Akkam’s Razor

• Flickr: The Obama Street Art Pool
  (tags: images 2008 election flickr graffiti obama streetart)
• Flickr: 2008 Election Graphics
  (tags: election graphics art 2008 president unitedstates)
• Advertising Expenditures - Newspaper Association of America: Advancing Newspaper Media for the 21st Century
  (tags: newspapers advertising expenditures expenses)
• “Let them use AOL”: upper-class searchers prefer Google
  Over half the high-income parents, however, used Google, while only 8 percent of low-income parents did—they apparently preferred AOL search.
  (tags: search research google aol Studies information web demographics psychology)
• rap represented in mathematical charts and graphs
  (tags: Music humor funny Rap graphs hiphop Charts)

The concept of "flare" is inspired by the seminal 90s movie, Office Space, where Jennifer Anniston's character gets berated by her employer at a Fridays-Bennigans-Houlihan's knockoff for not having the required amount of "flare" on her uniform.  The "flare" is supposed to be the equivalent of a sticker filled bumper or the backpack covered with band patches and buttons.  What does it all mean in terms of webculture?

I got a heads up from Jarice Hanson (participant bio page), a chairperson at Temple University's (my alma mater, BTW) School of Communication and Theater regarding a webconference at WHYY titled Digital Democracy and Freedom of Speech.

The event looks quite interesting, and it is scheduled at a most-convenient time, 1-2:30pm on Tuesday, 10/9/2007, at the WHYY building, especially for those in the Center City (Philadelphia) area. 

To quickly riff on the subject, I understand and expect this conference to have a very US-centric focus, but I suspect conversations regarding digital freedom, at least as we Americans understand Freedom of Speech as enumerated in the First Ammendment (or don't, as the case may be), will most likely affect other nations, such as those in the Middle East and China, where excessive blocking and monitoring, often aided and abetted by prominent US companies such as Yahoo are the norm.

The excessive use of national security exemptions in FOIA, the circumvention of records-keeping and civil liberty safeguards, and others are all blatant attempts to stymie freedom of the press, but what of freedom of speech?  Despite isolated (although far too many) examples of abuses, such as the recent tasing at a John Kerry speech, "Free Speech Zones" at political gatherings, and arrests and detainings based on what t-shirt one wears, I see little formalized institutional censorship, although we're getting there.

That said, there are tremendous threats to digital freedom here in the US, but they often don't come from the government directly to the individual speaker.  No, they come indirectly, via the corporate sphere, the establishment press, intra-governmental agency suppression , other opinion influencers, ideological bullies, our society-at-large, and our own tendencies to self-censor.  In most cases, all it takes is the threat of a libel suit or a DMCA takedown letter to pull content, either by the creator or their ISP.  As illustrated in the Electronic Frontier Foundation Legal Guide, many of the concerns of online speech have little to do with the government.  You can't really say whatever you want.

The first person who interjects Latin into an online argument has already lost.

Will Fred Thompson hottie-wife hurt or help him with the base?

If the 2008 Presidential Race becomes a Tussle in Tennessee between Gore and Thompson, who wins?

Industry, government, and the media are in big trouble if they don't try to understand webculture, particularly as it relates to sarcasm, satire and parody, piracy and intellectual property, memes, and game culture.

Pundits who are quick to label and demean online critics would do well to examine the survey results and comare them to their own work and academic experience as well as that of their viewers and readers.

If Congress is going to make persecution of college students an easy way to milk campaign contributions from the record labels and the RIAA (by targeting the 19 most-offending Universities and Colleges), then it is only fair that the  Young Voters make certain to work for primary challenges or voting those politicians out of office.

The problem with most internet startups is that they are inventors and not innovators - in most cases, their only future plans are to get noticed and acquired by one of the big-5 (Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, or Fox Interactive) or to eek out a living based on Adsense earnings.

Urban areas need to monopolize on their futures to attract intellectual capital, infrastructure improvements, entrepenuers, and enterprise.  In the coming cruch, be it space, technology, or energy, cities are best equipped to handle the new challenges.

• Propaganda by Edward Bernays (1928)
  “If the public becomes more intelligent in its commercial demands, commercial firms will meet the new standards. If it becomes weary of the old methods used to persuade it to accept a given idea or commodity, its leaders will present their appeals more in
  (tags: propaganda book)
• http://www.publicintegrity.org/superfound
  A Google Maps mashup detailing Superfund sites.
  (tags: mashup google maps superfund epa)
• “Freedom Is About Authority” –Rudy Giuliani
  “Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.”
  (tags: history Politics civil_liberties justice policy wtf?)

A long time ago, probably as the domestic spying-slash-internet-tapping scandal was breaking, I posted the following search - thinking about what I'd like to see - the Government submitting to the same oversight as us jus' folks.  Imagine if we could see what the Executive Branch was Googling?

I've long maintained that watching your server logs (incoming, that is) is a great idea.  I've often gotten insight into stories and found out things that I might have not found out through other means.  For example, why was the CIA looking for "No Fly List Spreadsheet xls" (story here), or what is OSIS?  And who is looking for Matt O'Donnell nude (he's a local ABC affiliate news anchor)?  Why were people from the Republican National Committee, such as "Shawn Reinschmiedt",  Googling staff members regarding the "caging list"?  Why was someone from the Pentagon looking for a WaPo story on corrupted-company MZM, connected to the most corrupt Congressman in US history?  Hell, I even had someone ON THE FLOOR OF THE US Senate looking for "Joe Lieberman" (hint, he's standing over there, with the Republicans).

While there has long been a long historical precedent of wrangling over internal emails, from Reagan and Iran-Contra through Clinton to the current day, the webserver logs are far more interesting.  What delicious treasure-troves await us in the White House webserver logs? 

The goons at seminal site of satire SomethingAwful have gotten a Best of the Web summary, parts 1 and 2, of some cherry pucked entries from the AOL database, previously discussed here.

• The number one searched item on AOL is Google.  The number three is Yahoo.  MSN was all the way down at 24. 
• Many people are functionally illiterate
• Many people do not know how to spell.
• Many people search using the URL that they could have just entered in the address bar.
• There are still people who use AOL, although most of them are old.
• A lot of people use natural language queries, even though AOL doesn't work (best) that way.
• It's ok to alternate between searching for biblical quotes and latinsex.com.