Net Neutrality

[2020hindsight]

Could it be that chatrooms will be the only place we get the full facts in the future? Here's a panel on the subject of "net neutrality"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwekV9kWdzU = panel on net neutrality

And here's Teddy Kennedy:-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UlCXXZTTh8 =teddy kennedy on ASF

Mind you, I've heard that comments added under youtube posts are in turn also censored. Not sure who to believe, except that I'm least likely to trust a politician In my experience, they are hunting for suckers to vote for them.

 

[2020hindsight]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWt0XUocViE&mode=related&search= control of the internet? maybe something to watch out for?
heaps of others on :-
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=save+the+internet

 

[siempre33]

2020hindsight,
Hi! it seems I remember you from somewhere in the distant past....
could it have been @ Kitco.....were you one of the "KicoCrazies"?....

yes, the internet IS freedom, as you know, where we are free to think and free to speak....until when, we do not know....

 

[2020hindsight]

siempre, no mate, - that might have been my cousin, 2020foresight - he's the rich one of the family
but I did know a chinese engineer working for chinese govt engineering company in polynesia back 5 years or so - like a posting out of the clutches of home censorship - he spent all his time on the internet - just loved it (maybe it has relaxed in china since then - and even countries like malaysia?)

yet again, we don't know how lucky we are, fred,
or as Fred Dagg used to say,
we don't know who propitious are our circumstances, frederick.

 

[siempre33]

2020hindsight,
thanx for the reply.....you don't talk about conspiracy theories enough to be a KitcoCrazy anyway....check out this site if you want a few eye-openers!...
esp. in the wee-smalls...

http://www.voy.com/64855/

 

[2020hindsight]

http://abc.net.au/news/opinion/

"20th century politics meets 21st century media
YouTube offers politicians a huge potential audience, writes Dr Graham Meikle, senior lecturer in the Department of Media at Macquarie University.

The attractions are clear: they can control their own presentation, can avoid awkward questions, and can make the video available 24/7 without paying the broadcasters anything.

If political parties embrace this participatory culture, then for voters, this could be good news, a move towards a more inclusive, participatory kind of media politics, but it could also be a depressing expansion of the politics of image and spin, where trust is invoked in the person, not the policy, at the expense of substance and content."

heck who needs a billion dollar election campaign fund??! - just get a free posting on youtube!

 

[2020hindsight]

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200703/s1865851.htm

Best Wikipedia pages edited over and over
By Stephen Pincock for ABC Science Online

The best quality articles on Wikipedia, the free online encyclopaedia anyone can edit, are those that have been edited often by a lot of different people, new research shows.

The study, published on the arXiv website, shows the power of cooperation in building a site that has seen 236 million edits by 5.77 million different contributors since it was started in 2001.

Dennis Wilkinson and Bernardo Huberman from the Hewlett Packard Information Dynamics Laboratory in Palo Alto, California, studied the editing dynamics of Wikipedia articles.

In their study, the researchers counted the number of edits and contributors for 1,211 featured articles on the English-language Wikipedia and compared them with the same figures for other English-language articles on the site.

Featured articles are selected by the people who contribute to the Wikipedia community as being the best articles on the site, based on criteria such as accuracy, completeness, neutrality and style.

The first thing they found was that the number of times articles are edited is not random.

Instead there are a small proportion of highly visible or relevant articles that are edited often, while others are edited less often.

Second, the researchers found that the high quality articles are edited more often, and by more people than other articles.

"Wikipedia article quality continues to increase, on average, as the number of collaborators and the number of edits increases," the researchers wrote.

Maureen Henninger, a senior lecturer in information and knowledge management at Australia's University of Technology in Sydney, says this is an interesting piece of research.

"Probably the fact that something is constantly being edited means someone is always looking at it and making sure it improves," she said.

Deb Polson from the Australasian CRC for Interaction Design agrees.

"Any information that is read and tweaked by people from different perspectives all the time will inevitably get better," she said.

Although Mr Wilkinson and Mr Huberman say that collaborations do not always produce good results, their study shows that for Wikipedia, it seems that too many cooks are not spoiling the broth.

In fact, they say the correlation between article quality and number of edits validates Wikipedia as a successful collaborative effort.

Ms Polson cautions that may be so, but it does not necessarily validate it as a place to go for the truth on everything.

"Wikipedia is a great first stop for someone trying to find out about a new topic," she said.

"But as a lecturer I would encourage my students to back it up with other sources."

Must say , I'm damned if I know how they keep the balance in Wikipedia posts.
If you look up "the assassination of JFK, there's no mention of "the magic bullet " being "magic " I suspect that Wikipedia is still tainted when it suits them