Berkman Buzz

Berkman Fellow Rebecca MacKinnon blogs frequently about the future of media in the internet age and freedom of speech online.  Yesterday she posted a lengthy piece about Michael Anti, a Chinese blogger whose MSN-Spaces hosted blog was taken down after he published posts critical of the Beijing News management purge.  Today MacKinnon is quoted in Forbes "Microsoft faces backlash after site of prominent China blogger is deleted."  Interestingly, I found that Bokee had no mechanism preventing me from posting anything in the titles or text bodies of the posts. But eventually, blogs with politically sensitive words in them ... were taken down in what appeared to be a human screening process, perhaps assisted by some kind of keyword search or alert system.

Yesterday's Chicago Tribune covers the state of Illinois' decision to shift control of its data network from AT&T to its own staff.  Berkman Fellow David Isenberg is quoted in the article, saying "Any organization big enough to have its own telecommunications manager is big enough to run its own network. This stuff has gotten so simple that the amount of expertise it used to take just to talk to telco salespeople is now sufficient to run the network." To hear more from David, click here to read his blog.

Berkman Fellow David Weinberger has cross-posted a list of resources compiled by Seth Johnson of New Yorkers for Fair Use on the push to have WIPO establish a "webcasters" right. Click here to check it out.