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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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A new report from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) warned that the "independent watchdog function that the founding fathers envisioned for journalism" was at risk in local communities across the US. The report said there was a "shortage of local, professional, accountability reporting" that could lead to "more government waste, more local corruption," "less effective schools," and other problems. The 475-page report is the product of an 18-month effort to explore the turmoil sweeping the traditional media business in the US.

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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.

A team led by a Libyan-American telecom executive has helped rebels hijack Muammar Gaddafi's cellphone network and re-establish their own communications. The new network, first plotted on an airplane napkin and assembled with the help of oil-rich Arab nations, gives more than two million Libyans their first connections to each other and the outside world after Gaddafi cut off telephone and internet service a month ago.

The network has enabled rebel leaders to make calls needed to rally international backing, source weapons, and strategize with their envoys abroad. To make this possible, engineeers hived off part of the Libyana cellphone network -- owned and operated by the Tripoli-based Libyan General Telecommunications Authority, which is run by Gaddafi's eldest son -- and rewired it to run independently of the regime's control.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703841904576256512991215284.html

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An elderly Georgian woman was scavenging for copper with a spade when she accidentally sliced through an underground cable and cut off internet services to nearly all of neighboring Armenia. The fibre-optic cable near Tbilisi, Georgia, supplies about 90% of Armenia's internet so the woman's unwitting sabotage had catastrophic consequences.

Internet users in the nation of 3.2 million people were left twiddling their thumbs for up to five hours. Large parts of Georgia and some areas of Azerbaijan were also affected. Dubbed "the spade-hacker" by local media, the woman is being investigated on suspicion of damaging property. She faces up to three years in prison if charged and convicted.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/06/georgian-woman-cuts-web-access/print