Links for 22 May 2006

Great Firewall of China China now has more internet users than any other country except for the US, but its most significant and best-funded research is focused on web filtering and other forms of censorship, building an ever higher and thicker "great firewall of China". Via RConversation.

Related to that story, an article about the Beijing Association of Online Media (BAOM). The BAOM is trying to recruit 200 internet supervisors to supervise Beijing based web sites. Via Shanghaiist

Of course, in the U.S. we're trending towards some sort of great filter of our own (I assume that it will have a trendy, patriotic name like the United Strategic Application for Content Entrichment Network Security Operational Requirements or USA CENSOR for short). In the U.S. it's porn, porn, porn all the time. In China it's please to not be discussion certain topics, topics which change randomly. Of course, once in place, the use of such filters to restrict public discussion on any topic becomes tenable, regardless of which fathers founded the country.

The Australian article mentions that this ongoing censorship game in China will get even more complicated, and more public, come 2008 (and I expect next year) for the Beijing Olympic Games. Having played a role in three Games, I know there's thousands of non-Chinese who will start showing up in the coming years and will run into the firewall, and then write about it. Will the Chinese block the networks used by the athletes and sponsors? Actually, I guess it could be the IOC's dream come true: total control of outbound content from the Olympic Games.

How Digital Natives Experience News: What is the process of news and information gathering for the DN? Here’s a hypothesis. It’s a three-step process: Grazing, Deep(er) Dive(s), and the Feedback Loop. Via The Social Software Weblog which asks: Much attention has been paid to the blogosphere's alleged lack of fact checking as is supposedly key to traditional media - but how many of us take the time to check other online information regarding our topic of interest before blogging?

I have been working on an essay on comments which I guess I need to post somewhere, which only remotely ties into the last element of that process (feedback loop).

Closing out, also from Australia, a nascent network neutrality battle is brewing. James Packer, chairman of PBL told an audience at the Digital Marketing Summit in Sydney:

Our services are totally dependent on this infrastructure.

We need faster broadband speeds in order to stay competitive to the rest of the world and that is starting to be understood, I believe, by all stakeholders.

Most Australians are not only on slow [broadband] plans but also plans that have download caps.

This is very unusual compared to other countries all over the world. Australia needs government policy and regulatory certainty to encourage the provision of unmetered fast broadband by the [telecommunications] incumbent [Telstra] and/or other providers.

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