According to The Los Angeles Times, a Californian water utility paid nearly US $200,000 for glowing coverage on a website that boosted its profile on Google. The newspaper reports that officials from the Central Basin Municipal Water District used public funds to hire a consulting firm affiliated with a professional-looking …
Twenty years ago, when Tim Berners-Lee linked up a community of scientists in what came to be known as the worldwide web, Jaron Lanier was an enthusiast of the project. Like many others he believed in the democratic potential of a large online community. Lanier’s views began to change around …
Google’s Street View is heading down the Amazon to capture pictures of “some of the most remote and biodiverse areas in the world”, says its official blog. The Street View team will be floating downriver in Peru in partnership with the Amazonas Sustainable Foundation (FAS), the non-profit conservation organisation that …
WANT to know which migratory birds do your region host? Or perhaps, you want to check on the conservation status of a bird species. The Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) has a website on avian ecology giving exactly this kind of information. The site, set up in collaboration with the …
A hacker group has attacked Blackberry’s website after the company said it would assist the police investigating riots in the UK. On August 10, Team Poison defaced the official Blackberry blog, posting a message that threatened the firm with retaliation if it handed users’ data to the authorities. UK police …
Many believe Canada’s tar sands industry to be the world’s most environmentally destructive energy industry. But not Aleykhan Velshi, a 27-year-old neocon political communications professional, who launched a website aimed at extolling the virtues of Canada’s “ethical oil”. The term has been coined by conservative political activist Ezra Levant. Click …
Launched in 2010, the website is affiliated to the Foundation for Research on Rare Diseases and Disorders, a Chennai non-profit. It provides information on over 400 rare diseases. It also provides basic reviews of the diseases as provided by volunteers, patients and their family members, and health experts. The site …
If you believe that progress of human civilisation depends on individual expression of new ideas, especially unpopular ideas, then the principle of freedom of speech is the most important value society can uphold. The Internet is usually regarded as the harbinger of free speech. It not only provides universal access …
Government procedures in India are known to confound people. What documents do we submit to apply for a PAN card? How does one get an educational loan? How to apply for a passport? Log on to www.wikifyindia.com and help is at hand. The website, a non-profit initiative, is an aspiring …
Google has stopped collecting images for its Street View service in Bengaluru after police raised security concerns. Google launched its project to collect high definition images to give Google users 360 degree views of streets in Bengaluru in May. “We received a letter from Bengaluru’s commissioner of police and are …
TODAY many of us are aware that our eating habits are not exactly making us healthy. We know the problem but the solution somehow seems elusive. And healthy is expensive. This website showcases the work of an alliance of 100 non-profits from across the world who try to find solutions. …
It’s a bit of Iraq and Afghanistan out there on the Internet. Just like the invasion of Iraq was lies, deceit and regime change as George W Bush chased illusory weapons of mass destruction in that hapless country, on the Internet, too, there is an element of fabrication and duplicity …
Taiwan is stopping the use of Chinese characters—the script used in mainland China—on official websites. Taiwan used the traditional but more complicated Chinese script. It switched to a simplified script used in mainland China three years after opening its doors to tourists from mainland. Taiwan’s President Ma Ying-jeou has argued …
American defence strategists have plans to categorise cyber attacks as acts of war, the Pentagon says. “A response to a cyber-incident or attack on the US would not necessarily be a cyber-response. All appropriate options would be on the table,” Pentagon spokesperson Dave Lapan told BBC. A US president could …
IN 2007, a group of foodies in the US decided to set themselves a challenge of eating only locally grown food. They kept a log of their performance. This website is a record of their successes and tribulations. Buying locally grown food is stuff for wonderful stories. One writer notes, …
SCIENTIFIC scepticism is healthy. Scientists should always challenge themselves to expand their knowledge. Yet this is not what happens in global warming scepticism. Sceptics criticise any evidence that supports human-induced global warming and yet embrace any argument, blog or study that refutes global warming. This website is sceptical about global …
A rianna Huffington and Kenneth Lerer, cofounders of Huffington Post, sold the popular American website to Internet services and media company, AOL, in March for US $315 million, prompting a group of bloggers to file a $105-million lawsuit against Huffington Post and AOL. The suit is led by Jonathan Tasini, …
THE “about us” section of http://mother-earth-journal. com describes it rather modestly as a citizen journalist project in the US. The content on the site can scarcely be called modest. For one, a rather nononsense home page has articles on mercury toxins, a feature on the Gulf of Mexico, a year …
UNTIL recently, no system of power seemed more invincible than corporate media. A century ago, industrialisation handed a monopoly of mass communication to a tiny elite with the money to buy and run printing presses and, later, TV studios. Yet through a further twist of technological fate, the digital revolution …
Our world is increasingly held together by the network of digital communications networks we call the Internet. Business, government, politics, science and the arts have all been fundamentally transformed by the fact that everyone’s connected to everyone else, everywhere, and no one needs to get permission to collaborate, trade, or …
