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It won’t make you dinner or rub your feet, but nearly one in four Americans say that the Internet can serve as a substitute for a significant other for some period of time, according to a new poll released today by us kids at 463 Communications and Zogby International. (All the details follow after the jump...)
In celebration of the Chinese Communist Party's 17th Congress this last week, leaders there apparently decided that preventing people from seeing cats flush toilets would make the choreographed proceedings run all that much smoother.
Indeed, we wrote here last August, that China was developing rules that could put a YouTube and other "non-approved" video sites out of business in the country. Now, they have seemingly followed through at least temporally.
Reporters Without Borders says:
“It is disturbing that these problems are taking place during the party congress. The blocking of these sites comes at a perfect time for the government. Blogs and video-sharing sites such as YouTube offer ways for Internet users to share situations they may have encountered during the congress. Preventing Chinese citizens from having access to them forces them to rely on the national media for their information. It so happens that on 15 October, the front pages of all the national newspapers were virtually identical.”
The Moonlight Blog covers the blockage here (the screenshot above comes from this site). I should note that in the post, the author suggests linking here if you are outside of China to see if you can get to YouTube via Google search. I could. This may mean that with the end of the Congress yesterday, the curtains on the site have been lifted. (The Moonlight Blog also notes that, at least temporarily, Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google searches were being redirected to the Chinese-owned search site Baidu over the weekend).
Others suggested that the YouTube hit was retribution for Google opening a presence in Taiwan).
Regardless of the reason, IF YouTube is back up, it will bring great joy to the 200 strong (and growing) members of the "Mad That Youtube is BANNED in China" Facebook group. The description of the group by a high school student in China succinctly speaks volumes to the actual divide between the well-educated Internet-savvy Chinese kids and their Communist Party elders:
"Now that youtube is gone in China, i have nothing to fucking do anymore. I WANT IT BACK"
Millions of people watch Lou Dobbs' sad decline into economic demagoguery in silence and with a resigned shake of the head. I am one of them. Thank goodness, the Consumer Electronics Association has a CEO with the...um... guts to take the Pompous One on directly.
CEA's Gary Shapiro challenged Dobbs today:
“I am prepared to debate Lou Dobbs live on his CNN show. His anti-trade comments on his cable show and his refusal to grant equal time to opposing viewpoints are inconsistent with CNN’s great legacy as a pioneering news network. We are hopeful that CNN will wish to retain its credibility and allow equal time for pro-free trade viewpoints. We should not promote a climate of fear. A great nation like the United States isn’t afraid to compete and to win on the international market.”
And, perhaps to the surprise of some politicians who may have written the American people off as sheep herded by a climate of fear and pessimism, CEA also released a poll of 10,000 Americans that said:
- 78 percent of Americans polled agreed that it would be hypocritical for an American news anchor to speak out against international trade while, at the same time, promoting their program overseas and generating advertising revenue from foreign services. More than 50 percent "strongly agreed" that such activity would be hypocritical.
-Nearly 70 percent of those polled either "somewhat" or "strongly" agreed that Dobbs is being "inconsistent" by publicly attacking free trade while promoting himself overseas and generating revenue from foreign sources.
- Of those polled, more than 46 percent agreed with the statement that criticizing international trade "sends the wrong message that the U.S. isn't good enough to compete globally" vs. only 23 percent who agreed with the statement that "criticizing international trade sends the right message because the U.S. actually can't compete globally and needs to protect American jobs."
- Of those polled, more than 50 percent of those polled said that they watched Lou Dobbs' show at least a few times a year.
These Americans polled are remarkably like the CEA members who run small businesses and are dependent on international trade to be successful and hire/retain their employees. After the jump are two videos of small business owners who represent the coming (hopefully) less silent majority...
There is something dangerous about the way we communicate today. By nature, as humans, we seek those who approve of our opinions and avoid those who we disagree with. With the Internet and other mediums that provide the illusion of contact of contact and interaction with all types of people all over the world, you are lulled into a false sense that there is Massive amounts of energy and support for People Like You. This is a big problem with the contemporary green movement that seems to be Everywhere. But is it? And, even if it is, are the fleeting images of magazine covers and rock concerts deriving change?
This thought is raised and explored in a Guardian (UK) article about the green focused panel at last week's TechNet event. A long excerpt (after jump)...
Being lazy by nature, I've long been a fan of the post-generating ability of Google Trends and now Reuters has stepped into the action with a truly remarkable and dedicated effort at investigative journalism. Here are the countries who search the most for the following terms....
"Jihad" - Morocco, Indonesia, Pakistan
"Terrorism" - Pakistan, Philippines, Australia
"Hangover" - Ireland, United Kingdom, United States
"Burrito" - United States, Argentina, Canada
"Iraq" - United States, Australia, Canada
"Britney Spears" - Mexico, Venezuela, Canada
"Homosexual" - Philippines, Chile, Venezuela
"Love" - Philippines, Australia, United States
"Botox" - Australia, United States, United Kingdom
"Viagra" - Italy, United Kingdom, Germany
Being an advanced Internet researcher, I wasn't content in Reuters filling my daily (monthly?) quota for posts, I also plugged in the following terms and got back these juicy results:
"Internet Censorship" - United Arab Emirates, Iran, Malaysia
"Music Piracy" - Singapore, Philippines, Australia
"Bart Simpson" - Australia, Sweden, Chile
"463" - Columbia, United States, Italy
Ah, the joys of living in the "new communications" world. It's a place where you can make charges at people with little basis in reality and then when you try to correct them, they call you out for not doing it right.
Here's the deal. There is a blogger named Tom Foremski who writes Silicon Valley Watcher. He's a former Financial Times journalist and a good guy. But, like all of us, he can be wrong from time to time.
He was wrong last week when he misquoted Cisco CEO John Chambers as saying that Silicon Valley schools "can't be fixed" and called out Chambers and Cisco to do more for education. I told Tom a few hours after his post (at an event) that he was targeting his ire at the wrong CEO and company and that Cisco has a rich tradition of educational involvement. But, more importantly, I asked Tom to do the research needed to understand the systemic issues in public education and how the tech world could best benefit schools 2.0 or whatever we want to call the next phase of learning. Tom then asked me to comment the next day on his post (after I had eight hours straight of meetings).
Since my Friday evening comment was fairly precise, I then was accused on the site as not being "new PR" enough to provide Tom with everything I said the night before verbally. (I perhaps am too "old PR" to expect that writers should try to get their facts straight the first time out of the box...)
Whatever. But, anyway, I decided over the weekend that it would be a good exercise to learn from the past as we move forward and look at new solutions for education. So, I got a spare hour or so last night to write up a little history of TechNet involvement in education and insight into what Cisco has done recently. I posted this as a comment on Foremski's site. This spiel is after the jump below...
And, I need to mention that after my initial response to Tom, he did start brainstorming on solutions for schools that could be led by technology (but not necessarily tech CEOs). He also put a recent trend among tech bloggers in play and posted a fundraiser for schools that allows you to see what a particular institution needs and how much it would cost for them to have the item (for example, "Mountain View school needs $537 for scientific calculators").
Now, this is more like it. Ask not what a CEO can do for you, but ask what you can do to make a technology work for you (and schools).
Continue reading "For the Record: Tech, Education and an Underinformed Blogger" »
It turns out that North Korea's Kim Jong-il is not only a totalitarian dictator, he's also an Internet expert.
During summit talks with South Korea this week, President Roh Moo-hyun asked that South Korean companies operating in the North Korean city of Kaesong be allowed to use the Internet.
Kim responded by saying, "I'm an Internet expert too. It's all right to wire the industrial zone only, but there are many problems if other regions of the North are wired."
