Here’s the talk David Isenberg gave at O’Reill eTel. It is, rather amazingly, a disquisition about freedom to connect, done in the style of dr. Seuss.’ [Tags: david+isenberg f2c freedom+to-connecf]

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We’re seeing off our daughter who is going to study in Florence (yes, Italy, not Florence, NJ, although I’m sure the latter is totally lovely and rich in Renaissance art) for a semester. So the four of us, aged 15 to 55, are going to spend a couple of days in NYC, since the plane departs from JFK. We’re staying near Times Square. Here’s the challenge:

A couple of us are Shabbos-keeping Jews and thus can’t go in motorized vehicles or pay money from Friday evening through Saturday at around 7pm. (There’s a great worldwide database of kosher restaurants at Shamash.org, by the way.)

But wait, there’s more: One of us is on crutches after knee surgery and another of us is having a back problem and can’t walk for much more than hour without having to do some serious sitting. The back-problem person is also generally whiny, is never satisfied, and will probably spend most of the day looking for good wifi signals.

We already have tickets for the Museum of Modern Art on Saturday.

Other suggestions? [Tags: nyc]

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All I know about Krugle.com is that it’s launching at Demo, it has something to do with “vertical search” and code, and it’s had the incredibly bad judgment to hire RB to blog for it. Also, my friend Steve Larsen seems to be involved. (These are all actually very good signs.) [Tags: rageboy steve larsen krugle]

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Steve is in Davos and describes describes well an experience I often have at conferences: Wandering alone, having failed to hook into anyone’s dinner plans. But his has a little twist at the end. [Tags: steve johnson davos conferences]

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Hoder, the Iranian blogger is in Israel. He writes:

I’m going to Israel as a citizen journalist and a peace activist.

As a citizen journalist, I’m going to show my 20,000 daily Iranian readers what Israel really looks like and how people live there. The Islamic Republic has long portrayed Israel as an evil state, with a consensual political agenda of killing every single man and woman who prays to Allah, including Iranians.

I’m going to challenge that image.

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Mark Liberman doesn’t like the word “blawg.” Denise Howell, who coined it, responds charmingly, and even manages to work in her phrase “doorknob spam.”

Meanwhile, in the Arrested Development we watched last night, there was a reference to Bob Loblaw’s law blog. (Bob Loblaw is just such a good name, but only if you say it aloud.) [Tags: blawg deniseHowell arrestedDevelopment bobLoblaw markLiberman law blogs language doorknob spam]

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Ok, so that’s not quite the appropriate take-away from the new Pew Internet & American Life study. Its subtitle is more accurate:

The internet and email aid users inmaintaining their social networks and provide pathways to help when people face big decisions

The first nine pages summarize the findings.

Here’s an almost-randomly chosen snippet to give you a taste of its flavor:

Robert Putnam argued in 2000 that people are seeing friends and relatives much less than they were in the mid-1960s. For example, family picnics decreased by 60% between 1975 and 1999, and card playing went down from an average of 16 times per year in 1981, to 8 times per year in 1999.

Yet evidence from the Social Ties survey show that the situation is not so dire. For one thing, we did not ask about picnics; we asked directly about social relations. This leads to a focus on social networks, whomever they include and wherever they are located. For example, friends and relatives are now spatially dispersed rather than concentrated in neighborhoods. The difficulty of traveling to get together may explain why picnics have declined as a way for friends and relatives to meet. Yet other ways of interacting have flourished, on- and offline.

Americans have an average of more than 200 relationships with friends, relatives, and acquaintances…

Lee Rainie of Pew says, “We worked with some terrific network sociologists to get this right and try to place it in the larger context of social change over the past generation.” Looks good. It’s even well-written, a real plus for a research report (but not a surprise for a Pew Internet report). [Tags: internet pew leeRainie]

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Yes, I had a scary moment last night. The case for the linux computer my nephew Greg and I put together a few weeks ago – I’m using the computer initially for writing my book – came with a little board with eight LEDs that dance in joy when the computer starts. Those wires shorted, melting their insulation and making me realize I don’t yet have a backup routine for the computer.

After disconnecting the melted wires and cracking a window in my home office, all is well.

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The Berkman Center, along with the Oxford Internet Institute, Consumer Reports Webwatch, and a bunch of corporate sponsors, have launched StopBadware.org, an attempt to organize volunteers to create a database of purveyors of malware.

Sounds good! And it’s got a great set of people/organizations behind it. [Tags: adware malware berkman]

(Disclosure, I’m on the board of advisors of SiteAdvisor, a company using a different technique to compile a similar database. The initiatives seem to me to be complementary.)

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“…purity is an idea for a yogi or monk…
Well, I have dirty hands.
Right up to the elbows,
I’ve plunged them in filth and blood”
JP Sartre*

Google is going to censor results for Chinese users.

Andrew McLaughlin, Google’s Senior Policy Counsel, puts the problem well: “While removing search results is inconsistent with Google’s mission, providing no information (or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information) is more inconsistent with our mission.”

It’s a tough world. Most of what we do is morally mixed. The consequences aren’t unambiguously good and our intentions are never pure. Google has apparently gone through some genuine soul-searching. I know Andrew and have the highest respect for him; if you had the privilege of spending time with him, you would too.

So, I find myself torn. Doing the work of a totalitarian state is bad. Of course. But Google plans on noting on results pages when results have been censored; alerting Chinese users to the fact of censorship could have a positive political effect. Apparently Google also plans on having a link to the US-hosted version. And they won’t host user data on servers under Chinese jurisdiction so they won’t have to turn users over to the Chinese police.

That helps. But is it enough?

If forced to choose — as Google has been — I’d probably do what Google is doing. It sucks, it stinks, but how would an information embargo help? It wouldn’t apply pressure on the Chinese government. Chinese citizens would not be any more likely to rise up against the government because they don’t have access to Google. Staying out of China would not lead to a more free China.

I’m not sure I’m right. Maybe my assessment of the likely consequences is wrong. And the high ground has its appeal, not least of which is that it keeps my hands clean. But the Chinese government is a big gob of repression plopped onto the middle kingdom, spattering our clean white robes.

At least it shows once and for all that Google’s motto is just silly in a world as complex as this one.

Some other opinions:

Rebecca MacKinnon:

At the end of the day, this compromise puts Google a little lower on the evil scale than many other internet companies in China. But is this compromise something Google should be proud of? No. They have put a foot further into the mud. Now let’s see whether they get sucked in deeper or whether they end up holding their ground.

Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Watch:

Oh, the irony. Less than a week after we hear that Google is ready to fight the US government in part to defend its users, now comes news that Google will cave into the Chinese government’s demands for its new Google China web site. However, the issues aren’t directly comparable. Moreover, while I’m no fan of Chinese censorship, I like some of the way Google is reacting to the demands. Come along, and we’ll explore the entire censorship situation in China, the US and some other places you rarely hear discussed, like France and Germany.

Ethan Zuckerman:

The devil’s in the details. And the attention taken to detail tells me that Google has thought long and hard about what they were doing and come up with a compromise. It’s a compromise that doesn’t make me happy, that probably doesn’t make most of the people who work for Google very happy, but which has been carefully thought through. And that, I think, gives some reason for optimism.

[Tags: google china]

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