It is almost believable to be that some one is actually suggesting this kind of thinly veiled move toward censorship, but that is exactly what Evgeny Morozov is proposing. Morozov is a writer of a book and researcher that focuses on how the use of technology tends to affect the social aspects of society at large, so his opinion piece recently suggesting such a move of labeling websites that may be based more on pseudo science as such has gotten a lot of attention. Now to be sure, after reading his opinion and listening to parts of his recent interview Q, his actual idea is to label the sites actually based on science or even move them up in the page rankings.
Most of you have probably already into some internet site today that is either completely unavailable to you or more likely been altered and redirecting you to information about SOPA and PIPA. Some of us that are very in tune with the technology world and especially the behind the scenes process involved in making the internet work were looking forward to today, mostly to see who was going to join in the movement and support and who, especially among the big companies, would not. What is SOPA and PIPA and why all the fuss anyway? Good questions…
Just as the promotional materials for the Small Business Saturday event say, first there was Black Friday and then there was Cyber Monday… For those not in the loop this is a promotion to try to push shopping, to some at least some extent, on Saturday after Thanksgiving with small businesses. It is even implied to do so with local small businesses, which is even better. It is a good idea and something I am very much in favor of doing myself.
As I write this, it is starting to seem like most of the things that have been making so much of our economy here in the US, especially as it pertains to banking and Wall Street, figured out over in Europe. I will agree it seems like we have been close a couple of times before and there is certainly not an absolute, but we have gotten new technocratic governments in both Italy and Greece the seem largely on board with the changes that need to be made and we have an EU that seems largely on board with the support that it needs to offer to keep anything of a major collapse from occurring anytime in the real near future. With the strong earnings, combined with a very modest growth in the economy and very slight dip in the unemployment rates, some forecasters are starting to shoot for a positive 2011 after all. Not so fast I say…
