Jonathan Schwartz: ...no amount of fear can stop the rise of free media, or free software (they are the same, after all). The community is vastly more innovative and powerful than a single company. |
Compromises on the Zero
| | I've characterized the Net as a Giant Zero, because that's the ideal toward which it shapes itself — with zero distance, distortion and lockout or filtration between everything and everybody on it. |
| | Well, OpenNet Initiative (ONI) concerns itself with one of the ways zero-ness is compromised: by filtration. ONI constantly looks into filtering and surveillance practices, especially as they are carried out on a national basis. |
| | So, for example, you can do a search on ONI's home page, to see if a site is blocked in one or more countries. This way we see, for example, that Google is blocked in Iran while Technorati is blocked in both Iran and China, and Playboy.com is blocked in fourteen countries. On the Profiles page, we find links to country profiles that show how Saudi Arabia has Selective, Substantial or Pervasive filtering in all four of the studied areas: Political, Social, Conflict/Security and Internet Tools. |
| | There's a lot more to check out, including ONI's blog. It's new and has a few kinks to work out, but I think is doing an excellent as well as necessary job. |
There are responses to this message:
Copyright 2009 The Doc Searls Weblog
|
