"Spanish government's domain names held for ransom over water"

A cybersquatter is holding the Spanish government ransom by refusing to give up the domain names of several government ministries unless they agree to transfer water to all of Spain's drought stricken regions.
read the full article

Cybersquatter's have developed a bad reputation for holding hostage trademarked domain names from their legal owners. But to me, this feels like good old fashioned socially conscious civil disobedience.

Pierre has initiated an interesting project called Rent Your Soul. This week my soul was one of 20 randomly selected!! Basically Pierre donates $10 to the charity of your choice and also pays you $10. You can do whatever you want with the money, but the idea is that you might make a charitable contribution yourself and perhaps adopt the habit. Sometimes projects like this have the feeling of a pyramid scheme - but as far as I can tell this is genuine and the donations are made in good faith.

"What are you doing?"

This is the social problem that twitter declares to solve. Big deal. Twitter basically lets you spam your friends (and other silent lurkers/followers) about whatever you may be doing at any given moment.

Over 2 years ago TXTMob, by the Institute for Applied Autonomy, provided a similar service with a much more compelling agenda. It provided a platform for social and political activists to organize in the streets.

Instead of "What are you doing?" people were asking "What are the cops doing?". TXTMob allowed protesters to quickly communicate and circumvent police tactics aimed at curtailing their movements in urban environments. In 2004 the service was used by protestors at the Democratic National Convention in Boston and the Republican National Convention in New York: lots of signal, very little noise.

If twitter was a beverage it would be kool-aid. Kind of tastes good at first, but leaves a nasty sugary taste in your mouth and slowly corrodes your teeth.

Equally perplexing is the recent feature in last week's Sunday NY Times business section complete with full color picture of twitter's developers. Why it is being featured at all is beyond me. But in addition, Jason Pontin's half-heartedly bemused critique was kind of wimpy and missed an opportunity to really challenge the social merit of this service.

Lots of noise, very little signal.

2008 Presidential Campaign Contributions from 10021

An article in today's New York Times indicated that 10021 (Marymount Manhattan College) is the top zipcode in the nation when it comes to campaign contributions. Interestingly it is #1 for both democratic and republican in terms of money collected by the 2008 presidential candidates.

You can read/research the FEC's campaign finance reports directly at their website.

Also opensecrets.org provides a wealth of information about past and upcoming (2008) elections.

You can play with a Google mashup of this data here.

Recent article in Wired about China's latest move to limit free speech by blocking the popular blogging website, LiveJournal.

If you're curious about what other sites that are blocked within China, check out greatfirewallofchina.org.

Link courtesy of crushedice.

What do you all think about giving gifts on Facebook? Read what zephoria and James have to say ...

A great open-source documentary about the history of the internet and net-neutrality.

Link from Four Eyed Monsters courtesy of Shelly Tseng.

A new initiative, the Arizona Voter Reward Act, was approved for the ballot in Arizona. If approved, voters would be eligible to win $1 million dollars. Scratch-and-win democracy ... a scary state of civic duty indeed!

Don't forget to vote tomorrow!

Thanks to Jen Javier for the link to the story.