- WikiLeaks Fundraising — PayPal has frozen WikiLeaks’ assets. Interesting: they need $600k/yr to run.
- The Great Australian Internet Blackout — online protest to raise awareness about the Great Firewall of Australia.
- HTML5 Video: Problems Ahead — YouTube and Vimeo won’t support a free codec (file format). The web is undeniably better for Mozilla having entered the browser market, and it would have been impossible for us to do so if there had been a multi-million-dollar licensing fee required for handling HTML, CSS, JavaScript or the like. It’s not just a matter of Mozilla licensing formats such as H.264 for browsers and their users: sites would have to license to distribute content.
- History of the World in 100 Objects (BBC) — a radio show, telling the history of humanity in 100 objects from the British Library. Exquisitely high quality commentary (available in original audio and in textual transcript), hi-resolution images, maps, timelines, and more. It’s growing day by day as episodes air, and shows how a quintessentially offline place like a museum can add to the online world.
"censorship" entries
Four short links: 23 January 2010
Wikileaks Fundraising, Internet Censorship, Unfree as in Video, and Museums Online
Bringing e-Books to Africa and the Middle East
Infrastructure, economics and censorship are major issues
In the United States, Western Europe and Asia, e-Books are becoming a major player, especially now that e-Readers like the Kindle and Nook are available. But people living in the Arabic speaking world or Africa haven’t been invited to the dance. Two of the keynote speakers at the upcoming O’Reilly Tools of Change conference are working to improve access to e-Books in these areas: Arthur Attwell in South Africa and Ramy Habeeb in Egypt. We talked to each of them about how e-Books are important in their area of the world, and the challenges that they are facing.
Review of Guobin Yang's "Power of the Internet in China"
My review of
The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online,
a combination of research and sociological analysis,
Walking the Censorship Tightrope with Google's Marissa Mayer
Google sometimes finds itself at an difficult crossroad of wanting to make as much information available to as many people as possible, while still trying to obey the laws of the countries they operate in. I recently had a chance to talk to Marissa Mayer, who started at Google as their first female engineer, and has now risen to the ranks of vice president in charge of some of Google’s most critical product areas, such as search, maps and Chrome. We talked about some of Google’s future product directions, and also about how Google makes the decision as to when information has to be withheld from the users. Marissa will be delivering a keynote address at the O’Reilly Velocity Conference next week.