kerkko.fi

I have noticed a huge trend not only in websites moving away from RSS to Twitter and Facebook, but removing it completely! This is NOT a good move for people who provide content to stay in touch with consumers. RSS is a way to consume a LOT of information very quickly, and store it in nice categories if you miss it. I can catch up with a small blog’s output at the end of the week and, if I so choose, read every article easily in one sitting.

Small blogs cut their own throat by taking away the RSS capability. Social media outlets are information colanders: 5% of your followers will see anything you post, and that is probably only within 20 minutes of posting. That is the way it is, and it is going to only get worse. Apart from email lists, RSS is the best way you can collect stuff across the internet to read quickly, and I am so irritated when that choice is taken from me.

http://feliciaday.com/blog/rss-rant

The newest government in the world was designed with help from comments on the internet. God help us all.

After Iceland’s economic collapse in 2008, the island nation decided it was time to write a new constitution, this one not based on its parent country of Denmark but rather made from the original ideas of its citizens.

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The Egyptian April 6 Youth Movement's PR man, Bassem Samir, turned activists into reporters by organizing a trip to the United States for a group of Egyptian activists, where they learned the ins and outs of video journalism. They then went back to Egypt and travelled to major cities secretly teaching more activists these techniques. Samir and his colleagues even trained activists to choose sites for their protests that would make good photo locations. They were also taught how to move their content after it had been shot: Photographers would hand off small memory flash cards at frequent intervals, switch cameras with activists posing as innocent bystanders, and send in camera teams in waves instead of all at once. These training programs led to the abundance of footage from Egypt that we have seen the past few weeks.

Several sources are reporting Egypt has shut off all internet access ahead of a new wave of anti-government protests are expected to begin. A major service provider for Egypt, Italy-based Seabone, reported early Friday that there was no internet traffic going into or out of the country after 12:30 a.m. local time. The Associated Press reports that the government has "deployed an elite special operations counterterrorism force" to the streets.

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/01/28/0114217/Egypt-Shuts-Off-All-Internet-Access

On Christmas Day, Facebook's Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan first noticed strange things going on in Tunisia. Reports started to trickle in that political-protest pages were being hacked. "We were getting reports that user accounts had been deleted," Sullivan said. For Tunisians, it was another run-in with Ammar, the nickname they have given to the authorities that censor the country's internet. They had come to expect it. Now Ammar was in the process of stealing an entire country's worth of passwords.

The "Gaza Youth Breaks Out" manifesto does not put forth any clear analysis of the current historical situation, or outline a response to it. It does not invite anyone to join anything. Its tone is denunciatory rather than analytical. Its language is apolitical: the terminology of resistance common to Palestinian manifestos is replaced here by use of the f-word. It lacks any mobilisational dimension.

Without being rooted in any particular or collective vision of change, the demands articulated in the manifesto are meaningless. Perhaps this is why it is so attractive to those who have read it on Facebook, and the European and American media who have taken it up. It caters to western tastes and desires, especially to the fantasy of a digitally connected youth emerging from cyberspace as agents of transformative change in the real world.

In the case of Palestine, this fantasy does a number of things besides soothing guilty consciences. It reframes the issue of justice for Palestine in vacuous and unthreatening terms, casts the method by which change may occur into virtual space, and empties the Palestinian body politic of the thoughtfully articulated demands of its millions of citizens.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2011/01/10/karma-nabulsi/facebook-in-gaza/

We are living in an age where a decreasing number of firms serve as a kind of Master Switch over speech on the internet -- think Google, Facebook, the cable industry, and the major telephone carriers. These firms are already under strong pressure to censor from powerful governments, religious groups, political parties, and essentially any outfit with a reason to want information suppressed. On a daily basis, as we speak, internet companies are making speech-related decisions more important than those made by any government.

This is what speech management looks like in 2010. No one elected Facebook or YouTube, and neither one is beholden to the First Amendment. Nonetheless, it is their decisions that dictate, effectively, who gets heard. The American public needs to be aware of the dangers that private censors can pose to free speech. The American Constitution was written to control abuses of power, but it did not account for the heavy concentration of private power that we see today. And in the end, power is power, whether in private or public hands.

Facebook may be about to unveil its Project Titan email client. Rumored to have been in the works since February, this "full-fledged" webmail service with @facebook.com personal addresses is reportedly referred to as a "Gmail killer" internally.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/11/facebook-gmail-titan/