WealthShare Society

Checking out growing wordpress blogs I found WealthShare Society by Sovereign John. After checking out his blog a bit and looking at his booklist, etc. I think readers of this blog may find it of interest. There’s more current Presidential race posting than I would do if I were updating this blog frequently, but among his booklist are included Rule by Secrecy by Jim Marrs and The Christ Conspiracy by Acharya S., both of which Zeitgeist afficianados should recognise as part of the source material for that movie. Since I can’t commit to frequent updates here right now, I figure it may be an alternate source of wordpress info. Not that I necessarily endorse everything there, of course.

Some of my less read (but IMO deserving) posts

Taking a look at my complete blog stats from the least viewed end, I decided to highlight here a few older posts which didn’t get the clicks which some of my more popular posts have, yet nonetheless provide interesting, important or otherwise worthy links/information. I’ll divide this post into rough topics and descriptions and you can see whether you think any of them merit a visit.

On privacy, surveillance and datamining type issues-

The Panopticon Singularity - a link/exerpt of an important article on how surveillance technology has developed and is developing towards a total surveillance society in the developed world with estimated dates for the technologies described to be fully operational. You can visit the article itself directly via this link.

Google street view can provide alibis if necessary - using shadows, newspaper headlines and Google street view to establish when who was where. True, it’s fairly uncommon to be able to do so now, but I suspect that won’t always be the case.

CNET blog- Surveillance State - check out Chris Soghoian’s blog Surveillance State for lots of interesting and informative reading on privacy and surveillance issues.

UnSecureFlight.com- Homeland Security’s Data Vacuum Cleaner In Action – DHS is collecting and storing information on what books Americans are reading, their race, their profession, their associates, etc. Visit the full article directly here.

Boston.com- Interactive advertising: A good thing? datamining, privacy, surveillance, etc. links post.

a couple which may have gotten buried during the Spitzer scandal distraction circus:

NY Times- To Aim Ads, Web Is Keeping Closer Eye on You - a valuable NYTimes article on datamining by the major internet players. Archived versions of the charts, etc. linked on my blog. Go directly to the NY Times piece here and see also the related article How do they track you? Let us count the ways.

Wall Street Journal- NSA’s Domestic Spying Grows As Agency Sweeps Up Data visit the article directly here

on Sibel Edmonds (find out all you can about her- the most gagged person in US history according to the ACLU and then pass it on, b/c the media won’t and it’s important)

Dallas Morning News breaks US MSM silence on Sibel Edmonds (only 9 blog views on a story I sumitted to digg which has gotten 1749 diggs so far). Sure it’s old news to some now, but it’s still news to most due to the continuing US MSM blackout on her recent revelations. Spread it around and digg it up some more.

in the rants type category:

Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury on media monopolies and social proof and how they affect the political “discourse”.

Image text recognition redux: privacy advocate’s nightmare, dataminer’s wet dream? fictional scenario

posts on solutions

idealist.org networking, volunteer opportunities, etc. visit the site directly @ http://www.idealist.org/ reminds me of

WiserEarth.org – Toward a Just and Sustainable World Created by Community visit @ http://wiserearth.org/

HAUTE*NATURE – looks like a great resource blog visit @ http://hautenature.blogspot.com/

some new links – localization, algae, etc., some updates and a few links - solutions type websites and links

and of course readers can always use my tags/categories to find topics and posts of potential interest as well.

Possibly related posts (automatically generated)- do I like this new feature?

WordPress has recently added in a feature which adds automatically generated links at the end of posts which as they say are “possibly related”. Is this good, bad or neutral, from my point of view?

First off, it seems that perhaps only posts of a certain length may recieve this treatment (or perhaps only posts which are keyword rich enough, who knows?). Secondly, they don’t appear on the main blog, but only under individual entries. Thirdly, if I really dislike them, I can apparently disable them (though I haven’t tried to yet). They are getting a fair bit of discussion in wordpress forum threads such as these:
http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic.php?id=27419&replies=15
http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic.php?id=27282&replies=15
http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic.php?id=27356&replies=22

So, how do I personally feel about them? Ambivalent at the moment, but generally positively enough not to disable them (for now anyway).

On the down side- spam/porn blog linking potential (or just blog posts that I would never personally link to) and links to unreciprocating MSM sites.

On the upside- referrals from other blogs to my posts and potentially interesting further reading for both myself and my blog’s readers. These are really sort of like auto generated Google ads without the downside of having ads. OTOH, they don’t necessarily have the potential upside of ads either (income- which I’m not interested in selling out my blog for) except perhaps for potentially bringing in new readers.

Here are some reasons why I think they’re worth keeping:

Firstly, I usually try to make my headlines descriptive enough so that people interested in what I’m writing about will get a pretty good idea of what they’ll encounter if they stop by, which is one of the recommendations which “uber blogger” Cory Doctorow gives for making a blog more sucessful, which you can see in this video. I think this gives me an advantage over bloggers who don’t.

Secondly, I don’t have a problem with sending my blog traffic elsewhere for further reading. This blog has never been designed in order to keep readers “only here”. Not that I think it would be sucessful if I did try to design it in that way.

Thirdly, I think it offers the potential for like minded bloggers to find each other and start conversations, exchange links and build community.

Fourthly (and this point is still ambivalent) I think wordpress will continue to improve the feature enough to make the upsides mentioned above outweigh downsides such as links going to sites which I don’t want to send traffic to. I think that wordpress can do that by

1. offering bloggers more options and control- such as allowing them to exclude MSM links if they choose and to go with wordpress only links

2. making the feature an entirely reciprocal one- if I get an auto generated link to a blog post, that blog post should have one to my post.

3. making it very clear that this is a wordpress feature, and that the blogger (currently) has no say in what links appear through this feature, so caveat emptor (or clicker).

4. improving the AI’s reading of relevant posts so that the quality improves

5. continuing efforts to identify and purge spam and identify adult content

 

Anyway, though I’m not completely sold on the feature in its current form I figure it doesn’t cost me much to leave it turned on. But, readers should be aware that they visit such links on their own recognisance or some such. In other words, along with the good you may also see the bad and the ugly if you use the feature yourself or click on the autosuggested links.

 

 

Peter Scheer- The Great Firewall

Peter Scheer wrote an interesting article awhile back called The Great Firewall, talking about the internet censorship in China. Parts of particular interest to me were what search engine terms were deemed verboten and the types of sites outside of China which get blocked, so I’ll quote those passages below.

A milestone of sorts was passed in the first quarter of this year when China blew past the United States to become the biggest internet market in the world. At 225 million users, and still growing at double-digit rates, China’s internet is a business opportunity so grand and irresistible that it can blind normally circumspect people to the moral compromises that cooperation with Chinese government authorities inevitably entails.

I experienced this first-hand when, about a year ago, I made inquiries at the China offices of a number of American law firms to ask for help in comparing internet search results for searches performed inside China–within the “Great Firewall” of government censorship, as it is called–with the same searches performed from locations outside China (and therefore outside the firewall). The law firms demurred, explaining, with commendable candor at least, that they could not risk being observed submitting to Google and Yahoo search terms like “Tiananmen Square” or “Falun Gong”.

Mind you, these were American-trained litigators, the kind of lawyers who barely flinch in the face of a grand jury subpoena, and who spend their careers pushing back against the demands of government authorities. While usually immune to intimidation, they nonetheless feared the repercussions to themselves, their firms, and their clients from the mere act of typing a few search terms into an internet-connected computer. So seductive are the business opportunities in China that the risk of losing them transforms even hardened litigators into wimps.

and the type of sites (which no doubt include this blog) which get blocked…

Websites based outside China, meanwhile, are subject to blocking by the Great Firewall based not on their content, but on their capacity to create, inside China, large, voluntary online communities that are independent of the government. These include nearly all blogging services, wikipedia and wiki platforms generally (wikileaks included), social networking websites and peer-to-peer technologies of all kinds, including photo-sharing and video-sharing businesses. In other words, the full panoply of internet 2.0 technologies.

Websites commanding vast audiences for user-generated content are seen by authorities as a grave threat. The Chinese government’s worst nightmare, after all, is a lone and anonymous Tibetan uploading to YouTube grainy cellphone videos of rioting police.

What this boils down to IMO, is that there is probably currently little that bloggers like myself can do to pass along to the Chinese the hazards of consumerism from a western perspective. Considering the worldwide environmental impact which China is having as it becomes increasingly consumer oriented, this is indeed unfortunate. Also unfortunate is the lack of potential for the Chinese to share information with each other through blogging and social networking.

Why I haven’t posted much lately

There are several reasons, really. Feeling a bit under the weather, computer issues and feeling a bit burnt out/frustrated with the world and the “news” have all been factors. Nothing recent on the Sibel Edmonds front to post about, for instance. And really, in the ultimate cosmic scheme of things how much difference does this blog make? Perhaps some. It’s hard to say exactly, of course. But I’m sure that most of what I’ve posted here is more or less a repackaging of information already available in other locations- the exceptions on the lesser end would perhaps be things like the Fortune 500 mappings which I’ve done, which did involve some synthesis to pull them together. But let’s face it, when I get discouraged I tend to think that anyone who is hungry for information will be able to find it with or without my posts and it just doesn’t seem like enough people are hungry for the type of change that will allow us to change the world and “reprogram Armageddon“. But then again, who knows, maybe you who are reading this post right now, maybe you’ll be the last straw that breaks the back of Armageddon- just from having decided to read this particular post which I’ve decided to post here right now. Stranger things have probably happened somewhere in the multiverses. Like the couple who bucked 24 trillion to one odds and won two lotteries in a single day in 2002, for instance.