Sherry Chandler

Another informative article on Wikipedia at the NYTimes online:

Wikipedia’s come-one, come-all invitation to write and edit articles, and the surprisingly successful results, have captured the public imagination. But it is not the experiment in freewheeling collective creativity it might seem to be, because maintaining so much openness inevitably involves some tradeoffs.

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The system seems to be working. Wikipedia is now the Web’s third-most-popular news and information source, beating the sites of CNN and Yahoo News, according to Nielsen NetRatings.

If you’re interested at all, this article explains how the Wikipedia folk have compromised to maintain openness while protecting the site from malicious posts.

Projects like Wikipedia are what make me passionate about keeping the internet free and open. True, you get a lot of meanness—some of the porn spam I get, well, I don’t know whether it’s more sickening or just ridiculous. I mean, Harry Potter comics porn? But when all is said and done, this open access, people talking to people, seems to me the best bet we have for democracy and actual free enterprise.

Remember Americorps? Neither does the Bush administration:

Only lately recovered from devastating budget cuts imposed by Congress three years ago, the nation’s flagship program for volunteers, AmeriCorps, is again on the chopping block. Unless the Senate rescues it, or President Bush displays a sudden and unexpected burst of leadership, this proven force for good stands to be seriously harmed.

The current crisis originated with Mr. Bush. He voices strong support for AmeriCorps. Yet, the budget proposal he submitted to Congress in March called for eliminating the National Civilian Community Corps, an elite arm of AmeriCorps that is based on five regional campuses and is positioned to rapidly deploy well-trained teams to help out in national emergencies, like Hurricane Katrina.

Well, goodness knows, we don’t need any help with our emergency response capabilities.

Do you remember Dan Rather? Another Bush administration casualty, he, it seems, would rather not fade into memory:

Mr. Rather said he had been weighing several other offers for work, including two from what he described as major broadcast or cable networks. But as of yesterday, Mr. Rather said, “what I expect to do, what I hope to do, is bring this HDNet thing to fruition.”

Mr. Rather, who was anchor of the “CBS Evening News” for nearly a quarter-century and who, at one point also served as a correspondent on the news magazines “60 Minutes II” and “48 Hours,” acknowledged that it would “take some adjustment” for him to get used to being seen by perhaps tens of thousands of viewers in a week, as opposed to millions.

But he added that “the opportunity to build something from the ground up, I think, will have its own satisfactions.”

Mr. Rather also said that in April, in anticipation of what seemed to be his imminent departure from CBS, he had formed a company — he named it News and Guts, in a nod to what he considers the pillars of his professional life — through which he plans to create several other journalism ventures, including, perhaps, a blog. (Though he has not yet settled on a title, he says he has ruled out one: “I’d Rather Say This.”)

It has been impossible for me to separate out whether the Bush National Guard story that ruined Dan Rather’s network career was ill-conceived or a victim of Karl Rove’s spin machine. Maybe a bit of both. As one who admired the young Dan Rather, I wonder whether the increasingly infotainment environment of network news is the best place for him anyway. 60 Minutes seems to have become a parody of itself, more like The National Enquirer than the New York Times. I hope this forced move will let Rather re-invent himself.

What if roads were privatized? It’s happening in some places in our current drive to privatize everything, and let us hope that the outcome is better than the outcome of a privatized army and a privatized school system. But for the moment, the question is, do we want a privatized internet?

At TPM Café, Sterling Newberry has a long article that makes the comparison to the need for public rights of way:

Net neutrality is the same principle that we use to run the road system - everyone has access. Even hard core libertarians recognize that rights of way must be public - for the simple reason that if they are not, those who own them can charge any figure that they care to name in order to allow you to get out of your house in the morning. This is so obvious to us now that we forget that it was not always so.

In the article, Newberry follows the politics of transport from the open waterways system of John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay, through the Civil War era development of a Federal railway system that allowed the development of the post Civil-War robber barons, and on to Grover Cleveland’s development of our public highway system. The gist—those who control the transport make the money.

The desire to control rights of way then, and the need to open them, is a long running story in American history. There are periods where rights of way are controlled, and with them the financial system being locked down, and there are periods of rights of way being opened.

This translates to a tension between industry’s desire to control the market and a populist push for open access, which is how this all relates to the current battle over net neutrality.

It is also vital for the nation’s economic future. Replacing road usage for commuting is essential for any plan to reduce energy costs, reduce dependence on petroelum, and to allow decentralized, and threfore less expensive, economic development. As with Grover Cleveland, who supported individual road based economics in its infancy as a communication system, the present has the chance to engage in advancing a technological road to prosperity which will expand for a generation or more. Or it can replicate the robber baron system, with its attendant hindering of general economic development and creation of blots of poverty.

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So do you want a smart network? Or do you want the telecoms beating you over the head with a pipe? Because trust me, they are more than willing to get medieval on your bank account.

This article is sometimes a little incoherent and shows signs of being written in haste. That last passage makes the editor in me cringe just a little bit. Nevertheless, I recommend reading the whole thing because it puts the current situation in context. The discussion in the comments is thought-provoking, too.

A message from Larry Jaffe at Poets for Human Rights:

Poets for Peace was created in 1997 when I realized it was time to create a monument for peace in place of war. I felt a need to balance all the trash with some positive poetic work. And it did do that spreading out into the real world with global live readings over the last several years.

But now it is time for change and P4P though very dear to my heart is about to take on a new look and feel and cause.

The cause is human rights! As far as I am concerned at this time on planet earth it is one of the most important issues we face today if not the most important. We cannot have peace if we do not have human rights.

A fair number of the poets who are in the conversation here at this weblog strike me as already being Poets for Human Rights. Maybe we all should consider joining this group and submitting to and supporting the magazine they hope to start: Rope

Larry Jaffe’s MySpace blog Clear H2O