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Search Privacy: An Issue?, Part 1
Danny Sullivan has an article over on Clickz.com, where he mentions my boycott Google piece from March. Interestingly the piece appears to be sponsored by, you guessed it, Google Inc. It's a good article though, and well worth the read. It is a controversial topic but I im sticking pretty much to my guns, I have been getting along quite happily without Google.
4:38:35 PM 
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Press ganged
Polly Toynbee writes a party political speech for the Labour Party, in an article in today's Guardian. She laments the demise of Tony Blair as a leader, that he lacks the will to promote the successes of New Labour since their election in 1997. She lambasts the 'right-wing media', for calling on a referendum on the European constitution.
Polly, regardless of what percentage of the British people know about the European constitution, this does not mean we simply do not have a referendum on it. It should be incumbent upon you, and the government to educate the British people on this important issue. Criticising them for not knowing about it does not help.
4:15:27 PM
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Gavin Esler: The danger of this infantile anti-Americanism
Natalie points to an article by Gavin Esler, presenter of Newsnight, in the Independent. He writes about the blight of anti-americanism in the UK.
Esler was for a long time the BBC's main man in Washington, he was the Washington correspondent for as long as I can remember. He argues that Americans are not all that bad, that they are not the stereo-type that the media in Europe portray them as. I am inclined to agree, but I think Esler may be muddling two issues.
As I see it there will always be illogical ad hominem attacks against anybody who is different to the person doing the 'attacking'. But separting the logical from the illogical is important, there are justifiable criticisms of the US and its foreign policy. We should not dismiss such arguments for the sake of not hurting the feelings of Americans.
Esler is right to call this anti-Americanism 'infantile', and it is as infantile as the anti-French movement in the US, but we will always get that, we are humans after all.
3:55:05 PM
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Mike Powell
Over at Instapundit.com, Glenn Reynolds is discussing the ins and outs of Mike Powell over at the FCC.
As I wrote in my TechCentralStation column yesterday, this kind of legislation undercuts FCC Chairman Michael Powell's argument that the openness of the Internet means that we don't need to worry about media concentration. If Powell were busy defending the Internet against this sort of intrusion, I'd feel a lot better about his claims.
Here's a story by Farhad Manjoo in Salon that quotes both me and Howard Bashman on this. We're both skeptical of Powell's position. (You'll have to sit through a short ad for Sid Blumenthal's book if you're not a subscriber)
I looked up Mike Powell's biography and I find it interesting that in a fairly extensive biography it fails to mention that he is the son of one Colin Powell, Secretary of State.
3:44:39 PM
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Hey
I is back. After many many problems with the PC, I have salvaged pretty much everything. It was an unexpected absence so my apologies to readers.
And so I begin blogging again...
2:53:53 AM
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