The FCC Censorship Machine.

Jeff Jarvis: Censorship by the tyranny of the few. With not much original reporting, I discovered that the latest big fine by the FCC against a TV network -- a record $1.2 million against Fox for its "sexually suggestive" Married by America -- was brought about by a mere three people who actually composed letters of complaint. Yes, just three people.

The First Amendment is under attack, and I can't understand why the "conservatives" are so happy to see it happen. They've rightly complained about some of the left's overzealous "speech codes" at universities, but can't see why this is a much, much bigger threat -- ultimately to their own speech. I just got back to Hong Kong from Shanghai, where I met some young bloggers who have been cowed by odious government speech restrictions; they don't dare talk politics in a medium that is made to order for debating the issues of our times. America isn't China, but what's going on with broadcast censorship is an awful trend. [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

7:42:53 PM    

Just finished a business class today in which a very smart professor lamented that in 18 months, Google will have been over-run by Microsoft. Can we prevent this?...

Google Scholar.

This should be useful - Google Scholar: " Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web."

[elearnspace]

7:37:30 PM