From here: "Both cities and the Internet are at once highly atomized and elaborately connected milieus that encourage both solitude and interaction with the diverse, bountiful unwashed." Considering how much social interaction goes on via the internet, its main use and value is as a social tool and in maintaining diverse, multi-national and wider social networks.
Via RWW, "A survey of more than 3000 people performed in the two days after the US Presidential Election found that 37.6% of respondents considered the Internet the most reliable source of news, 20.3% consider national TV news most reliable and 16% said that radio is the most reliable source. ... It's quite striking, though, that we're at a point in history where the internet is trusted more than TV and the Radio!" (more)
I has it.

Back in business again without the need to go to work or internet cafe to get run of the mill things done like shopping, banking, etc. This house is in an older development before there was planning for things such as digital networks. Consequently all the wires are run through the air from the telegraph poles at the back of the house. I recall when I was in San Francisco that all the wires ran in tumbled messes between poles, houses and streets. (more)
Last week I was at Tempe Marketplace; a large sprawling new mall that contains indoor and outdoor public spaces. It has plenty of outdoor furniture and the misted water which is popular in Phoenix that helps keep the body's heat down.

Americans have a sophisticated view of freedom of speech and other political rights. Courtesy of these political rights being entrenched in the US Constitution as amendments the civil understanding of them and the political reproach of them is quite detailed.

These are political rights though, not property rights and are areas of liberty that the government cannot intrude into. So public spaces related to government control, such as a park, tend not to extinguish freedom of political speech. The other aspect is that the censoring of political views is often democratically impossible in a country that is used to the liberal nature of free speech. It can be done, and often is in secret ways, but for the most part it is hard to remove.

Anick Jesdanun has an article which argues that these rights are not only political, but inalienable to the individual and necessary for a healthy and functioning civic society. He argues that companies are making the political arguments impoverished by over-cautious removal of political and social speech. (more)
An interesting recommendation on browser updates, "The final recommendation is that the software industry adopt the same type of labeling system currently used by the food industry. Under such a system, web browsers would be dated with a best before label, and would automatically flag the user when the browser expired."
Domain Tasting is not consistent with private property. (more)
From here:

If statistics on popular searches are anything to go by, it looks like many people aren't bothering with that inconvenient "www" and ".com" and are just going straight through Google.

I do that. Apparently someone has already argued for the dropping of the .com on the internet. Not sure what that would leave for .org or .net sites.
Umair Haque asks:

Let's revisit the spectre haunting venture capital. Why aren't there more Googles?

This is disingenuous. It is easy to forget that prior to google there were numerous search engines all vying for people's attention. I can recall changing from Alta Vista to Hotbot as the competing products got better and better. Google basically won on interface. In other words they didn't innovate so much, as improve an existing product.

This is the normal trajectory for a successful business. There is nothing unique about Google in that respect. (more)
One of the supporting experiments for the Big Bang theory is the isotropic cosmic microwave background radiation. It is the residual energy for our universe existing the way it does as a system. What of the internet? It is a complex system with all sorts of network effects. Does it have an isotropic background energy or activity level? With the change over to the new software system for South Sea Republic there is some data to explore that question. (more)

From a Rusty Elliot Harold entry titled, Comment Spam Gets Trickier :

Comment spammers are copying sentences out of legitimate comments and resubmitting them with a link or two changed. If you're not careful, this can even fool a human inspection since the spam is thereby on topic and relevant. If it comes a couple of months after an original article was posted that received a lot of comments, it's very easy to miss.
(more)
Cam Riley: South Sea Republic. Freedom, liberty, equity and an Australian Republic.