Internet

British prime minister's office Twittering?

Can heads of state Twitter?

Well, I wouldn't go so far as to expect anyone in as lofty a position as U.K. PM Gordon Brown to spend their time actually posting to Twitter themselves. But it appears that someone out there in Twitter-land has started an account that purports to be the "official Twitter channel for the Prime Minister's Office based at 10 Downing Street."

Looking briefly at the official Web site for the prime minister's office, I don't see any mention of Twitter, but whoever is posting from that account is doing … Read more

Internet Archive to fund super-high-speed Internet in public housing

Living in public housing is nothing to write home about, and certainly nothing that offers lifestyle advantages over what most people fortunate enough to afford something more elaborate have.

But thanks to the Internet Archive, and its founder, Brewster Kahle, residents of one San Francisco public housing development may soon have something over everyone else, especially those who like high-speed Internet connections.

The Internet Archive says it will allow those who live at Valencia Gardens Housing in San Francisco's Mission district to access the Internet at 100 megabits per second. By contrast, my Comcast Internet service delivers 6Mbps via … Read more

Wikimedia Foundation gets $500,000 donation

It's been a good week for the coffers of the Wikimedia Foundation.

On Tuesday, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced it was giving $3 million over three years to the organization that runs Wikipedia.

And on Thursday, top-dog venture capitalist Vinod Khosla and his wife, Neeru, said they were going to donate $500,000 to the foundation.

This is good news for an organization that has been recently criticized over its finances, particularly from those who say founder Jimmy Wales may have played a little fast and loose with the foundation's credit card when it came to personal … Read more

I can has LOLpoliticians?

When I wrote this morning about an LOLcat contest in which Icanhascheezburger.com users would be contending to create one of five bottle labels for a soda company, I mused that it would also be nice to have a politics-LOLcat mashup.

Wait no more. In fact, even as I wrote it, the nice folks at Icanhascheezburger hopped in their time machine, went back 24 hours, and launched the exact site I wanted yesterday.

Well, OK, maybe there was no metaphysics involved. But either way, on Monday, Icanhascheezburger launched Pundit Kitchen, a site for LOLcats, except with politicians.

The same folks … Read more

Sloan Foundation gives Wikimedia Foundation $3 million

Talk about hot foundation-on-foundation action.

On Tuesday, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced it was giving the Wikimedia Foundation--which runs Wikipedia--$3 million.

The money will go toward supporting "Wikimedia's organizational development and help to increase the quality of its content and the reach of its services."

Among other things, the announcement said the money would go specifically to a new Wikipedia feature called "flagged revisions," which will "allow experienced editors to publicly and visibly grade the quality status of articles--in effect, functioning as a kind of 'nutrition labeling' for Wikipedia content."

I … Read more

Soda company to put LOLcats on bottle labels

I can has a break?

OK. I love Icanhascheezburger.com, and LOLcats in general, as much as the next guy. Truly. I have spent hours, in aggregate, laughing myself to tears on the site.

But when I ran across an item on the site on Tuesday morning announcing that it is teaming up with the trendy micro-soda company Jones Soda to run a contest to put LOLcats on root beer--and other flavor--bottle labels, I had to ask myself if someone was maybe huffing a little too much catnip.

LOLcats, of course, are the whimsical combinations of silly pidgin English phrases and funny pictures of cats … Read more

YouTube unblocked in China, but could Google have cooperated?

William Long at Moonlight Blog reports that YouTube is again accessible from his connection in China.

I'm in Osaka, Japan, but a friend in Beijing, who prefers to be identified as "Hot Mama in Beijing," confirms.

Hot Mama adds an anecdote: Last Friday, YouTube was accessible but anything related to what we called T%%% to avoid filters would return a message to the effect of, "This content is not available in your country." Though it would be relatively easy for Chinese filters to replicate this result, this may indicate some effort on YouTube/Google's … Read more

Yahoo and MSN briefly help find Tibetan dissidents

Yahoo China and MSN China both briefly posted a "most wanted" list with photos of people Chinese authorities are trying to track down surrounding the recent events in Tibet, a French TV website reports.

Rebecca MacKinnon reports that the lists were down when she checked, and offers a guess as to what happened:

I wouldn't be surprised if the local editors just automatically ran it because everybody else in China was running it, then got over-ridden by management in the U.S. who realized how badly this would play outside of China... Such is the disconnect between … Read more

Before Tibet's unrest, Tudou and YouTube saw scrutiny in China

A Chinese agency promised to shut or punish video sharing websites for hosting prohibited material, but this was going on before the incidents in Tibet made a different agency's occasional blocking of YouTube famous.

An AP reporter says the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT) announced Friday that the leading Chinese video site, Tudou, would be penalized. The report notes that no mention was made of Tibet, but doesn't make clear the most important part: that this all started before the demonstrations in Tibet did. I am sure SARFT takes politically sensitive films into account in … Read more