Net neutrality was on my mind today in my post at BlogHer—Comcast: The Hammerer and the Hammeree. It you have not responded to the campaign to preserve net neutrality, I urge you to do so now. See Save the Internet for ideas on how to do that.
Category: News-Politics
Court rules in NFB case against Target
The courts moved forward in favor of the case brought by the National Federation for the Blind (NFB) against Target’s online store this week. All kinds of news is available about it, but Jim Thatcher’s brief reaction is most interesting.
Yesterday Judge Marilyn Patel of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California issued a ruling in the case in which the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) (http://nfb.org) is suing the Target Corporation alleging that Target’s web site, http://www.target.com, is inaccessible, especially for shoppers who are blind. I am the Expert Witness in this case for the Plaintiffs; they are represented by Disabilities Rights Advocates (DRA) (http://dralegal.org). I have written about this important case on these pages before (http://jimthatcher.com/law-target.htm).
Thatcher goes on to explain why the ruling on this case is so important.
Technorati Tags: Accessibility, NFB, Target
Does coolness trump price?
Amazon.com announced today that is it selling MP3 Downloads
Let the party begin!
What’s your favorite Web 2.0 site and why?
Feds OK fee for priority Web traffic
Yahoo! News reports in Feds OK fee for priority Web traffic: “The Justice Department on Thursday said Internet service providers should be allowed to charge a fee for priority Web traffic.” The report pointed out that, “The agency’s stance comes more than two months after Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Deborah Platt Majoras cautioned policy makers to enact Net neutrality regulation.”
If you dropped your attention from the issue of Internet freedom recently because of all the other important issues facing the U.S., it might be time to refocus on this issue again for a while. At Save the Internet, you can learn more and participate in the resolution of the issue by sending your thoughts to Congress and the FCC.
Technorati Tags: Net Neutrality
Mainstream Media Ignores BlogHer Conference
I was in Chicago last weekend for a BlogHer conference. In attendance were over 800 women (and men) bloggers. Many more bloggers participated in the events on Second Life. A main event at the conference was to announce a year long activist action called BlogHers Act on the number one topic selected from a survey of thousands of bloggers. The topic is the one the thousands of bloggers surveyed want to see both Democratic and Republican nominees address positively in order to win our votes in 2008. Yet the activism potential of the over 13,000 bloggers who are members of BlogHer was largely ignored by the main stream media.
As Joanne Bamberger, writing at The Huffington Post pointed out,
It wasn’t difficult for Cooper Monroe and Emily McKhann, two activist bloggers who were behind the been there clearinghouse to aid victims of Hurricane Katrina, to figure out that if major advertisers like GM, Dove, Yahoo and Google are interested in a conference where close 1,000 women bloggers will be, that we, as a group, could also have significant influence on the major political issues in the next election.
The winner? Global Health.
A pretty significant issue for a whole variety of reason, especially when it comes to the whole health insurance coverage question.
But who is going to find out about this amazing effort to lead the way on gaining attention for and promoting solutions for the myriad health care issues we all face when no one from the main stream media shows up to cover it?
The breakout sessions, the keynote speakers, and the topics discussed were the same topics that are discussed at other large technology conferences. Business, Writing, Technology, and the BlogHers Act agenda. But no one was there covering the event for the press. As Bamberger pointed out in the article I mentioned, a largely men’s conference, The Yearly Kos, gained plenty of coverage.
For YearlyKos? Plenty of stories, including ones in the National Journal, the Washington Post, MSN, FOX News and the New York Times. That’s what I’d call Main Stream Media attention.
There are 509 blog posts on technorati tagged blogher07 as I write this. They appear to be mostly reports from the bloggers in attendance. A general Google search for blogher07 returns over 65,000 results. The first few pages were similar to what technorati is pulling in. A news search on Google returns 26 results. They include Yahoo Tech, a press release touting the sponsors, and a piece mentioning the article I quoted here. Nothing of substance about what happened, what issues were discussed, who spoke, or the important BlogHers Act initiative.
The mainstream media is completely out of touch with what people (voters) care about. They just proved it again.
Technorati Tags: BlogHer07
Ethics and Civility on the Internet
You know I love the Internet. I love playing with web pages. I love the freedom to communicate that I never had before the Internet. But like every wonderful technology, the Internet has its undesirable side. That undesirable side allows people to act in ways that are not acceptable in the real world. People become trolls and incite flame wars. People hide behind anonymity and say terrible things about other people or rival businesses. People defraud unapprehended with spam and phishing schemes.
The results of all this freedom to behave badly in the virtual world seems to be leaking over into the real world, too. Rude behavior is spreading. An attitude of “only my needs matter” pervades society. Brilliant people with enormous gifts to offer like Kathy Sierra are silenced. We all suffer from her loss, especially people concerned with learning, teaching, and how the brain processes new information.
Whole Foods CEO John Mackey is outed as a sockpuppet who has been denigrating Wild Oats for 8 years on business forums. This behavior should tarnish the image of Whole Foods in the eyes of consumers—but who knows yet—he may pull a Libby and get away undamaged.
Since a lot of bad behavior online is hard to pin down as illegal, there are few ways to stop it. We occasionally catch a spammer. We sometimes out the sockpuppets. But not often enough. We, the users, we, the people, are the ones who must demand better behavior. We must name names, make the hidden transparent, stop rewarding bad behavior. It isn’t up to the government. It’s up to us.
Technorati Tags: ethics, John Mackey, Kathy Sierra