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

http://emailcharter.org/

In a bid to quash a popular rebellion, the Syrian government has shut down pretty much all electronic communications inside the country and to overseas. Cut off from the internet, protestors, journalists, and human rights activists have resorted to communications networks from another era.

To get the news out, activists have been smuggling videos to Jordan through the desert and across a nearly 80-kilometer border Jordan shares with Syria. Desperate Syrians have been using a helping hand from smugglers to cross the border, either by walking or on the backs of donkeys.

Some risk approaching the border with Jordanian cellphones to report to the outside world and send clips. It is a dangerous task because the Syrian and Jordanian armies traditionally have the area under heavy surveillance to prevent the smuggling of drugs and weapons into the kingdom or further.

Two decades after creating the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee says humans have become so reliant on it that access to the Web should now be considered a basic right. In a speech at an MIT symposium, Computation and the Transformation of Practically Everything, Berners-Lee compared access to the Web with access to water. While access to water is a more fundamental right, because people simply cannot survive without it, Web access should be seen as a right, too, because anyone who lacks Web access will fall behind their more connected peers.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Al Jazeera was gaining more prominence because it offered "real news" -- something she said American media were falling far short of doing. Speaking before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Clinton said the US was losing the "information war." Other countries and global news outlets, she said, were making inroads into places like the Middle East more effectively than the United States. One of the reasons she cited for this was the quality of channels like Al Jazeera. The channel, she said, was "changing peoples' minds and attitudes. And like it or hate it, it is really effective." US news, she added, was not keeping up.

The Never-Betters believe that we are on the brink of a new utopia, where information will be free and democratic, news will be made from the bottom up, love will reign, and cookies will bake themselves.

The Better-Nevers think that we would have been better off if the whole thing had never happened, that the world that is coming to an end is superior to the one that is taking its place, and that books create private space for minds.

The Ever-Wasers insist that at any moment in modernity something like this is going on, and that a new way of organizing data and connecting users is always thrilling to some and chilling to others; that this is what makes it a modern moment.

We are strongly of the view that things should be published. Where you are open things will not be WikiLeaked. Whatever view you take about WikiLeaks -- right or wrong -- it means that things will now get out. It has changed things. Government and authorities need to factor it in. Be more proactive, publishing more stuff, because quite a lot of this is only exciting because we did not know it.

You cannot un-invent WikiLeaks. It is part of the phenomenon of the online, empowered citizen. These are facts that are not going to go away, and government and authorities need to wise up. One response is that they will clam up and not write anything down, which is nonsense, you cannot run an organisation that way. The other is to be even more open. The best form of defence is transparency.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/dec/30/wikileaks-freedom-information-ministers-government/print

The role of the media, the role it must adopt if society is to function in a practically and morally coherent way, is to reveal power, to pester power, to hound it with questions. Because power cannot be trusted. The fact that many columnists see fit to attack WikiLeaks is evidence of how severely they have misinterpreted their mission statement. It is an indictment of the British media that its response to WikiLeaks is one of condemnation rather than troubled inner scrutiny. Its general outlook is so conservative, its relationship with the establishment so cushy, and its interests so scurrilous that it now condemns those who do their jobs properly.

The only difference between WikiLeaks and other news organisations is that Wikileaks is doing its job properly. This is not a symptom of its greater intelligence, merely its ability to comprehend the ramifications of new technology. WikiLeaks is like a symbol of globalisation. WikiLeaks represents the birth-pangs of a new media, one that cuts out the middle man to reveal the documents in full. Perhaps the media feels things moving away from it, to a world of citizen journalists and information freedom. That is an eventuality which would be far less likely if the traditional media did its constitutional duty and held the powerful to account.

Iceland Turns From Banks To Freedom Of Speech by American Public Media

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Iceland has a bold new international money-making plan. The country wants to turn itself into a haven for the digital age. "A haven for freedom of information, freedom of expression and of speech," says lawmaker Birgitta Jonsdottir. "What we are doing is putting together all the best laws so that one country can set the standard for how we in the future strengthen these rights." Iceland wants people from around the world to set up their servers there and publish material online without the fear of ruinous lawsuits or censorship. Icelanders see this as a noble aim and a business opportunity.

The documents in question relate, among other events, to the 1948 war, which established Israel, and the 1956 Suez crisis. The state’s chief archivist says many of the documents "are not fit for public viewing" and raise doubts about Israel's "adherence to international law."

Had Germany's archives remained secret for 70 years, we would only have documentary proof of Nazi war crimes until 1940. Those responsible would be largely unknown to the general public, and Simon Wiesenthal would have spent his days idly by until his death in 2005.

http://aljazeera.com/news/articles/39/The-secrets-in-Israels-archives.html